It really is about who you know

There is no quick fix to becoming an overnight success in business. Or is there? According to Keith Ferrazzi, the former chief marketing officer at Deloitte Consulting and Starwood Hotels, success starts with building and maintaining relationships. In his new book, "Never Eat Alone: And Other Secrets to Success, One Relationship at a Time," Ferrazzi explains how to create and then make the most of your relationships. Read an excerpt.

Chapter 1: “Becoming a Member of the Club”

"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, 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?...

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 did not.

As a kid, I caddied at the local country club for the homeowners and 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...

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 each other jobs, they invested time and money in each other's ideas and they made sure their kids got help getting into the best schools, got the right internships, and ultimately 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 bag. 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 they started out as a caddy or not...

I came to realize that first semester at business school that Harvard's hyper-competitive, 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, brownnosers, smarmy sycophants...

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... 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 of managing relationships...

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 were a litany of tough-minded principles that made this soft-hearted 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.

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