The Go-Giver

Joe is a salesman with a week left in the quarter and one sale he has to land, the account his office calls the Big Kahuna. A colleague named Gus hands him a phone number for a consultant his followers call the Chairman. Joe calls him wanting an edge.

Over the next week the Chairman sends him out to meet people he knows: a restaurateur who started with a hot dog cart, a former schoolteacher now running an educational software company, a financial adviser, a real estate broker, and last of all Gus himself, who turns out to have connected all of them. Each one carries one of what the book calls the Five Laws of Stratospheric Success, which run value, compensation, influence, authenticity, receptivity. Each law is stated to Joe outright and then demonstrated in a working business. The Big Kahuna goes to a competitor. What comes back arrives from that competitor, stuck on something much larger and needing what only Joe can supply, and Joe can supply it because of someone he had gone out of his way to serve.

It is written for someone already thinking in quotas and commissions; the frame is professional success rather than ethics in general. The reservation is the form. This is a fable, and its characters exist to hold a principle rather than to behave like people. They turn up on cue, agree with one another, and hand over the next law on schedule. The book closes by reprinting the five laws as numbered maxims, which is a fair measure of how much of it a reader actually needs.