Never Eat Alone
I recently finished reading Keith Ferrazzi’s book, Never Eat Alone. I first learned about Ferrazzi about two years ago when Forbes ran an article about him. He’s a “master networker”, and maintains contact with thousands of people.
When Ferrazzi’s book came out last year, I read through an abstract and placed it on my “To Read” list. Finally, I read it and found it pretty interesting. Some of tips and ideas he writes about are things that I could probably never do, but I realized I was already doing some of them.
The book has much more in depth than the title implies. Obviously, it’s important to socialize and network; you should leave your desk for an hour a day and eat with someone from work. But, the main thing he emphasizes over and over again is that you don’t network for volume, but for quality. He says a good contact is one that will take your calls. I personally would go a step further, a good contact is someone I could call at anytime and ask a favor.
At conferences, Ferrazzi says many people will just hand out their business cards to everyone in a room, but that’s a waste. If you can’t match a face to contact info, you likely didn’t make any personal connection and the relationship is pretty much worthless. Instead he listed a number of strategies; I really liked two of these. The first is to host your own smaller private gathering during a conference. The second is to help organize the event. This gives you some insider info and will likely get you into the VIPs gatherings.
Ferrazzi says he profiles people he wants to meet, learning as much about them. He even goes so far as to have his staff create abstracts on people that include as much personal information as possible. At first I thought this was a little stalker-ish, but I changed my mind. When I conduct interviews or am interviewed, I google the other party to learn as much as possible. I consider this to be standard practice now, and I’m surprised when others don’t so the same.
He also talks about the Johari Window and how it’s important to communicate to others in their own communication style. I’d read something similar a while back, but I didn’t know about the specifics of the Johari Window exercise until I looked them up.
Ferrazzi mentions the importance of follow-up. If you don’t follow-up (or at least ping) frequently, you can lose contacts. Also, it’s important to be interesting. When you meet someone new, they are likely thinking something along the lines of, “Do I want to have lunch with this person?” Boring and annoying people don’t usually make the cut.
Another interesting thing he said is to never be a generalist in your career, rather at every stage of your career you need something to differentiate you from others. This is part of your personal brand and you need to pay attention to it.
Ferrazzi mentioned that most of business isn’t reinventing the wheel, rather it’s attaching the same wheel to a new wagon. In this way, the content creator (i.e. idea person) is inherently valuable for their ability to bring value out of almost anything.
It’s also important to be mentor to many people and have many mentees. All of my valuable mentor/mentee relationships have been terrific mutually beneficial learning experiences.
And, of course, play golf. Tons of business happens on the courses and if it’s important to you to be part of that, you need to be there.
Earlier I was talking about what makes a good friendship. Ferrazzi has another description which I like more: you know you’re friends with someone if you can walk into their house and rummage through the refrigerator without asking. :-)
The most important thing that Ferrazzi says is that you should not hesitate to spend your “personal capital” on others. Lots of people think that if they ask someone to help out someone else, they have exhausted their capital with that person. Actually (and I’ve noticed this to), personal capital is very renewable. If you connect two people, both of them will likely be happy for your help (unless you are spamming them). In my short career, I’ve referred my mentors, mentees, and friends to others with great results, including lots of people finding new jobs.
There are a lot of things that I felt were a bit overboard, like only having one non-social meal a week or spending every free minute on a cell phone, but those are mostly lifestyle differences.
Overall, I enjoyed this book. I’m glad I read it, though, since I took lots of notes and there are a lot of related articles online, I don’t think I’ll need to read it again.
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