Take Names - Ch 8 of Never Eat Alone at Catch a Gideon

April 18th, 2007 by digerati

This is Chapter 8 of the Never Eat Alone series at Catch a Gideon. Points from Mr. Ferrazzi are in bold. I’m asking that you react to the quotes through comments. Share you reaction to each as well as your experiences in college and the real world.

I mapped out the most important players. My goal was to get to know almost all of them within a year.Connect with the “influentials.” That is journalists, early adopters, industry analysts, potential customers, and potential acquirers interested in funding you.

College is a great time to meet these people. Find people outside of your major and become friends with them. Finding a wide range of friends makes life more interesting, and builds your network for the future.

Your network has a lot more people than most think. Relatives, friends of relatives, spouses relatives and contacts, current colleagues, members of a professional and social organization, current and former customers and clients, parents of your children’s friends, neighbors (past and present), people you went ot school with, people you have worked with in the past, people in your religious congregation, former teachers and employers, people you socialize with, people who provide services to you.

If you take a few minutes to write down everyone you know, you’ll be amazed, and probably give up shortly. The list will simply be too long! Think of everyone you know in your classes, the professors in your department (and others), the people in your office. There are probably hundreds of people you don’t even think of day to day. Keep track of useful data. I keep lists by geographical location, by industry, by activities (other runners for instance), acquaintance or friend. If you’re organized, focused, and a stickler for taking names, no one is out of reach. Finding a good way of organizing your network.

I use Outlook to keep contact info. Outlook allows you to use categories to organize categories. The great thing is unlike folders, each contact can have multiple categories. This means you can have a business contact who is also a family member, etc. Think about using different types of categories. Friends, work, and family contacts make sense, but so do keeping track of industries, interests, or people you can help vs. people who can help you. Try to use categories along the lines of how you actually think. The computer is the best tool when you can project yourself onto how you use it, not when you pick arbitrary organization.

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Never Eat Alone is one of the best networking books written, period. Buy it now and follow along as Catch a Gideon goes through each chapter of the book.