Never Eat Alone

My read-on-the-train book this month was Never Eat Alone by Keith Ferrazzi. This is the kind of book that can give networking a good name: "I learned that real networking was about finding ways to make other people more successful." (p 9) Ferrazzi is a master: "Today, I have over 5,000 people on my Palm who will answer the phone when I call." I doubt that any librarian needs to have 5,000 contacts, but I imagine 500, maybe even a 1000, might make it possible me to do things that I can only dream about today. So, I kind of used that as a rule of thumb while reading Ferrazzi's book--take every idea and scale it down to 10-20%. Almost everything in the book became useful to me with that yardstick.

Here are some things I plan to do after reading this book:

• Keep a contact list with notes so that I remember people and have things to talk about the next time I meet them
• Get more out of conferences by making them more about meeting people and less about attending sessions
• Organize lunches and other get-togethers between people in different parts of my network
• Throw parties
• Send birthday cards

I recommend this book for librarians and doubly recommend it for people in more extroverted professions. I gave a copy to my nephew for his birthday--he's a junior in high school and I think he's going to get more out of college by reading this book first.     #

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