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![Never Eat Alone: And Other Secrets to Success, One Relationship at a Time (Portfolio Non Fiction) by [Keith Ferrazzi, Tahl Raz]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51g98XrdQiL._SY346_.jpg)
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An updated and expanded edition of the runaway bestseller Never Eat Alone by Keith Ferrazzi
Proven advice on networking for success: over 400,000 copies sold.
As Keith Ferrazzi discovered early in life, what distinguishes highly successful people from everyone else is the way they use the power of relationships - so that everyone wins. His form of connecting to the world around him is based on generosity and he distinguishes genuine relationship-building from the crude, desperate glad-handling usually associated with 'networking'.
In Never Eat Alone, Ferrazzi lays out the specific steps - and inner mindset - he uses to reach out to connect with the thousands of colleagues, friends, and associates on his Rolodex, people he has helped and who have helped him. He then distills his system of reaching out to people into practical, proven principles.
Keith Ferrazzi is founder and CEO of Ferrazzi Greenlight, a marketing and sales consulting company. He is the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Who's Got Your Back and has been a contributor to Inc., the Wall Street Journal, and Harvard Business Review. Previously, he was CMO of Deloitte Consulting and at Starwood Hotels & Resorts, and CEO of YaYa media. He lives in Los Angeles and New York.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherPenguin
- Publication date5 June 2014
- File size2064 KB
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Product description
From Booklist
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.
From AudioFile
About the Author
Keith Ferrazzi is the founder and CEO of the training and consulting company Ferrazzi Greenlight and a contributor to Inc., the Wall Street Journal and Harvard Business Review. He was previously the CMO of Deloitte Consulting and of Starwood Hotels and Resorts, and the CEO of YaYa Media. He lives in Los Angeles.
Tahl Raz has written for Inc., the Jerusalem Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, and GQ. Raz lives in New York City.
--This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Becoming a Member of the Club
Relationships are all there is. Everything in the universe only
exists because it is in relationship to everything else. Nothing
exists in isolation. We have to stop pretending we are individuals
that can go it alone.
–Margaret Wheatley
How on earth did I get in here?” I kept asking myself in those early days as an overwhelmed first-year student at Harvard Business School.
There wasn’t a single accounting or finance class in my background. Looking around me, I saw ruthlessly focused young men and women who had undergraduate degrees in business. They’d gone on to crunch numbers or analyze spreadsheets in the finest firms on Wall Street. Most were from wealthy families and had pedigrees and legacies and Roman numerals in their names. Sure, I was intimidated.
How was a guy like me from a working-class family, with a liberal arts degree and a couple years at a traditional manufacturing company, going to compete with purebreds from McKinsey and Goldman Sachs who, from my perspective, seemed as if they’d
been computing business data in their cribs?
It was a defining moment in my career, and in my life.
I was a country boy from southwestern Pennsylvania, raised in a small, hardworking steel and coal town outside of Latrobe called Youngstown. Our region was so rural you couldn’t see another house from the porch of our modest home. My father worked in the local steel mill; on weekends he’d do construction. My mother cleaned the homes of the doctors and lawyers in a nearby town. My brother escaped small-town life by way of the army; my sister got married in high school and moved out when I
was a toddler.
At HBS, all the insecurities of my youth came rushing back. You see, although we didn’t have much money, my dad and mom were set on giving me the kind of opportunities my brother and sister (from my mom’s previous marriage) never got. My parents pushed me and sacrificed everything to get me the kind of education that only the well-to-do kids in our town could afford. The memories rushed back to those days when my mother would pick me up in our beat-up blue Nova at the bus stop of the private elementary school I attended, while the other children ducked into limos and BMWs. I was teased mercilessly about our car and my polyester clothes and fake Docksiders–reminded daily of my station in life.
The experience was a godsend in many ways, toughening my resolve and fueling my drive to succeed. It made clear to me there was a hard line between the haves and the have-nots. It made me angry to be poor. I felt excluded from what I saw as the old boys’ network. On the other hand, all those feelings pushed me to work harder than everyone around me.
Hard work, I reassured myself, was one of the ways I’d beaten the odds and gotten into Harvard Business School. But there was something else that separated me from the rest of my class and gave me an advantage. I seemed to have learned something long
before I arrived in Cambridge that it seemed many of my peers had not.
As a kid, I caddied at the local country club for the homeowners and their children living in the wealthy town next to mine. It made me think often and hard about those who succeed and those who don’t. I made an observation in those days that would alter
the way I viewed the world.
During those long stretches on the links, as I carried their bags, I watched how the people who had reached professional heights unknown to my father and mother helped each other. They found one another jobs, they invested time and money in one another’s ideas, and they made sure their kids got help getting into the best schools, got the right internships, and ultimately got the best jobs.
Before my eyes, I saw proof that success breeds success and, indeed, the rich do get richer. Their web of friends and associates was the most potent club the people I caddied for had in their bags. Poverty, I realized, wasn’t only a lack of financial resources; it was isolation from the kind of people that could help you make
more of yourself.
I came to believe that in some very specific ways life, like golf, is a game, and that the people who know the rules, and know them well, play it best and succeed. And the rule in life that has unprecedented power is that the individual who knows the right people, for the right reasons, and utilizes the power of these relationships, can become a member of the “club,” whether he started out as a caddie or not.
This realization came with some empowering implications. To achieve your goals in life, I realized, it matters less how smart you are, how much innate talent you’re born with, or even, most eye-opening to me, where you came from and how much you started out with. Sure all these are important, but they mean little if you don’t understand one thing: You can’t get there alone. In fact, you can’t get very far at all.
Fortunately, I was hungry to make something of myself (and, frankly, even more terrified that I’d amount to nothing). Otherwise, perhaps I would have just stood by and watched like my friends in the caddy yard.
I first began to learn about the incredible power of relationships from Mrs. Poland. Carol Poland was married to the owner of the big lumberyard in our town, and her son, Brett, who was my age, was my friend. They went to our church. At the time, I probably wanted to be Brett (great athlete, rich, all the girls falling over him).
At the club, I was Mrs. Poland’s caddie. I was the only one who cared enough, ironically, to hide her cigarettes. I busted my behind to help her win every tournament. I’d walk the course the morning before to see where the tough pin placements were. I’d
test the speed of the greens. Mrs. Poland started racking up wins left and right. Every ladies day, I did such a great job that she would brag about me to her friends. Soon, others requested me.
I’d caddie thirty-six holes a day if I could get the work, and I made sure I treated the club caddie-master as if he were a king. My first year, I won the annual caddie award, which gave me the chance to caddie for Arnold Palmer when he came to play on his
hometown course. Arnie started out as a caddie himself at the Latrobe Country Club and went on to own the club as an adult. I looked up to him as a role model. He was living proof that success in golf, and in life, had nothing to do with class. It was about
access (yes, and talent, at least in his case). Some gained access through birth or money. Some were fantastic at what they did, like Arnold Palmer. My edge, I knew, was my initiative and drive. Arnie was inspirational proof that your past need not be prologue to your future.
For years I was a de facto member of the Poland family, splitting holidays with them and hanging out at their house nearly every day. Brett and I were inseparable, and I loved his family like my own. Mrs. Poland made sure I got to know everyone in the club that could help me, and if she saw me slacking, I’d hear it from her. I helped her on the golf course, and she, in appreciation of my efforts and the care I bestowed upon her, helped me in life. She provided me with a simple but profound lesson about the power of generosity. When you help others, they often help you. Reciprocity is the gussied-up word people use later in life to describe this ageless principle. I just knew the word as “care.” We cared for each other, so we went out of our way to do nice things.
Because of those days, and specifically that lesson, I came to realize that first semester at business school that Harvard’s hypercompetitive, individualistic students had it all wrong. Success in any field, but especially in business, is about working with people, not against them. No tabulation of dollars and cents can account for one immutable fact: Business is a human enterprise, driven and determined by people.
It wasn’t too far into my second semester before I started jokingly reassuring myself, “How on earth did all these other people get in here?”
What many of my fellow students lacked, I discovered, were the skills and strategies that are associated with fostering and building relationships. In America, and especially in business, we’re brought up to cherish John Wayne individualism. People who consciously court others to become involved in their lives are seen as schmoozers, brown-nosers, smarmy sycophants.
Over the years, I learned that the outrageous number of misperceptions clouding those who are active relationship-builders is equaled only by the misperceptions of how relationship-building is done properly. What I saw on the golf course–friends helping friends and families helping families they cared about–had nothing to do with manipulation or quid pro quo. Rarely was there any running tally of who did what for whom, or strategies concocted in which you give just so you could get.
Over time, I came to see reaching out to people as a way to make a difference in people’s lives as well as a way to explore and learn and enrich my own; it became the conscious construction of my life’s path. Once I saw my networking efforts in this light, I gave myself permission to practice it with abandon in every part of my professional and personal life. I didn’t think of it as cold and impersonal, the way I thought of “networking.” I was, instead, connecting–sharing my knowledge and resources, time and energy, friends and associates, and empathy and compassion in a continual effort to provide value to others, while coincidentally increasing my own. Like business itself, being a connector is not about managing transactions, but about managing relationships.
People who instinctively establish a strong network of relationships have always created great businesses. If you strip business down to its basics, it’s still about people selling things to other people. That idea can get lost in the tremendous hubbub the business world perpetually stirs up around everything from brands and technology to design and price considerations in an endless search for the ultimate competitive advantage. But ask any accomplished CEO or entrepreneur or professional how they achieved their success, and I guarantee you’ll hear very little business jargon. What you will mostly hear about are the people who helped pave their way, if they are being honest and not too caught up in their own success.
After two decades of successfully applying the power of relationships in my own life and career, I’ve come to believe that connecting is one of the most important business–and life–skill sets you’ll ever learn. Why? Because, flat out, people do business with people they know and like. Careers–in every imaginable field–work the same way. Even our overall well-being and sense of happiness, as a library’s worth of research has shown, is dictated in large part by the support and guidance and love we get from the community we build for ourselves.
It took me a while to figure out exactly how to go about connecting with others. But I knew for certain that whether I wanted to become president of the United States or the president of a local PTA, there were a lot of other people whose help I would need along the way.
Self-Help: A Misnomer
How do you turn an aspiring contact into a friend? How can you get other people to become emotionally invested in your advancement? Why are there some lucky schmos who always leave business conferences with months’ worth of lunch dates and a dozen potential new associates, while others leave with only indigestion? Where are the places you go to meet the kind of people who could most impact your life?
From my earliest days growing up in Latrobe, I found myself absorbing wisdom and advice from every source imaginable–friends, books, neighbors, teachers, family. My thirst to reach out was almost unquenchable. But in business, I found nothing came close to the impact of mentors. At every stage in my career, I sought out the most successful people around me and asked for their help and guidance.
I first learned the value of mentors from a local lawyer named George Love. He and the town’s stockbroker, Walt Saling, took me under their wings. I was riveted by their stories of professional life and their nuggets of street-smart wisdom. My ambitions were sown in the fertile soil of George and Walt’s rambling business escapades, and ever since, I’ve been on the lookout for others who could teach or inspire me. Later in life, as I rubbed shoulders with business leaders, store owners, politicians, and movers and shakers of all stripes, I started to gain a sense of how our country’s most successful people reach out to others, and how they invite those people’s help in accomplishing their goals.
I learned that real networking was about finding ways to make other people more successful. It was about working hard to give more than you get. And I came to believe that there was a litany of tough-minded principles that made this softhearted philosophy possible.
These principles would ultimately help me achieve things I didn’t think I was capable of. They would lead me to opportunities otherwise hidden to a person of my upbringing, and they’d come to my aid when I failed, as we all do on occasion. That aid was never in more dire need than during my first job out of business school at Deloitte & Touche Consulting.
By conventional standards, I was an awful entry-level consultant. Put me in front of a spreadsheet and my eyes glaze over, which is what happened when I found myself on my first project, huddled in a cramped windowless room in the middle of suburbia, files stretching from floor to ceiling, poring over a sea of data with a few other first-year consultants. I tried; I really did. But I just couldn’t. I was convinced boredom that bad was lethal.
I was clearly well on my way to getting fired or quitting.
Luckily, I had already applied some of the very rules of networking that I was still in the process of learning. In my spare time, when I wasn’t painfully attempting to analyze some data-ridden worksheet, I reached out to ex-classmates, professors, old bosses, and anyone who might stand to benefit from a relationship with Deloitte. I spent my weekends giving speeches at small conferences around the country on a variety of subjects I had learned at Harvard mostly under the tutelage of Len Schlessinger (to whom I owe my speaking style today). All this in an attempt to drum up both business and buzz for my new company. I had mentors throughout the organization, including the CEO, Pat Loconto. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.
From the Back Cover
From the Inside Flap
A cover article in Inc. magazine on YaYa CEO Keith Ferrazzi's secrets to networking generated the largest response the magazine has received in the past ten years. Now Ferrazzi, working with Inc. writer Tahl Raz, explains the guiding principles he has mastered over a lifetime of reaching out to explain what it takes to build the kind of lasting, mutually beneficial relationships that lead to professional and personal success.
For Ferrazzi, the son of a small-town steelworker and a cleaning lady, the ability to connect with others paved the way to a scholarship at Yale, a Harvard MBA, and a prestigious posting to management consulting giant Deloitte Consulting. He discovered early on in life that the key to what makes successful people different from everyone else is the way they use the power of relationships. The sharing of knowledge, resources, time, and energy with people they know and trust is the foundation of their success. In NEVER EAT ALONE, Ferrazzi distinguishes such genuine relationship-building from the crude, desperate glad-handing usually associated with the word "networking." He distills the ways he uses to reach out to others into practical proven principles, such as:
• Look for mentors: Link up with people who can help guide your career and can introduce you to the people you need to know. Then become a mentor yourself.
• Be interesting: Develop the style, knowledge, and expertise that will draw others to you.
• Build it before you need it: Create lists of people you know—and those you want to know—and maintain ongoing contacts with them throughout your life and career—not just when you need a favor.
• Never eat alone: Avoid the fate of "invisibility"—use potential social settings to constantly reach out to colleagues and future contacts.
Ferrazzi's form of connecting is based on a spirit of generosity. He cautions readers not to keep score. Helping colleagues connect with other friends creates the kind of goodwill that inevitably pays its own dividends. Full of specific advice on handling rejection, getting past gatekeepers, and more, NEVER EAT ALONE is destined to be the How to Win Friends and Influence People of the new millennium.
Review
"Your network is your net worth. This book shows you how to add to your personal bottom line with better networking and bigger relationships. What a solid but easy read! Keith's personality shines through like the great (and hip) teacher you never got in college or business school. Buy this book for yourself, and tomorrow go out and buy one for your kid brother!"
—Tim Sanders, author of Love Is the Killer App: How to Win Business and
Influence Friends and leadership coach at Yahoo!
"Everyone in business knows relationships and having a network of contacts is important. Finally we have a real-world guide to how to create your own high-powered network tailored to your career goals and personal style."
—Jon Miller, CEO, AOL
“I’ve seen Keith Ferrazzi in action and he is a master at building relationships and networking to further the interests of an enterprise. He’s sharing his playbook for those who want learn the secrets of this important executive art.”
—Dr. Klaus Kleinfeld, CEO-designate, Siemens AG
“A business book that reads like a story—filled with personal triumphs and examples that leave no doubt to the reader that success in anything is built on meaningful relationships.”
—James H. Quigley, CEO, Deloitte & Touche USA LLP
"Keith has long been a leading marketing innovator. His way with people truly makes him a star. In Never Eat Alone, he has taken his gift and created specific steps that are easily followed, to achieve great success."
—Robert Kotick, Chairman and CEO, Activision
“Keith’s insights on how to turn a conference, a meeting, or a casual contact into an extraordinary opportunity for mutual success make invaluable reading for people in all stages of their professional and personal lives. I strongly recommend it."
—Jeffrey E. Garten, Dean, Yale School of Management --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.
Product details
- ASIN : B00IICN1FS
- Publisher : Penguin (5 June 2014)
- Language : English
- File size : 2064 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Print length : 374 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #23,581 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #205 in Self-Help for the Workplace
- #1,518 in Self-Help eBooks
- #4,676 in Personal Transformation
- Customer Reviews:
About the authors
Keith Ferrazzi is the author of the bestsellers Who’s Got Your Back and Never Eat Alone. Ferrazzi has been published in The Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, Inc., and Fast Company. He was the youngest person to make partner and hold the position of Chief Marketing Officer at Deloitte Consulting, where he raised Deloitte’s brand recognition from lowest to a primary position, spurring the highest growth rate in the industry.
As founder and CEO of Ferrazzi Greenlight, Keith Ferrazzi transforms behaviors that block global organizations from reaching strategic goals into new habits that increase shareholder value. The firm’s Greenlight Research Institute has proven the correlation between practices that improve relationships and business success, particularly in sales performance and team effectiveness in an increasingly virtual world. Greenlight’s behavior engineering methodology for diagnosing and instilling the highest ROI behavior change is based on a decade of field engagements with iconic global organizations.
Tahl Raz is a storyteller of big ideas in business, technology and the social sciences that are transforming the way we work and live. An award-winning journalist and best-selling author, he has edited and published in everything from Inc. Magazine and GQ to Harvard Business Review and the Jerusalem Post. Management guru Tom Peters called his first co-authored book, “Never Eat Alone,” one of “the most extraordinary and valuable business books” of recent history. The book is still in hardcover over a decade later and is now used as a textbook in MBA programs around the world. He has held roles as a Chief Content Officer, CEO of an online education company called MyGreenLight, and founder and editor-in-chief of Jewcy Media. He lives in New York City with his wife, daughter, and a very fat Pug named Bibi.
Customer reviews
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Top reviews
Top reviews from India
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Relationships drive everything in life, and this book helps you build new and better ones!
Simply because the author has reflected the idea that we aren't successful on account of our efforts only but there is an involvement of so many people to make every single person successful.
The book does drag a little towards the end and there might be parts where you might want to skip as they are irrelevant to your personal life.
All in all, a fun read and important book about the importance of relationships in business.
In one chapter, the author says vulnerability is a virtue and describes how expressing his vulnerability to a complete stranger once helped him build a deeper connection. However, one must be careful with whom he chooses to be vulnerable. Maybe you want a deeper connection but if the other person only wants to take advantage of you then all of this wont really help.
Dont follow the advice blindly. People will take advantage of you easily.
No amount of your effort will make up for a lack of theirs.
Top reviews from other countries

This is not to say that reading of the book will per se make you a networking wizard but at least many of the necessary steps for getting there will be laid out and described, the rest being mostly down to getting out there and doing it.
The book covers a wide variety of topics, including upward as well as horizontal and downward management (as the author correctly concludes from his own experience, upward management on its own falls woefully short), subjects such as mentoring, publicity, writing, network maintenance activities, and many more.
The examples given are almost exclusively from the author's own experience, with some limited research findings thrown in on occasion. This is not to say that the findings are any less valid for that, even though the author admits himself that his is not the only possible way.
If you are an experienced manager and / or networker, there may be little in here that is fundamentally new. At the same time, the content is reasonably well packaged, easy to read and sufficiently comprehensive and the book is likely to be a very helpful guide to readers about to enter the job market or being in their early professional career.
Some may be a bit put off by the author's style (somewhat too often praising himself) and the fact that parts come across as a thinly veiled advertorial for his consulting services. A more general area for improvement in my opinion is the light 'ageing' of the advice - not that it is in any way obsolescent but a chapter or so on how some of the lessons can be usefully applied in today's 'compliance' obsessed business world, where many large companies get a shock of occurrences as common as business lunches or conference invitations, would certainly be a welcome addition (and bring the book that much closer to five star status in my opinion).
In the end, experienced networkers will likely find much confirmation of what they do and aspiring ones potentially be helped in avoiding unnecessary mistakes and being more successful at it sooner after reading this book - so you can hardly go wrong with giving it a try.


Helped make many needed mindset shifts to take smarter action in growing socially!

