Never Eat Alone

The title is the thesis stated as an instruction: Ferrazzi treats every meal as a networking opportunity and argues most careers are limited less by talent than by who you know — and more specifically, by how few real relationships you've built before you need them.

His own career is the evidence he draws on. He moved from Deloitte to Starwood Hotels, where he became chief marketing officer at 32 — reportedly the youngest CMO in the Fortune 500 at the time — then founded the entertainment-marketing company YaYa Media in 2000 and sold it in 2003. The method he pulls out of that run is generosity first and keeping no score: make the introduction, do the favor, follow up, before you need anything back, on the theory that a network built that way is the only kind that holds up when you do need something.

It's a book written from an executive's Rolodex — a Fortune 500 CMO turned consultant, giving advice that assumes reasonably easy access to conference rooms and dinner reservations — and the tone runs immodest by design. The advice underneath is sound and largely free of jargon, but a reader without Ferrazzi's platform has more translating to do than the book admits, to make it work from a colder start.