The tech-writer’s journal #15 — Book Review- Never Eat Alone: And Other Secrets to Success, One Relationship at a Time by Keith Ferrazzi

This article was originally published on The Communicator in the Spring 2023 edition

People and relationships form the core of what we accomplish as technical communicators. The better you understand your audience (users), the easier your content should be for them to follow. The better your relationships with your Subject Matter Experts (SMEs), the easier it is to extract information from them.

The book Never Eat Alone: And Other Secrets To Success, One Relationship At A Time by Keith Ferrazzi illustrates the significance of creating and nurturing good relationships.

Overview

This book, in a nutshell, is a networking guide. It explains the importance of having a professional network, how it spearheads your success and provides actionable insights on how to build and nurture your professional network.

The book has five sections, each explaining different aspects of networking. The author starts by explaining the importance of having a networking mindset. When you are ready to help others, they often come forward to help you. Success is not about elbowing your way to the front. Instead, it is about finding opportunities to collaborate with others and help them succeed.

About the Author

Keith Ferrazzi is the founder and CEO of the consulting company Ferrazzi Greenlight. He is a successful entrepreneur and a marketing expert. In this book, he shares his tricks and tips on networking. He illustrates each aspect of networking with a story or an incident taken right out of Keith’s life, sort of like a biography, which makes this book an engaging read, rather than just a rule book.

Target Audience

This is a book for anyone working in any organization or trying to build a business. As a technical writer, the book speaks to the bread and butter of what I do — maintaining good relationships. However, it would prove useful to almost anyone in whatever field. For instance, it guides people working in customer support on maintaining good relationships with their users. It also offers guidance to product owners on maintaining good relationships with the engineers who design and build their products, and thus to continually improve things.

Ideas that Strike a Spark

Generosity is the key

Creating and maintaining good workplace relationships is key to professional success. At the core of networking is generosity — being able to ask “How can I help you?” instead of

“How can you help me?.” Real networking is about working hard to give more than you get.

Good relationships lead to a more healthy and fulfilling life

According to a 75-year-old Harvard Study of Adult Development, good relationships keep us happier and healthier. The author explains this with the refrigerator analogy — How many people can walk into your homes and just open up the fridge and help themselves? Not many. People need “refrigerator rights relationships,” the kind that is comfortable, informal, and intimate enough to let us walk into one another’s kitchen and rummage through the refrigerator without asking. Close relationships like these keep us well-adjusted, happy, and successful.

Lack of social relationships constitutes a major risk factor for health. Therefore, networking not only feeds your professional success, but also the happiness quotient in your life.

You are the average of people that are close to you

Dr. David McClelland of Harvard University researched the qualities and characteristics of high achievers in our society. What he found was that your choice of a “reference group,” the people you hang out with, was an important factor in determining your future success or failure. In other words, if you hang out with successful people, you’re more likely to become successful.

From very early on, the author’s father encouraged him to meet with well-educated adults from whom he could learn. He wanted his child to be comfortable with older, more experienced people, and never to fear seeking their help or asking them questions.

Build your brand

Building your brand will provide you with a distinctive identity, and attract more people to your network. To become a brand, you need to relentlessly focus on what value you add to your organization. People hire and retain only the ones they think can make them and their companies better.

Never eat alone

Constantly find ways to include others in whatever you are doing. It’s symbiotic — the more new connections you establish, the more opportunities you’ll have to make even more new connections. The network is like a muscle — the more you work on it, the bigger it gets.

This book also covers some of the other marketing-related concepts such as cold calling, leveraging conferences for networking, the art of small talk, connecting in the digital age, and so on.

Conclusion

Never eat alone provides you with the tools you need, skill sets to develop, and mindset to cultivate to build a genuine business network. Implementing a handful of them can take you a long way toward becoming successful as a professional. This book is a treasure for anyone who is just starting their corporate careers, and entrepreneurs who are trying to build a profitable business.