In Never Eat Alone, Keith Ferrazzi lays out the specific steps--and inner mindset--he uses to reach out to connect with the thousands of colleagues, friends, and associates on his Rolodex, people he has helped and who have helped him.

The son of a small-town steelworker and a cleaning lady, Ferrazzi first used his remarkable ability to connect with others to pave the way to a scholarship at Yale, a Harvard MBA, and several top executive posts. Not yet out of his thirties, he developed a network of relationships that stretched from Washington's corridors of power to Hollywood's A-list, leading to him being named one of Crain's 40 Under 40 and one of Davos' Global Leaders for Tomorrow.

Ferrazzi distinguishes genuine relationship-building from the crude, desperate glad-handling usually associated with "networking." He then distills his system of reaching out to people into practical, proven principles.