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Takers have a knack for generating creative ideas and championing them in the face of opposition. Because they have supreme confidence in their own opinions, they feel free of the shackles of social approval that constrict the imaginations of many people. This is a distinctive signature of George Meyer’s comedy. In 2002, he wrote, directed, and starred in a small play called
Up Your Giggy
. In his monologues, he called God “a ridiculous superstition, invented by frightened cavemen” and referred to marriage as “a stagnant cauldron of fermented resentments, scared and judgmental conformity, exaggerated concern for the children . . . and the secret dredging-up of erotic images from past lovers in a desperate and heartbreaking attempt to make spousal sex even possible.”

The secret to creativity: be a taker?

Not so fast. Meyer may harbor a cynical sense of humor, deep-seated suspicion about time-honored traditions, and a few past indiscretions, but in a Hollywood universe dominated by takers, he has spent much of his career in giver style. It started early in life: growing up, he was an Eagle Scout and an altar boy. At Harvard, Meyer majored in biochemistry and was accepted to medical school, but decided not to attend. He was turned off by the hypercompetitive premed students he met in college, who would regularly “sabotage each other’s experiments—so lame.” After being elected president of the
Lampoon
, when peers attempted to depose him, Owen notes that “Meyer not only survived that coup but also, characteristically, became a close friend of his principal rival.” After graduating and failing at the dog track, Meyer worked in a cancer research lab and as a substitute teacher. When I asked Meyer what drew him to comedy, he said, “I love to make people laugh, entertain people, and try to make the world a little better.”

Meyer has used his comedic talent to promote social and environmental responsibility. In 1992, an early
Simpsons
episode that Meyer wrote, “Mr. Lisa Goes to Washington,” was nominated for an Environmental Media Award, granted to the best episodic comedy on television with a pro-environmental message. During his tenure,
The Simpsons
won six of these awards. In 1995,
The Simpsons
won a Genesis Award from the Humane Society for raising public awareness of animal issues. Meyer is a vegetarian who practices yoga, and in 2005 he cowrote
Earth to America
, a TBS special that utilized comedy as a vehicle for raising awareness about global warming and related environmental issues. He has done extensive work for Conservation International, producing humorous PowerPoint lectures to promote biodiversity. In 2007, when scientists discovered a new species of moss frogs in Sri Lanka, they named it after Meyer’s daughter, honoring his contributions to the Global Amphibian Assessment to protect frogs.

Even more impressive than Meyer’s work on behalf of the planet is how he works with other people. His big break came when he was working on the Letterman movie script in 1988. To provide some variety in his workday, he wrote and self-published a humor magazine called
Army Man
. “There were very few publications that were just trying to be funny,” Meyer told humorist Eric Spitznagel, “so I tried to make something that had no agenda other than to make you laugh.” The first issue of
Army Man
was only eight pages long. Meyer typed it himself, arranged it on his bed, and started making photocopies. Then he gave away his best comedy, sending copies to about two hundred friends for free.

Readers found
Army Man
hilarious and started passing it along to their friends. The magazine quickly attracted a cult following, and it made
Rolling Stone
magazine’s Hot List of the year’s best in entertainment. Soon, Meyer’s friends began sending him submissions to feature in future issues. By the second issue, there was enough demand for Meyer to circulate about a thousand copies. He shut it down after the third issue, in part because he couldn’t publish all of his friends’ submissions but couldn’t bear to turn them down.

The first issue of
Army Man
debuted when
The Simpsons
was getting off the ground, and it made its way into the hands of executive producer Sam Simon, who was just about to recruit a writing team. Simon hired Meyer and a few of the other contributors to
Army Man
, and they went on to make
The Simpsons
a hit together. In the writers’ room, George Meyer established himself as a giver. Tim Long, a
Simpsons
writer and five-time Emmy winner, told me that “George has the best reputation of anyone I know. He’s incredibly generous in giving and helping other people.” Similarly, Carolyn Omine marvels, “Everybody who knows George knows he is a truly good person. He has a code of honor, and he lives by this code, with a supernatural amount of integrity.”

George Meyer’s success highlights that givers can be every bit as creative as takers. By studying his habits in collaboration, we can gain a rich appreciation of how givers work in ways that contribute to their own success—and the success of those around them. But to develop a complete understanding of what givers do effectively in collaboration, it’s important to compare them with takers. The research on creative architects suggests that takers often have the confidence to generate original ideas that buck traditions and fight uphill battles to champion these ideas. But does this independence come at a price?

In the twentieth century, perhaps no person was more emblematic of eminent creativity than
Frank Lloyd Wright
. In 1991, Wright was recognized as the greatest American architect of all time by the American Institute of Architects. He had an extraordinarily productive career, designing the famous Fallingwater house near Pittsburgh, the Guggenheim Museum, and more than a thousand other structures—roughly half of which were built. In a career that spanned seven decades, he completed an average of more than 140 designs and 70 structures per decade.

Although Wright was prolific throughout the first quarter of the twentieth century, beginning in 1924, he took a nine-year nosedive. As of 1925, “Wright’s career had dwindled to a few houses in Los Angeles,” write sociologist Roger Friedland and architect Harold Zellman. After studying Wright’s career, the psychologist Ed de St. Aubin concluded that the lowest Wright “ever sank architecturally occurred in the years between 1924 and 1933 when he completed only two projects.” Over those nine years, Wright was about thirty-five times less productive than usual. During one two-year period, he didn’t earn a single commission, and he was “floundering professionally,” notes architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne. By 1932, “the world-famous Frank Lloyd Wright” was “all but unemployed,” wrote biographer Brendan Gill. “His last major executed commission had been a house for his cousin” in 1929, and “he was continuously in debt,” to the point of struggling “to find the wherewithal to buy groceries.” What caused America’s greatest architect to languish?

Wright was one of the architects invited to participate in MacKinnon’s study of creativity. Although he declined the invitation, the portrait of the creative architect that emerged from MacKinnon’s analysis was the spitting image of Wright. In his designs, Frank Lloyd Wright appeared to be a humanitarian. He introduced the concept of organic architecture, striving to foster harmony between people and the environments in which they lived. But in his interactions with other people, he operated like a taker. Experts believe that as an apprentice, Wright designed at least nine bootleg houses, violating the terms of his contract that prohibited independent work. To hide the illegal work, Wright reportedly persuaded one of his fellow draftsmen to sign off on several of the houses. At one point, Wright promised his son John a salary for working as an assistant on several projects. When John asked him to be paid, Wright sent him a bill itemizing the total amount of money that John had cost over the course of his life, from birth to the present.

When designing the famous Fallingwater house, Wright stalled for months. When the client, Edgar Kaufmann, finally called Wright to announce that he was driving 140 miles to see his progress, Wright claimed the house was finished. But when Kaufmann arrived, Wright had not even completed a drawing, let alone the house. In the span of a few hours, before Kaufmann’s eyes, Wright sketched out a detailed design. Kaufmann had commissioned a weekend cottage at one of his family’s favorite picnic spots, where they could see a waterfall. Wright had a radically different idea in mind: he drew the house on a rock on top of the waterfall, which would be out of sight from the house. He convinced Kaufmann to accept it, and eventually charged him $125,000 for it, more than triple the $35,000 specified in the contract. It’s unlikely that a giver would have ever been comfortable deviating so far from a client’s expectations, let alone convincing him to endorse it enthusiastically and charging extra for it. It was a taker’s mind-set, it seems, that gave Wright the gall to develop a truly original vision and sell it to a client.

But the very same taker tendencies that served Wright well in Fallingwater also precipitated his nine-year slump. For two decades, until 1911, Wright made his name as an architect living in Chicago and Oak Park, Illinois, where he benefited from the assistance of craftspeople and sculptors. In 1911, he designed Taliesin, an estate in a remote Wisconsin valley. Believing he could excel alone, he moved out there. But as time passed, Wright spun his wheels during “long years of enforced idleness,” Gill wrote. At Taliesin, Wright lacked access to talented apprentices. “The isolation he chose by creating Taliesin,” de St. Aubin observes, “left him without the elements that had become essential to his life: architectural commissions and skillful workers to help him complete his building designs.”

Frank Lloyd Wright’s drought lasted until he gave up on independence and began to work interdependently again with talented collaborators. It wasn’t his own idea: his wife Olgivanna convinced him to start a fellowship for apprentices to help him with his work. When apprentices joined him in 1932, his productivity soared, and he was soon working on the Fallingwater house, which would be seen by many as the greatest work of architecture in modern history. Wright ran his fellowship program for a quarter century, but even then, he struggled to appreciate how much he depended on apprentices. He refused to pay apprentices, requiring them to do cooking, cleaning, and fieldwork. Wright “was a great architect,” explained his former apprentice
Edgar Tafel
, who worked on Fallingwater, “but he needed people like myself to make his designs work—although you couldn’t tell him that.”

Wright’s story exposes the gap between our natural tendencies to attribute creative success to individuals and the collaborative reality that underpins much truly great work. This gap isn’t limited to strictly creative fields. Even in seemingly independent jobs that rely on raw brainpower, our success depends more on others than we realize. For the past decade, several Harvard professors have studied
cardiac surgeons
in hospitals and security analysts in investment banks. Both groups specialize in knowledge work: they need serious smarts to rewire patients’ hearts and organize complex information for stock recommendations. According to management guru Peter Drucker, these “knowledge workers, unlike manual workers in manufacturing, own the means of production: they carry that knowledge in their heads and can therefore take it with them.” But carrying knowledge isn’t actually so easy.

In one study, professors Robert Huckman and Gary Pisano wanted to know whether surgeons get better with practice. Since surgeons are in high demand, they perform procedures at multiple hospitals. Over a two-year period, Huckman and Pisano tracked 38,577 procedures performed by 203 cardiac surgeons at forty-three different hospitals. They focused on coronary artery bypass grafts, where surgeons open a patient’s chest and attach a vein from a leg or a section of chest artery to bypass a blockage in an artery to the heart. On average, 3 percent of patients died during these procedures.

When Huckman and Pisano examined the data, they discovered a remarkable pattern. Overall, the surgeons didn’t get better with practice. They only got better at the
specific hospital
where they practiced. For every procedure they handled at a given hospital, the risk of patient mortality dropped by 1 percent. But the risk of mortality stayed the same at other hospitals. The surgeons couldn’t take their performance with them. They weren’t getting better at performing coronary artery bypass grafts. They were becoming more familiar with particular nurses and anesthesiologists, learning about their strengths and weaknesses, habits, and styles. This familiarity helped them avoid patient deaths, but it didn’t carry over to other hospitals. To reduce the risk of patient mortality, the surgeons needed relationships with specific surgical team members.

While Huckman and Pisano were collecting their hospital data, down the hall at Harvard, a similar study was under way in the financial sector. In investment banks, security analysts conduct research to produce earnings forecasts and make recommendations to money management firms about whether to buy or sell a company’s stock.
Star analysts
carry superior knowledge and expertise that they should be able to use regardless of who their colleagues are. As investment research executive Fred Fraenkel explains: “Analysts are one of the most mobile Wall Street professions because their expertise is portable. I mean, you’ve got it when you’re here and you’ve got it when you’re there. The client base doesn’t change. You need your Rolodex and your files, and you’re in business.”

To test this assumption, Boris Groysberg studied more than a thousand equity and fixed-income security analysts over a nine-year period at seventy-eight different firms. The analysts were ranked in effectiveness by thousands of clients at investment management institutions based on the quality of their earnings estimates, industry knowledge, written reports, service, stock selection, and accessibility and responsiveness. The top three analysts in each of eighty industry sectors were ranked as stars, earning between $2 million and $5 million. Groysberg and his colleagues tracked what happened when the analysts switched firms. Over the nine-year period, 366 analysts—9 percent—moved, so it was possible to see whether the stars maintained their success in new firms.