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The Reciprocity Ring
When I joined the faculty at Wharton, the world’s oldest collegiate business
school, I decided to try a giving experiment in my classroom. I announced that
we would be running an exercise called the Reciprocity Ring, which was
developed by University of Michigan sociologist Wayne Baker and his wife
Cheryl at Humax. Each student would make a request to the class, and the rest of
the class would try to use their knowledge, resources, and connections to help
fulfill the request. The request could be anything meaningful in their
professional or personal lives, ranging from job leads to travel tips.
In a matter of minutes, I was facing a line of students—some cynical, others
anxious. One student pronounced that the exercise wouldn’t work, because there
aren’t any givers at Wharton: givers study medicine or social work, not business.
Another admitted that he would love advice from more experienced peers on
strengthening his candidacy for consulting jobs, but he knew they wouldn’t help
him, since they were competing with him for these positions.
Soon, these students watched in disbelief as their peers began to use their
networks to help one another. A junior named Alex announced that he loved
amusement parks, and he came to Wharton in the hopes of one day running Six
Flags. He wasn’t sure how to get started—could anyone help him break into the
industry? A classmate, Andrew, raised his hand and said he had a weak tie to the
former CEO of Six Flags. Andrew went out on a limb to connect them, and a
few weeks later, Alex received invaluable career advice from the ex-CEO. A
senior named Michelle confided that she had a friend whose growth was stunted
due to health problems, and couldn’t find clothes that fit. A fellow senior,
Jessica, had an uncle in the fashion business, and she contacted him for help.
Three months later, custom garments arrived at the doorstep of Michelle’s friend.
Wayne Baker has led Reciprocity Rings at many companies, from GM to
Bristol-Myers Squibb. Oftentimes, he brings leaders and managers together from
competing companies in the same industry and invites them to make requests
and help one another. In one session, a pharmaceutical executive was about to
pay an outside vendor $50,000 to synthesize a strain of the PCS alkaloid. The
executive asked if anyone could help find a cheaper alternative. One of the group
members happened to have slack capacity in his lab, and was able to do it for
free.
The Reciprocity Ring can be an extremely powerful experience. Bud Ahearn,

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a group president at CH2M HILL, noted that leaders in his company “are strong
endorsers, not only because of the hundreds of thousands of annual dollar value,
but because of the remarkable potential to advance the quality of our ‘whole’
lives.” Baker has asked executives to estimate the dollar value and time saved in