A few years after The Go-Giver first appeared, an idea occurred to us. It felt like Pindar still had more to say.
Pindar, of course, is the mysterious mentor character from the first book, who introduces our struggling hero Joe to the Five Laws of Stratospheric Success, one of which says, 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.
Originally published in 2011 under the title, It’s Not About You, the book has been retitled The Go-Giver Leader, given a beautiful new jacket, and the text has been revised/sharpened/clarified a bit (especially in its concluding chapters and in Ben’s fifth and final “Key to Legendary Leadership”) to better capture in words just what it was that Ben finally learned—what lies at the heart of Pindar’s leadership secret.
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? Clearly, he would support those great books and teachings. 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.
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, which we thought nicely echoed the core idea of The Go-Giver (that is, that shifting your emphasis from a me focus to an other focus leads to great and often unexpected returns). Made perfect sense to us. But that wasn’t how it was perceived. Many read the title It’s Not About You and thought, “Well, if it’s not about me, I guess there’s no point in my reading it.”
Its original title and jacket also didn’t make it clear that there were other books in the Go-Giver universe.
In short, readers couldn’t quite figure out exactly what this book was actually about. Oops.
So our incredibly supportive publishing partners at Portfolio / Penguin agreed to let us retitle the book, give it a new jacket, and revise/sharpen/clarify the text a bit (especially in its concluding chapters and in Ben’s fifth and final “Key to Legendary Leadership”) to better capture in words just what it was that Ben finally learned—what lies at the heart of Pindar’s leadership secret.
We also added a Discussion Guide and a Q&A with the Authors section.
We are thrilled to be able to bring the true heart of the story to light and share it with you!