The Go-Giver Leader

A Little Story About What Matters Most in Business

• #3 on Entrepreneur’s “10 Books Every Leader Should Read to Be Successful” List

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!

Foreign Language Editions

NOTE: Polish and Vietnamese editions of The Go-Giver Leader are available now; a Romanian edition is forthcoming. Meanwhile, these foreign-language editions of It’s Not About You (the earlier version of The Go-Giver Leader) are still available: Chinese (complex), Hungarian, Indonesian, Japanese, Spanish, and Thai. (Click on the language to go to that edition.)

The Go-Giver Leader Reviews

Excerpt from The Go-Giver Leader

He had the vague sense that there was something beyond the four points he had listed on his business card, something important. But he could not identify what it might be.

“It all makes sense,” he said out loud, to no one but himself. “Leaders hold a vision. Leaders care about their people. Leaders get their hands dirty and their boots muddy, do the work and make the tough decisions. And leaders stand for something.

“It’s about all those things. But . . .”

He stopped walking.

But at the same time, somehow, it wasn’t about any of those things.

He looked around at where he stood. His walk had taken him to the little park by the river where he and Mel used to bring Robbie to play. His legs seemed to have brought him here on their own. He now found himself in the park’s center, facing a statue of an elephant surrounded by four blind men all touching different parts of the animal.

He knew the story: each of the four would describe the nature of the beast based on what he could feel of it. One felt a leg, the second the tail, the third the beast’s trunk, and the fourth a tusk—and, not surprisingly, they each concluded it was a completely different thing.

The statue had been commissioned and placed there years ago by the city fathers (as he thought about it, it seemed to Ben he remembered hearing that Pindar himself had had something to do with this) to remind the city’s inhabitants that when people held very different viewpoints on the same topic, chances were excellent that no one position was wholly right—nor wholly wrong.

The thought brought to mind a comment Karen had made a few days earlier. “They’re good guys,” she had said, speaking of Allen, Augustine, and Frank, “and they all see important aspects of the business. Aspects.”

He supposed that was exactly what these four blind men were “seeing”—aspects of the elephant. But wasn’t an elephant far more than the sum of its aspects?

Ben thought about that.

So what was he missing?

Click here to access the color print PDFs of
The Five Keys to Legendary Leadership.

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