Value the perspectives and interests of others, givers are more inclined toward asking questions than offering answers, talking tentatively than boldly, admitting their weaknesses than displaying thei...
Takers sometimes win in independent roles where performance is only about individual results, givers thrive in interdependent roles where collaboration matters.
Seeking advice is among the most effective ways to influence peers, superiors, and subordinates.
Questions are effective persuasive devices.
Physicist Max Planck once observed, A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die.
Givers always score high on other-interest, but they vary in self-interest. There are two types of givers, and they have dramatically different success rates. Selfless givers are people with high othe...
Analysts were more likely to maintain their star performance if they worked with high-quality colleagues in their teams and departments. The star analysts relied on knowledgeable colleagues for inform...
When we become curious about the dissatisfying defaults in our world, we begin to recognize that most of them have social origins: Rules and systems were created by people. And that awareness gives us...
When our audiences are skeptical, the more we try to dominate them, the more they resist.
When our audiences are skeptical, the more we try to dominate them, the more they resist. Even with a receptive audience, dominance is a zero-sum game: the more power and authority I have, the less yo...
When I put up a slide that says ‘Here’s why you shouldn’t buy this company,’ the first response was laughter. Then you could see them physically relax. It’s sincere; it doesn’t smell, feel, or look an...
Trust is one reason that givers are so susceptible to the doormat effect: they tend to see the best in everyone, so they operate on the mistaken assumption that everyone is trustworthy.
Timing accounted for forty-two percent of the difference between success and failure.
The identification of talent may be the wrong place to start. For many years, psychologists believed that in any domain, success depended on talent first and motivation second.
The greatest communicators of all time, says communication expert Nancy Duarte—who has spent her career studying the shape of superb presentations—start by establishing what is: here’s the status quo....
Some people, when they do someone a favor, are always looking for a chance to call it in. And some aren’t, but they’re still aware of it—still regard it as a debt. But others don’t even do that. They’...
Powerless communication had made all the difference. Instead of working to establish my credentials, I made myself vulnerable, and called out the elephant in the room.
On matters of style, swim with the current, Thomas Jefferson allegedly advised, but on matters of principle, stand like a rock. The pressure to achieve leads us to do the opposite. We find surface way...
In a study of over 15,000 classical music compositions, the more pieces a composer produced in a given five-year window, the greater the spike in the odds of a hit.
If you want to engage your audience, if you really want to grab their attention, you have to know the world they live in, the music they listen to, the movies they watch,