Never Eat Alone

 Keith Ferrazzi’s book is dedicated to such a phenomenon as networking.

Networking can be defined as the establishment and maintenance of useful contacts, through which a person quickly solves their own and other people’s tasks. Few people are born with the ability of networking, usually, this ability comes with life experience.

Networking can be defined as the establishment and maintenance of useful contacts

Keith Ferrazzi in his book answers the following questions:

• How to make the right connections?
• What needs to be done to make these connections work?
• Where to find the right people?
• How to behave so that these people do not forget about you?

Never Eat Alone Book

The book “Never Eat Alone, Expanded and Updated: And other secrets to success, one relationship at a time” consists of 5 parts and 33 chapters.

Section one. The Mind-Set

Decide for yourself what you want. The more specific the goal, the more you can do to achieve it. Ferrazzi offers a method for setting goals, which consists of 3 stages:

• The first stage: find your passion. Before you specify goals, deal with your dreams. Otherwise, it may happen that you will strive for a goal that does not give you any pleasure.
• The second step: putting goals to paper. Define your life mission and develop a plan to create a support network. The plan is divided into three parts. The first is devoted to the definition of objectives, the implementation of which will contribute to the realization of the mission. The second part links these goals to the people, institutions, and ways to help achieve them. The third determines the best ways to involve people who can help you achieve your goals.
• The third stage: create a personal “board of advisors”. Even the best plan will benefit from the fact that it is critically evaluated by someone from the outside. Consult with friends, advisors, mentor.

The author advises starting building your social circle before you need it. The environment is more likely to help you if they are already familiar with you and managed to love you.

Section two. The Skill Set

Before you meet a stranger, you need to find information about him

Before you meet a stranger, you need to find information about him and about the type of his occupation, his hobbies, and problems. The purpose of your communication to your acquaintance with a person is not forgotten and grew into friendship. Any acquaintance with new people should be considered as your next task, which provides additional opportunities. You can start with a phone call and an e-mail letter.

The author gives 4 rules of a “warm” telephone calls:

• Draft off a reference. To create an atmosphere of mutual trust by mentioning a mutual friend or an organization known to both interlocutors
• State your value. Describe how you can be useful. Make a useful suggestion
• Talk a little, say a lot. Make it quick, convenient, and definitive
• Offer a compromise. To show a willingness to compromise, agreeing to hold a meeting when it is convenient to the interlocutor

Keith Ferrazzi also gives recommendations on how to create a “warm” e-mail letter:

• Carefully consider the subject of the letter. Arouse interest in yourself
• Give time
• Be brief. Your letter should fit on the screen
• Make a clear “call to action”
• Read the letter out loud
• Check spelling

The author will pay attention to the role of the secretary in the company. Make a secretary your ally.

Forming a circle of friends, always remember that you never under any circumstances should not disappear from the field of view of their friends. Connect your social circle with someone else. Share your passions. Because infatuation has an infectious effect on others.

Make connections yourself and take an example from the masters of this business. The author gives several examples of professions where you can find masters of networking: restaurant owners, headhunters, lobbyists, politicians, journalists, etc.

The ability to conduct conversations is acquired with experience. If you are honest with people, they feel higher trust and begin to treat you with respect. Don’t forget about non-verbal communication. Be interesting-follow the news in the professional sphere and in the world.

Section three. Turning Connections into Compatriots

Health, wealth, and children – these are three things that always create a strong emotional connection between people. The only way to encourage people to do something for you is to recognize their value and importance. First of all, you should strive to ensure that the people you are interested in getting what they want.

Section four. Communications in the digital age

Your feed is a stream of data

Your feed is a stream of data reflecting the work of living people. Develop a system that will help to track and sort their contents, and get used to distinguishing the signal from the noise. Make an acquaintance offline and support it online. Become the king of content.

Our life is full of accidents. The author advises learning how to use the opportunity, not to miss their opportunities. He also says that it is necessary to push yourself to such accidents, and not to wait until the moment comes.

Section five. Trading Up and Giving Back

Build your brand, you solve three very important tasks. It inspires confidence in you, speaks for itself and attracts more and more people willing to help. Broadcast your brand – write articles, conduct seminars and speak at conferences, keep a blog, be active in social networks.

Build your brand

In the digital age, when the Internet has erased geographical boundaries and linked hundreds of millions of people and computers around the world, there is no reason to continue living in isolation. The best way to increase your knowledge is to develop relationships with other people, actively cooperate with them, and have the right conversations at the right time.

And most importantly, the more you give, the more you get.

The book often contains the heading “Connectors’ Hall of Fame Profile” in which the author tells the stories of people, gives examples from their lives that confirm one or another thought of the author. Also, in front of each section there are quotes of famous people, who in a brief form reflect the essence of these parts.

Keith Ferrazzi gives many examples from his life, while he tells not only about the successful experience, but also about the mistakes that he made because of his youth and ignorance.

The book is written in easy and accessible language. In general, the book is suitable for everyone. After all, understanding that we live in society, and without the help of other people we can not do – is an important knowledge that can help not only in business but also in everyday life.

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Business Roadmap

 ROUNDMAP™ is an integrated framework to assess, design, manage, align, and optimize business ventures ─ by identifying new revenue streams, by assessing current revenue streams and business models, by eliminating gaps and barriers, and by boosting the front-line operation.

3.1 - THE ULTIMATE LEVEL OF TRUTH

Research confirms that the employee-customer interaction that occurs during each customer lifecycle is at the core of a successful business operation. It is the ONLY level at which a company is able to identify opportunities (and threaths) and capture enough value with which to offset the cost of value creation and delivery. We, therefore, call this level The Ultimate Level of Truth™.

Furthermore, studies confirm that an integrative approach toward the customer development process leads to a substantially better commercial performance (up to 765%; Kotter and Heskett, 2011). However, research also confirms that teams within organizations have become extremely disconnected. This is exceedingly harmful to the execution of the business strategy, as idenfied by creators of the Balanced Scorecard, while it also undermines the prospect of offering seamless, personalized, and meaningful customer experiences.

Obviously, a firm also needs to have the right products and services in place, address the right audience with the right messages, using the right channels while making sure the operation is truly up to the task to serve customers’ needs with poise.

3.2 - THE SILO SYNDROME

What is keeping most companies from reaching a level of excellence is the degree of fragmention due to specialization ─ leading to mental and functional silos, tunnel vision, internal competition, and even turf wars. These negative effects tend to obstruct the creation and delivery of significant value while frustrating customer experiences; ultimately deteriorating commercial performance.

When you start with a fragmented leadership team, leading to separate groups, each rooted in their own values, beliefs, symbols, and taxonomies, the execution of the business strategy will undoubtedly be crippled. If additionally, departments hoard relevant customer data, reluctant to share it with others, the mission could be at grave risk.

We’ve identified several ways to break down the silo-mentality, such as the introduction of customer round tables, appointing cross-functional liaisons, build cross-functional teams, defining inciting rallying goals and objectives, and so on.

3.3 - ROUNDMAP DEFINITION

The name ROUNDMAP™ is a portmanteau of two words: roadMAP and ROUNDtrip.

ROUNDMAP

An integrative approach toward sustainable business growth.

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ROADMAP

A pathway toward a unified execution of the strategy.

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ROUNDTRIP

The lifecycle dynamics that forge strong customer bonds.

While ROUNDMAP™ addresses both the business map (roadmap) as well as the customer lifecycle (roundtrip), to drive growth, other frameworks are mostly cost-oriented. To increase operating income both aspects ─ cost and performance ─ should be considered.

3.4 - SYSTEMS DYNAMICS

ROUNDMAP™ is designed from an approach known as systems theory, an interdisciplinary study of systems: ‘A system is a cohesive conglomeration of interrelated and interdependent parts, whether natural or human-made. Every system is bounded by space and time, influenced by its environment, defined by its structure and purpose, and expressed through its functioning. A system may be more than the sum of its parts if it expresses synergy or emergent behavior.’

To explain the systems dynamics ─ the aspect of systems theory as a method to understand the dynamic behavior of complex systems ─ that are relevant to venture design we’ve created a flowchart, the ROUNDMAP™ Business Roadmap (see PDF for more info). A business roadmap is a high-level plan, defining an overarching strategic objective and caputuring the major steps planned for achieving that objective, as well as a communication tool that helps communicate the business’s strategy.

For instance, Customer Dynamics is a theory on company-customer relationships that describes the ongoing interchange of information and transactions between customers and organizations. It goes beyond the transactional nature of the interaction to look at emotions, intent, and desires. It views interactions as a chain of events rather than single-point occurrences.

3.5 - BUSINESS ROADMAP

Next to the four Carousels and the Business Model Matrix™, the Business Venture Roadmap, or Business Roadmap for comfort, will assist managers to plan, organize, control, and lead the business, while allowing agile development teams to discover new opportunities for growth.

The Business Roadmap is the linear aspect (roadmap) of the framework, matching the cyclical aspects (round trips) of the Carousels.

3.6 - STAGES

To (re-)design a business venture, or to consider multiple business ventures and to determine the gaps between (current and new) business ventures, Edwin Korver has developed an intelligent Business Roadmap as part of the ROUNDMAP™ framework.

The ROUNDMAP™ Business Roadmap consists of five stages:

STAGE 1 – DISCOVER

  (NEW) VENTURE ─ Q: What is your dream about? What is your hypothesis? Did you validate the product/market fit?

STAGE 2 – DESIGN

  BASE PLAN ─ Q: What are the key components? What is your value proposition? What is your key differentiation?
  GAME PLAN ─ Q: What is your production strategy? Who are your key partners? What is your go-to-market strategy?

STAGE 3 – DEVELOP

  ACTION PLAN ─ Q: What resources and capabilities are needed? What is your marketing strategy?

STAGE 4 – DIRECT

  OUTCOMES ─ Q: What are your key performance indicators? What do they tell you?
  RESULTS ─ Q: What economies of scale/scope work in your favor? What share have you obtained?

STAGE 5 – DISPENSE

  RETURNS ─ Q: Have you reached your aspired goals? Is your mission still aligned with your vision?

3.7 - STEPS

Let’s look in more detail and discuss the ROUNDMAP™ Business Roadmap step-by-step:

STAGE 1 – DISCOVER

The VENTURE stage is our first step ─ as we could have learned from Steve Blank’s first book, The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Products that Win ─ indicating that we should follow a four step process, referred to as Customer Development, to increase the likelihood of launching successful products and avoiding common pitfalls ─ customer discovery, customer validation, customer creation, and company building.

The last part of Blank’s four step process ─ company building ─ is the our next step, the BASE PLAN. 

If the Customer Development Method does not apply to your situation, you may skip this stage and start from stage 2, the BASE PLAN.

STAGE 2 – DESIGN

The BASE PLAN describes the principles of the business venture and looks at three aspects:

  ORGANIZATIONAL DYNAMICS ─ Culture Line ─ Q: What do we intent to achieve, how and why?
  BUSINESS MODEL ─ Added Value Line ─ Q: What’s our business model and go-to-market strategy?
  BEHAVIORAL DYNAMICS ─ Trend Line ─ Q: What are the trends in customer buying behavior?

The output acts as the starting points for the GAME PLAN:

  OPERATING MODEL ─ Business Line ─ Q: What products, material, and suppliers are key to our business model?
  REVENUE MODEL ─ Customer Line ─ Q: What’s our distribution model and customer strategy?

STAGE 3 – DEVELOP

Next, the output of the GAME PLAN needs to be fed into the ACTION PLAN:

  BUSINESS DYNAMICS ─ Operating Line ─ Q: What’s needed to create and deliver value?
  CUSTOMER DYNAMICS ─ Front Line ─ Q: What’s needed to develop the customer lifecycle?
  MARKET DYNAMICS ─ Activation Line ─ Q; What’s needed to influence customer behavior?

STAGE 4 – DIRECT

Now that we’ve designed the business venture, we’ll need to measure the OUTCOMES:

  BUSINESS PERFORMANCE ─ Business Intelligence ─ Q: What’s the cost per unit?
  CUSTOMER PERFORMANCE ─ Customer Intelligence ─ Q: What’s the margin per customer?
  MARKET PERFORMANCE ─ Market Intelligence ─ Q: What’s our share of the market?

Next, we’ll need to determine the RESULTS:

  OPERATING RESULTS ─ Expenses line ─ Q: What’s the total and distribution of the expenses?
  COMMERCIAL RESULTS ─ Revenue line ─ Q: What’s the total and distribution of the revenue?

STAGE 5 – DISPENSE

And finally, what are the RETURNS:

  RETURN ON VENTURE ─ Bottom line ─ Q: What’s result of the entire business venture?

P.s.: The activities in the ACTION PLAN are aligned with Porter’s Value Chain Theory. The arrangement of the dynamics in the ACTION PLAN makes it easy to consider the SWOT-model (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats), as well as the Backstage and Onstage Competitive Advantages relevant to defensible differentiation.

3.8 - CANVAS

We will soon provide a printable and online canvas that will allow you to perform a ROUNDMAP™ Business Roadmap exercise.

3.9 - VALUE HUB THEORY

Napoleon Hill wrote in Think And Grow Rich that to achieve our goals, i.e., to get things flowing, we need (to create) a value differential. You may have noticed the +/- signs in the scheme above. We use it to explain where the ‘value differentials’ reside.

Imagine that your efforts to create value ‘charge’ your Business Dynamics. If you can find a customer in the market with a need for that value, the potential for a value differential may emerge. However, to inspire a customer to buy you’ll need them to be close enough for a spark to cross over ─ don’t ‘touch’ because touchpoints are merely a figure of speech. After all, you don’t want their hair to look funny.

Since the activities involved in discovering, acquiring, serving, and retaining customers are so distant from running an operating line, the Customer Dynamics act as a go between of the Business Dynamics.

3.10 - DIFFERENT VIEWPOINTS

The three dynamics of the ROUNDMAP™ ACTION PLAN also provides us with different viewpoints. For instance, we may aspire a large share of the total addressable market (TAM), however, without a capable operating line to service the target market and an assertive frontline operation to obtain (SOM) it, we’re likely to get disappointed. Or, we may assume that we’re in full control of our brand’s identity, however, the image of the brand will ultimately be determined by (all of our interactions with) our customers.

"Cultivate a deep understanding of yourself - not only what your strengths and weaknesses are but also how you learn, how you work with others, what your values are, and where you can make the greatest contribution. Because only when you operate from strengths can you achieve true excellence."

~ Peter Drucker, best-selling author and management consultant

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