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PORTFOLIO PENGUIN

Portfolio Penguin is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.

Originally published as It’s Not About You: A Little Story About What Matters Most in Business in the United States of America by Portfolio/Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
This updated edition first published in the United States of America by Portfolio/Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 2016
First published in Great Britain by Portfolio Penguin 2016

Cover design by Joe Montgomery
Cover photograph © Angelo Hornak/Corbis

The moral right of the author has been asserted

ISBN: 978-0-241-25526-1

Introduction

1 Taking Leadership

2 The Question

3 The Top Floor

4 The Substance of Influence

5 The Heart of the Operation

6 The Language of Strength

7 The Work

8 Being Muddy

9 Birth and Death

10 An Imprint on the Soul

11 Robbie

12 Chaos

13 The Speech

14 Giving Leadership

Ben’s Manifesto: The Five Keys to Legendary Leadership

Discussion Guide

Q&A with the Authors

Acknowledgments

Follow Penguin

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Bob Burg is co-author of the Wall Street Journal bestseller The Go-Giver and its companion volumes, Go-Givers Sell More and The Go-Giver Leader. A former television personality and top-producing salesperson, Bob speaks to corporations, organizations and at sales and leadership conferences worldwide on topics at the core of the Go-Giver books. Addressing audiences ranging from sixty to sixteen thousand, Bob has shared the platform with some of today’s top business leaders, broadcast personalities, coaches, athletes and political leaders, including a former US president. He is also the author of Adversaries into Allies and the classic Endless Referrals, which has sold more than a quarter of a million copies and is still used today as a training manual in many corporations. He was named by the American Management Association as one of the Top 30 Most Influential Thought Leaders in Business for 2014.

John David Mann has been writing about business, leadership and the laws of success for more than thirty years. As a high-school student, he led a group of friends in creating their own successful high school. After establishing himself as a concert cellist and prize-winning composer, he built a multimillion-dollar sales organization of more than a hundred thousand people before turning to writing and publishing. In addition to co-authoring the Go-Giver books with Bob Burg, John is also co-author of the New York Times bestsellers Flash Foresight (with Daniel Burrus) and The Red Circle (with Brandon Webb) and the national bestseller Among Heroes (with Brandon Webb). His Take the Lead (with Betsy Myers) was named by Tom Peters and the Washington Post as Best Leadership Book of 2011.

BY BOB BURG AND JOHN DAVID MANN

The Go-Giver

Go-Givers Sell More

ALSO BY BOB BURG

Adversaries into Allies: Master the Art of Influence

Endless Referrals: Network Your Everyday Contacts into Sales

The Success Formula

ALSO BY JOHN DAVID MANN

Among Heroes (with Brandon Webb)

The Red Circle (with Brandon Webb)

The Slight Edge (with Jeff Olson)

Take the Lead (with Betsy Myers)

Flash Foresight (with Daniel Burrus)

The Secret Language of Money (with David Krueger, MD)

You Call the Shots (with Cameron Johnson)

THE GO-GIVER LEADER

‘The Go-Giver Leader is filled with pearls of wisdom that will cause anyone to reflect on how they can be a better person – and leader – by putting others front and centre. A real page-turner … extremely moving and motivating’ David Novak, executive chairman of YUM! Brands; author of Taking People with You

‘The Go-Giver Leader is a fascinating story that touches my heart, elevates my leadership and makes me want to be a better person’ Pastor Dan Rockwell, blogger at Leadership Freak

‘The Go-Giver Leader is a beautiful meditation on the foundations of business and leadership. Enjoy the story – then go apply its plentiful nuggets of wisdom in your work and life’ Nido Qubein, president of High Point University; chairman of Great Harvest Bread

‘At Zappos, part of my role is to help create an environment where employees feel empowered to come up with their own ideas for fulfilling our vision and growing our culture. The Go-Giver Leader reveals this same philosophy: get out of the way so your employees can lead the way’ Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos.com, Inc.; author of Delivering Happiness

‘Once again, Bob Burg and John Mann have given us a book that will tug at your heart and leave you with a timeless message that truly matters: authentic, far-reaching leadership is not about you but about those you serve’ Lolly Daskal, founder of Lead from Within; author of Thoughts Spoken from the Heart

‘Bob Burg and John David Mann have broken new ground in management literature. The Go-Giver Leader is now essential leadership reading for everyone at MindTree’ Subroto Bagchi, chairman of MindTree Ltd

‘A captivating book, packed with aha! moments. The Go-Giver Leader will delight you, surprise you and move you. More than that, it will change you’ Dondi Scumaci, author of Designed for Success and Career Moves

‘Bob Burg and John David Mann are wonderful storytellers, particularly when it concerns what matters most in business. The Go-Giver Leader has a lesson for everyone’ Harvey Mackay, author of Swim with the Sharks without Being Eaten Alive

‘In The Go-Giver Leader Bob Burg and John David Mann deliver a story as powerful as their blockbuster, The Go-Giver. Inspiring, thought-provoking and convicting, it will stay with you long after you finish the final page. Soak in the lessons of this book, then take your leadership to a higher level’ Skip Prichard, president and CEO of OCLC; blogger at Leadership Insights

‘John and Bob have nailed the core of genuine leadership and given us another classic on excellence in any human endeavour. If you want to create positive change in your own life and the lives of those you care about, read this book’ Brandon Webb, former Navy SEAL; CEO of Force12 Media; author of The Red Circle

‘I’m not typically a fan of business books written in fictional formats, but I love this book. It explains leadership principles I care about deeply, principles that truly matter. Read this book. You’ll enjoy the journey and become a better leader and a better person in the process’ Mark Sanborn, author of The Fred Factor

‘The Go-Giver Leader will share space with The Go-Giver on a special bookshelf in my office labelled Must Read Twice – and there are fewer than ten books on that shelf. Bob and John have captured the very essence of what leads to generational or legacy success: sit in the other guy’s chair first’ Frank McKinney, author of The Tap

‘The best in business get that it’s not about them – it’s about being useful to others. Read, study and apply the ideas in this superb little gem of a book’ Robin Sharma, author of The Leader Who Had No Title

Introduction

A few years after The Go-Giver first appeared, an idea occurred to us.

By this time our “little story about a powerful business idea” had traveled around the globe in translation and gathered quite a following here in the States. Companies large and small were using the book to create a Go-Giver culture and increase their business. We had put out a second book, a nonfiction companion volume titled Go-Givers Sell More, which featured vignettes of a few dozen people’s real-life experiences to address the question “This all sounds great, but do things really work that way, in real life?” (The answer, in a word, is yes.) Bob was training people around the world to become certified Go-Giver speakers. Schools were even starting to use The Go-Giver in classrooms, and we were starting work on a Go-Giver curriculum guide for teachers.

A lot was going on.

And yet it felt like Pindar still had more to say.

Pindar, of course, is the mysterious mentor character from the first book, the one who introduces our struggling hero Joe to the Five Laws of Stratospheric Success, which all revolve around the idea that a giving mindset is the key to a rich and fulfilling life. One of those Five Laws is the Law of Influence, which says that your influence is determined by how abundantly you place other people’s interests first. We thought Pindar would want us to expand on that. That he and his friends would have something to say about leadership.

With so many great books and teachings on leadership already out there in the world, we asked ourselves, was there a compelling reason for us to add to the pile?

Well, what would Pindar say to that? He would support those great books and their teachings, for sure. And yet, Pindar being Pindar, he would also add his own perspective to the question of what makes great leadership, no doubt turning conventional thinking on its head and finding something paradoxical at its center. As he says in The Go-Giver: “inside every truth and every appearance, there’s a bit of opposite tucked inside … just to keep things interesting.”

During those years, quite a few readers had also been asking us, “How do Go-Giver ideas work in the realm of leadership? What does a go-giver leader look like?”

This book is our effort to answer that question.

We wrote this story and published it in 2011 under the title, It’s Not About You. This title seemed to nicely echo the core idea of The Go-Giver: that shifting one’s emphasis from getting to giving, from a me focus to an other focus, leads to greater and often unexpected returns. Made perfect sense. Or at least, we thought it did.

That wasn’t how others saw it, though. Many read the title It’s Not About You and thought, “Well, if it’s not about me, I suppose there’s no point in my reading it.” We soon realized that the book’s title didn’t make clear what the book was actually about.

So our incredibly supportive publishing partners at Portfolio / Penguin agreed to let us retitle the book and give it a new jacket, creating the book you now hold in your hands.

Sharp-eyed readers will note that we’ve also made some revisions to the story itself, especially in its concluding chapters and in Ben’s fifth and final “Key to Legendary Leadership.” This has allowed us to better capture in words just what it was that Ben finally learned—what lies at the heart of Pindar’s leadership secret. We are thrilled to be able to bring the true heart of the story to light and share it with you.

Because the truth is, it is about you. It’s about you, and about what happens when you focus on making it about others. It’s about how the best way to increase your own influence is to give it away: Pindar’s paradox.

This little story is about some big ideas—vision and empathy, influence and character, loss and triumph. Yet the best of these are but abstractions on the page until they are breathed to life through flesh-and-blood experience.

That’s where you come in.

You may not be a CEO, prime minister, or president. You may not be the head of your organization or boss of your company. But even if you don’t happen to occupy a traditional “leadership position,” that doesn’t mean you’re not in a position to influence others, to inspire and empower others, to be the catalyst for others’ greatness. To champion their success; to hold them up.

In other words, to give leadership, and in so doing, to nudge the world in a positive direction.

Bob Burg and John David Mann

Bob Burg and John David Mann

THE GO-GIVER LEADER

A Little Story About What Matters Most in Business

PORTFOLIO PENGUIN

Contents

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

THE BEGINNING

BY BOB BURG AND JOHN DAVID MANN

ALSO BY BOB BURG

ALSO BY JOHN DAVID MANN

THE GO-GIVER LEADER

Introduction