It really is about who you know

By conventional standards, I was an awful consultant. Put me in front of a spreadsheet and my eyes glazed 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, pouring 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.

No rookie consultant in the history of Deloitte consulting has ever come closer to getting fired as quickly as I did. 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 opportunity/cost 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 in an attempt to drum up both business and buzz for my new company. I had mentors throughout the organization, including the CEO, Pat Laconto. Still, my first annual review was devastating. I received low marks for not doing what I was asked to do with the gusto and focus that was expected of me. Embarrassed, I offered to quit. But my supervisors, with whom I had already developed relationships and who were aware of all my extracurricular activities, rejected my resignation. Instead, together we cooked up a job description that previously did not exist at the company.

My mentors gave me a $150,000 expense account to do what I had already been doing: developing business, representing the firm with speaking engagements, and reaching out to the press and business world in ways that would strengthen Deloitte's presence in the marketplace. My supervisors' belief in me paid off. Within a year, the company's brand recognition moved from bottom of the consulting pack to the top of the industry, achieving a growth rate the company had never known (though, of course, it wasn't all my doing). I went on to become the company's chief marketing officer and the youngest person ever elected partner. And I was having a blast — the work was fun, exciting, interesting. Everything you could want in a job.

While my career was in full throttle, in some ways it all seemed like a lucky accident. In fact, for many years, I couldn't fully explain my professional trajectory to anyone — a crazy quilt of jobs including five companies in a little over ten years. It's only today, looking in the rearview mirror, that it makes enormous sense.

From Deloitte, I became the youngest Chief Marketing Officer in the Fortune 500 at Starwood Hotel & Resorts, then CEO of a Michael Milken-funded video game company, and now, founder of my own company, Ferrazzi Greenlight, a sales and marketing company that serves as consultant to scores of major organizations and as an advisor to CEOs across the world. I zigged and zagged my way to the top. Every time I contemplated a move or needed advice, I turned to the circle of friends I had built around me. That building these relationships was proving profitable for me and the organizations I worked for seemed, at least in the early years, almost surreal. When Crain's magazine listed me as one of the 40 top business leaders under 40 or The World Economic Forum labeled me as a "Global Leader of Tomorrow," I tried at first to draw attention away from my people skills for fear that they were somehow inferior to other more "respectable" business abilities. But as I got older, everyone from well-known CEOs and politicians to college kids and my own employees came to me asking for advice on how to do those things I had always loved doing. Senator Hillary Clinton asked me to use my connecting skills to raise money for her favorite nonprofit, Save America's Treasures. Fellow executives asked if I could help them throw intimate dinner parties for their lead contacts and prospects. MBA students sent e-mails hungry to learn the people skills their business schools weren't teaching them. Soon I was giving formal training courses at the most prestigious MBA programs in America...

"Never Eat Alone" outlines the secrets behind the success of so many accomplished people; they are secrets that are rarely recognized by business schools, career counselors, and therapists. By incorporating the ideas I discuss in this book, you too can become the center of a circle of relationships, one that will help you succeed throughout life. Of course, I'm a bit of a fanatic in my efforts to connect with others. I do the things I'm going to teach you with a certain degree of, well, exuberance. But by simply reaching out to others, and recognizing that no one does it alone, I believe you'll see astounding results, quickly.

Everyone has the capacity to be a connector. After all, if a country kid from Pennsylvania can make it into the "club," so can you.

See you there.

Excerpted from “Never Eat Alone” by Keith Ferrazzi. Copyright © 2005 by Keith Ferrazzi. Published by Doubleday & Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt can be used without permission of the publisher.

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