The Go-giver

A Frustrated Salesman Walks Into a Stone Mansion

Joe is on his third quarter at Clason-Hill Trust Corporation and his second consecutive miss. He has one shot left, a contract with a client his firm calls the Big Kahuna, and the broker on the other side has just told him, with the casual cruelty of a man holding all the cards, that Joe's firm does not have enough clout or leverage. A competitor named Neil Hansen has underbid him. The week is almost over. Joe is running out of options the way a runner runs out of breath uphill, except Joe has been holding his breath for months.

So he does what ambitious people do when they are cornered. He cold-calls a legend. Pindar, called the Chairman by some and the Old Man by others, is the consultant who whispers in the ears of Fortune 500 CEOs and gives keynote talks across the country. He has a phone number nobody on Joe's floor seems to have, except an older coworker named Gus, who keeps a Rolodex the way collectors keep first editions. Gus hands Joe the number and offers a single, ominous line: do not thank me yet.

That is how the parable begins, and the line earns its weight by the end of the book. Joe thinks he is going to borrow another person's reputation. What he actually finds is that the version of success he has been chasing is built on a misunderstanding so fundamental that he has been sprinting in the wrong direction for years. *The Go-Giver*, written by Bob Burg with John David Mann, is a short, almost suspiciously simple business parable about that misunderstanding and how to undo it. Under one hundred pages in print, more than seven hundred thousand copies in circulation, translated into more than twenty languages. A tiny book that has done what most thick business hardcovers cannot manage, which is to lodge itself permanently in the working memory of the people who read it.