As I noted, I’ve been reading Never Eat Alone: And Other Secrets to Success, One Relationship at a Time thanks to the generosity of Jonathan, who let me borrow his copy. I think that Jon knew what he was doing when he gave it to me. [But then again, he did say, "Of all the people I know, you're probably the person who least needs to read this."]

My thoughts, as I’ve gone along:

• Chapter One: I doubt Ferrazzi’s assertion that “anyone” can become a connector. I really do, and here’s why: truly being a connector requires the ability to make connections. Even if we work at it, some of us are simply better at it than others: we have better memories, we socialize better, etc. When it comes to the old Nature v. Nurture debate, I definitely say “both”, but I also feal that some folks just aren’t capable of becoming good connectors. Of course, that doesn’t sell you as many books, and what Ferrazzi is selling is something that is easily understood.
• Chapter Two: Ahhh yes, the concept of not keeping score. I really believe in this; the only place where I don’t is in who pays for lunch amongst friends. But other than that, Ferrazzi is spot on: doing for others is the way to building a great network. If you want to be important, you have to remember that most everyone is more important than you are.
• Chapter Three: Another head-nodding chapter on goal-setting. Ferrazzi believes, as I do, that you have to have goals. He also believes in the concept that “a goal is a dream with a deadline”. Additionally, he also believes in Personal Boards of Directors. Rochefauld is right: We rarely find that people have good sense unless they agree with us. [To be fair, I probably ran across the conceptualization of a "Personal Board of Directors" in a Weblog discussion of Ferrazzi's text. In any regard, I practice this---and did so just today [7 Aug 2006], in fact.]
• Chapter Four: Building a network before you need it is an important point, but I was quite disappointed that Ferrazzi only hit the point home with a handful of pages and one major anecdote. Given that his earlier chapters have spent a dozen or more pages weaving Ferrazzi’s own experience and a handful of anecdotes into a cogent point, this chapter felt rushed, thrown-in, and unimportant. It’s not, though.
• Chapter Five: Ahhh, audacity. It’s a skill that I’ve let lie fallow of late. Where I used to be highly outgoing, I’ve pulled back in the last few years. I don’t really know why. This is a bit of a kick in the pants to be better about reaching out.
• Chapter Six: Anti-”Networking Jerks”. Another important lesson. Ferrazzi failed to make what I see as an important point: you never know when the peer of today might be working the system as well as you are and becomes the boss of tomorrow. That said, his decision to stress the importance of working with your team is quite good: at this moment, I somehow quasi-manage people decades my senior. The only reason that works—if it does, which I wonder to myself sometimes—is that they all know that I care about who they are as people. My peers and manager are the reasons I chose to continue working for my employer at graduation, and I treat them as such.
• Chapter Seven: Doing Your Homework. I have not done this as much as I should have in life; I have, however, often gone back to a hotel room or my home after meeting someone and taken notes on our conversation: where they went to school, info about their family, etc. This is the reverse of that, and I see the idea behind doing it. It seems creepy, but it’s easily explained: you’re doing your due diligence for people you’d like to meet. Ferrazzi uses this in terms of meeting people at or above his level in business, but this is applicable to us everyday workaday types: who are the managers in your company? What makes them tick? Here in Alabama, I do my dead-level best to determine whether someone is a BAMA fan or an Aubie beforehand so I can mention it to them; me, I just don’t care, as I went to UAH and have familial ties to both schools. [It's easier to get BAMA fans interested, because a distant cousin of mine, Craig Sanderson, was a star wideout for the Crimson Tide back in the 1990s.]
• Chapter Eight: Take Names. This treads into slightly uncomfortable territory for me, but that’s probably a good thing. [Not that I'm uncomfortable with the process because it's bad; more because it pushes the envelope.] Taking names is a good thing, but I would have named this a bit differently. One thing that I have had great success in doing in my short engineering career is this propensity to always add a number to my Treo [and my Palm before that] whenever I call it. If you call someone about business once, you’ll probably call them again! If you start with a single number, you can end up filling it out. For example, I’ve got the cell phone number of the engineering manager on the main contract I work at TBE in my Treo. He gave it to me once when he really needed to get a hold of me, so I used it for that. Conversely, he has my cell number [and I know this because the third time I called his cell that week, he answered me by name]. Now, 95% of the time when I call him—or any of my other business contacts—I go through normal channels of doing it. Just because I have your cell doesn’t mean I’m going to ring you at that unless it’s your main communication point or I really need to talk to you—and when I call folks’ cell phones, they know I need to talk to them. It’s about respect.

  Another quick note: you should use any relational abilities of your contact management software to their fullest effect: note supervisor-employee relationships, who serves as administrative assistant for whom, etc. Speaking of AAs, it never, ever, ever hurts to be personally interested in them. With my company’s program manager for my main work contract, I try to pick up new little bits of info about her every time I call. I’ve never met her [because I've not gone to Houston on this job in the 32 months I've worked it, heh], but we have good small-talk whenever I call. In fact, I always try to treat the situation as if getting to talk to the boss is an afterthought; compared with how many folks seem to run roughshod over people they perceive as unimportant, I get good results. I can’t tell you how many times one of the AAs at work has pulled my ass out of the fire when I’ve deserved to be left to burn to a crisp…

• Chapter 9: Warming the Cold Call: Cold calls just aren’t something that I do, but it’s something that’s realistic in the medium-term of my career. I do like his advice on doing friend-of-a-friend stuff: when I’m chasing something down in the NASA empire, I always maintain a chain of the people who’ve referred me to others. Ferrazzi is right: if I can tell Person B that I’m giving them an interrupt because Person A referred me to them, I get better results. My best example now is in finding rare aerospace metals and fasteners: I now have a small network of folks across contractors and NASA field centers that I can call, all from a two-day event trying to find something that ended up pulling NASA/Kennedy Space Center out of a stop-work. Everyone knows that stop-works down there cripple the space program, so I got some very, very senior people—I mean, stunningly senior; my jaw was dropping as I was making these calls—on the horn to help me out. Like in Taking Names above: I kept a log across the day of as much info as I could get, who they worked for, and who directed me to whom. Anyway…
• Chapter 10, Managing the Gatekeeper: I was clearly ahead of myself here. As I worked through this chapter, I had another realization: my vice-president’s assistant has been a blessing to me over the years. She befriended me when I was just a shavetail of a co-op, for no real good reason. Okay, I know the reason why, but it had little to do with me and all to do with the person who got me my co-op position in the first place. But I’ve had more reason to work with her lately, and man … I owe her a note of thanks. And a lot more, but that, certainly.
• Chapter 11, Never Eat Alone. Given that this is the title chapter, I expected a long, meaty chapter. It’s not there, folks. I do like Ferrazzi’s idea of bringing people together, though: when I do go to Houston next, I now have the idea to go out to dinner with my engineering manager, any colleagues we can drag along, and any of my Caedmon’s Call Houstonian friends that I can scare up while there. I know that some of my Houston colleagues are believers [and that's all I'll say about that: I try to do my best to keep religion out of the office unless approached], and … putting those folks together would be great fun for me.
• Chapter 12, Share Your Passions. Ferrazzi doesn’t directly say this, but it’s important to know that who we are in our business lives is merely one-quarter to one-half of who we are [in terms of time spent doing our jobs] He encourages the reader to share his or her passions with the people they meet, seeking to find common ground. I have found this to be effective myself: at the end of the day, you’d rather be talking with a customer about your shared passion for canoeing—or actually doing it!—rather than re-hashing the issues you’ve already hashed out that day.
• Chapter 13, Follow Up or Fail. He makes good points all around about following up, including timing for doing it in various situations. There is first-mover advantage in following up…
• Chapter 14, Be a Conference Commando. Ferrazzi clearly gets the key thing with conferences: an opportunity to make acquaintances that can become relationships. Conferences are singles bars for business. [Note: I don't go to conferences.] I felt like this chapter should have been broken up a bit—it’s far longer than any other to this point—but you can winnow it down to three things: 1. Do your homework beforehand. 2. GET OUT THERE. 3. Follow up, follow up, follow up.

Okay, okay, I ran out of energy after that point, mainly because this chapter-by-chapter bit was making it take forever to read the bloody book. My generalized thoughts after finishing last night:

1. I’m not really sure that I’m in Ferrazzi’s complete target audience. He seems to be after the people that want to be C$Os in corporations. Me, I’m fine with the concept of being a middle-to-upper manager, perhaps a VP in my 50s or something. Really and truly, I don’t have the top-of-the-world aspirations that Ferrazzi has. Unfortunately for the reader, that’s the case with most of us, and Ferrazzi loses site of that, I feel. His principles—which are, on the whole, very good ones—get diminished more than a bit by this. The biggest example is his bit about being the CEO of Me, Inc., and about building your own personal brand. I might have bought that crap five years ago, but I just don’t buy it now, largely for theological reasons. [That's a whole other post there.] I hate that an otherwise good book was diminised by that.
2. That said, the best premise that Ferrazzi provides—never in so few words as I would like—is a quite simple one: you get the most value out of any network to which you add the most value. I would like to think that this is something that I intrinsically understand and execute at this point. [Is it any wonder that I love BitTorrent, really?]
3. The book could stand a re-write. I cherished Ferrazzi’s anecdotal story-telling, which fuels much of the book, but I would argue that the book is not formulaic enough. Look, every good book about business needs to have a good idea—usually common sense packaged in uncommon ways—told in an engaging manner. That said, I’ve found that the books that I like the best are either told by excellent writers—guys at the level of a Malcolm Gladwell or a Michael Lewis—or by competent writers who know that they should stick to a formula [notably, David Allen]. Yes, reading formulaic prose gets tiresome, but it divides and conquers the subject matter into manageable chunks, which allows you to read really good books at the same time you’re chunking your way through the other book. Ferrazzi and Raz seem to veer towards and away from a formula, and I wish that they’d stuck to it.
4. Stephen, you might read this and see what you’d have to say, given how often you, Jonathan, and I have discussed it.

Okay, two months to read that? Oi.