Keith Ferrazzi - Never Eat Alone

Once again, your goal in such a setting is to transform what could be a forgettable encounter into a blossoming friendship. There are shortcuts in my system, but this isn't one of them. I wouldn't have been able to reach out to these individuals, and truly connect, without doing my homework.

Once you've taken the time to figure out what your mission is and where you want to get to, the next step is to identify the people who can help you get there.

The successful organization and management of the information that makes connecting flourish is vital. Tracking the people you know, the people you want to know, and doing all the homework that will help you develop intimate relationships with others can cause one heck of an information overload. How do you manage it? Luckily, today we have a whole new set of software and hardware tools that can help us deal with the task in an orderly fashion.

But you don't need the latest and greatest gadgets. Ink and paper are a perfectly suitable way to keep track of the new people in your expanding social life. I'm a list-taking madman, and you should become one, too.

My experience at YaYa is a good example of how lists help people achieve their goals. On my last day at Starwood, I made more than forty phone calls. One of them was to Sandy Climan. What's interesting about the call, and the dozens of others like it I made that day, is that long before any of these people knew me, many of them had been on one of many lists I'd been keeping for years.

It was Sandy who eventually recruited me to YaYa. It didn't hurt that one of the other investors with a stake in the company, Knowledge Universe, was backed by the famed financier Michael Milken, who ultimately became a mentor of mine whom I'd met through a mutual nonprofit interest.

In November 2000, the YaYa board named me CEO and handed me two goals: establish a viable business model, and either find a major investor or sell the company to a well-heeled strategic acquirer. At the time, YaYa had the technology to invent online games that corporations could use to attract and educate their customers, but the company had no customers—or revenue.

First, I sat down and established a ninety-day, one-year, and three-year mission in my Networking Action Plan. Each goal required me to connect with and develop different parts of my network.

In ninety days, I had to establish credibility with the board, gain the trust of my employees, and set a clear direction for the business.

In a year, I wanted to have enough blue-chip accounts to be close to profitability and moving toward making the company attractive for potential acquisition. Most important, I had to prove to the outside world that YaYa was producing something worthwhile. The concept of advergaming, which wasn't even a word then, was not considered a viable segment of the advertising market. Interactive ads were hopelessly ineffective, and banner ads on Web sites were now considered an industry joke. We had to differentiate ourselves.

I wanted a business model in place three years down the road that could function without me, gain liquidity for my investors, and solidify the company's standing as a thought leader in the online marketing arena.

To make these goals possible, I mapped out the most important players in both the online and games industries, from CEOs and journalists to programmers and academics. My goal was to get to know almost all of them within a year.

To create excitement around our product, I wrote down a list of people I called "influentials": the early adopters, journalists, and industry analysts that help spread the initial buzz about a product or service. Next, I made a list of potential customers, potential acquirers, and people who might be interested in funding us down the road. (In creating your own categories, each should correspond to your own goals.)

When you make such lists, it's important you name the actual decision makers, and not just an organization. The point here is to have a readily accessible and specific list of names.

At the outset, concentrate on the people who are already part of your existing network. I bet you have no idea how vast and widespread it really is. As I noted in the previous chapter, take the time to list people such as:

Relatives

Friends of relatives

All your spouse's relatives and contacts

Current colleagues

Members of professional and social organizations

Current and former customers and clients Parents of your children's friends Neighbors, past and present

People you went to 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

Next, I enter the gathered names into a database. (I tend to use Microsoft's Outlook, but there are plenty of programs out there that are just as good.) I then create call sheets by region, listing the people I know and those I'd like to know. When I'm in a given town, I'll try to phone as many people as I can. I have the numbers in my Palm and BlackBerry; both devices have unique and important functionality to me, so I've kept both.

I also print out and carry these lists around with me wherever I go. They focus my efforts in cabs between meetings. I have something palpable to encourage me to reach out. Some of the lists you create will be related to your action plans; others are more general, helping you to stay connected. The way you organize your lists can be fluid. I have lists by geographical location, by industry, by activity (other runners, for instance, or people who like to go out on the town), whether they're an acquaintance or friend, and so on.

Adding to the names on your lists is simply a matter of looking in the right place. In the beginning stages at YaYa, I read all the trade magazines having to do with advertising and games. If I read about someone who fell into one of my categories, I'd put him on a list and find out his contact information.

When you're looking for people to reach out to, you'll find them everywhere. One great resource for making lists is—it almost sounds absurd—other people's lists. Newspapers and magazines do rankings of this sort all the time.

Long before I became one of CrairCs "40 Under 40," for example, I had been ripping out that list for years. I clip out lists of top CEOs, most admired marketers, the nation's most progressive entrepreneurs—all of these kinds of lists are published in local and national publications; every industry has something similar.

You want not only to know who the players in your field are but eventually to be recognized as one of those players. The people who are on Crain's "40 Under 40" aren't necessarily the forty best businesspeople. They are, however, probably the forty most connected. And they probably all have lunched with one another at one time or another. When you get to know these people, and the people they know (including the journalists at Crain's responsible for the "40 Under 40"), you're that much more likely to be on the list yourself the next time it appears.

There's another category you might want to add, something I call my "aspirational contacts." There are those extremely highlevel people who have nothing to do with my business at hand but are just, well, interesting or successful or both. The people on that list maybe anyone from heads of state and media moguls, to artists and actors, to people others speak highly of. I list these people, too.

If you could see my Palm, I could show you the contact information for Richard Branson, chairman of the Virgin empire. Now, I don't know Richard Branson . . . yet. But I want to. If you scroll down a bit farther, you'll find Howard Stringer, CEO of Sony Corp. of America. He was on my aspirational list once. I now know Howard.