Book review: Give and Take by Adam Grant published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson 2013
This was our book club read in November 2022, we were pretty unanimous in our views. One member opened the discussion with ‘you can take it’! Nobody argued.
It’s not hard to see that Adam Grant is a university professor. The book is packed with research, every piece is credited to the researchers, the methodology explained and the statistical results given. However they are given in the prose. Some graphs or tables might have made them easier to absorb. (There are 34 pages of references at the back of the book as well as extensive footnotes throughout the book)
Whilst the chapters seem to flow, and Grant refers back to examples used earlier we found it difficult to identify the purpose of the book. There was no real conclusion either. The final chapter ‘Actions for Impact’ invited us to apply the lessons of the book but even those were not inspiring.
Unusually several members of the book club only managed to read about 100 or so pages. We all struggled to take what we were reading in. Some of that was down to all the research and statistics but the chapters were too long and not broken up with enough sub-headings. Every page was crammed with text with no space to think and there were no chapter summaries to aid retention. We all questioned the purpose of the book.
Having said that I did take a little learning from the book although I had to refer to my notes to remember it!
My key takeaways
- Weak ties give us access to information that our strong ties don’t because the weak ties tend to move in different circles… worth remembering the people on the fringes of our networks
- Dormant ties are the neglected value in our networks and givers have a distinctive edge in unlocking this value
- Networking is a vehicle for creating value for everyone not just claiming it for ourselves… I don’t think any Fabulous Networker needs this explained!
- We should be willing to do anything that will take us five minutes or less for anybody
Would I recommend this book?
No! Not unless you are researching giver and taker behaviour in which case the extensive research included could save you a lot of time.
