9 results for author: Adam Grant

Negotiating Your Salary Without Playing Hardball

A few times a week, I get requests for advice on negotiating a job offer. They usually start like this: I’m in the recruiting process, and I just received an offer from the organization that I want to join. I’d like to sign, but I was hoping for a higher ...
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Playing Golf, and Other Mistakes CEOs Make

When you become the head of a major company, you instantly join the ranks of the rich and famous. Ethical questions aside, new evidence shows that the perks of celebrity life are bad for companies. Here are six situations that CEOs might want to refuse: 1. ...
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Emotional Intelligence is Overrated

Not long ago, the CEO of a sales company mentioned that he was spending millions of dollars to train his employees in emotional intelligence. He asked if it was possible to assess emotional intelligence during the interview process, which would allow him to ...
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How Not to Ask for a Recommendation Letter

To land a job or get into a university, we usually need someone to vouch for us. It can be tough to ask—recommenders are typically more senior than us, they’re busy, and we don’t always know where we stand in their eyes. When we work up the courage to ...
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Sustainable Employee Motivation: Selfish or Selfless?

Who contributes the most to organizations? Employees working selfishly to benefit themselves, or employees working selflessly to benefit others? Recent research reveals a surprising answer: neither. For starters, it turns out that in contrast to popular ...
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How Customers Can Rally Your Troops

How did a five-minute meeting motivate university fundraisers to increase their weekly productivity by 400%? How did a photograph drive radiologists to improve the accuracy of their diagnostic findings by 46%? Was it managers who inspired such enormous ...
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Turning the Tables on Success

In the old world of work, good guys finished last. "Takers” (those in organizations who put their own interests first) were able to climb to the top of hierarchies and achieve success on the shoulders of “givers” (those who prefer to contribute more ...
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Good Guys Can Win at Work

We all know successful people who are self-serving at work, who take more than they offer. In a cutthroat, competitive world, they tend to dominate givers, colleagues who happily contribute without necessarily expecting anything in return. According to ...
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Where Great Leaders Earn Their Stripes

When we think about where esteemed leaders earned their undergraduate educations, our minds naturally turn to the hallowed halls of Harvard and Yale. But there's another training ground that may be equally valuable. It's where Fred Smith, the founder and CEO ...
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