Keith Ferrazzi needs two PalmPilots to keep track of all his contacts, people like Bill Clinton and Michael Milken.
Keith Ferrazzi enters your life like a circus coming to town -- the two ringing cell phones, the two PalmPilots, the multiple conversations in which he seems to be listening and talking simultaneously. The way he walks and looks, all tanned and fit, with the styled hair and custom suit and black Prada shoes. The deals that are hanging in the air, the favors being extended or secured, the sideshows, the laughter, the juggling. That irresistible balloon of energy.
We've just bolted from the Yale Club and are hustling through midtown Manhattan in a cab, heading for Rockefeller Center and a lunch we're already late for with an important television executive. A Ferrazzi friend. I'm here because Ferrazzi is said to have a gift. In addition to heading up a young Los Angeles company called YaYa that's generating more than its share of buzz, Ferrazzi is a networker, a great networker. Indeed, some of the world's best networkers say that the still-only-36-year-old Ferrazzi may be the best of all. Ferrazzi is something else, too: an archetypal American story, the poor kid -- born to a steelworker and a cleaning lady -- who works his ass off to get into Yale and Harvard B-school; who becomes the youngest elected partner at Deloitte Consulting and then the youngest Fortune 500 chief marketing officer, at Starwood Hotels; who gets tapped by famed financier Michael Milken and others to become CEO of YaYa, a pioneering company in the creation of on-line games as custom-marketing vehicles. In two years Ferrazzi has transformed YaYa from a clever idea into a thriving business. He's got game, as they say. But the exact nature of that game -- the magic of it, everyone claims -- is networking, the acquisition and cultivation of influential connections.
And yet, sitting with Ferrazzi in the cab, I am aware of what many company owners will think of all this. Networking? Give me John Wayne individualism and the aggressive single-mindedness that's required to build something, to lead, and to do it all alone. Schmoozers are brownnosers, sycophants more suited to middle management than to the Wild West of the entrepreneurial world. Would it be a surprise if entrepreneurs recoil at the thought of consciously courting any person who has more power and money than they have?
In the cab I'm thinking I'll press Ferrazzi on that issue, lead him carefully through my list of questions, get to the bottom of networking's unseemliness. But it won't happen that way. Instead, in the course of following Ferrazzi throughout the day, at lunch and during a few hours of phone calls and a discussion that can only be described as a lecture, I will become a pupil. Keith Ferrazzi will teach me how the inner circle operates. He'll teach me how even I can operate. He'll teach me the system.
"Have you ever thought of broadcast journalism?" Ferrazzi is asking me now as we sit in traffic. He asks many such questions, personal and probing, and he does it with such an easy charm and sincerity that I find myself answering them.
"I guess I've considered it," I say.
"Well, this lunch will be great for you," he says. "She's a terrific woman who happens to be very powerful. This is your opportunity to start practicing your networking skills." But halfway through our meal in the Rainbow Room's members-only lunch club, all is not well. I'm polite but passive, asking a few questions but nothing more. Ferrazzi, on the other hand, manages the conversation like a yogi -- all deliberate, delicate movements, his listening as assertive as his banter. And now I'm about to face my first test. Choosing a moment when he and I are briefly alone in the buffet line, Ferrazzi leans in and whispers, "You're a fucking loser if you don't walk out of here with some reason for getting in touch with her again."
Later, when he is painstakingly explaining the practice of his system -- the rules of elite networking -- he'll also explain the critical difference between what he does and what most people do. He'll try to explain the nuances that the Rolodex builders and card passer-outers fail to grasp. But he'll admit that in the beginning it was more straightforward even for him.
EYES ON THE PRIZE: It was his father's pluck that got Keith Ferrazzi out of his working-class suburb.
As a kid he caddied at the local country club for the homeowners and children living in the wealthy town next to his, and it made him think often and hard about those who succeed and those who don't. He came to believe that business, like life, is a game, and that the people who play it best will win. And the rule in the game that trumps all others, Ferrazzi became convinced, is that he who knows the most people, and knows them well, becomes a member of the club, not a caddy. Hence his gradual construction of a plan, a set of existential operating procedures that today has bred a network of oceanic proportions. Whether you want to speak with Michael Milken or Bill Clinton or celebrity doctor Dean Ornish or CEO Barry Diller, Ferrazzi can open the door.
"So how'd I do?" I ask him when we're back at the Yale Club, his base when he's in New York, after our Rainbow Room lunch.
"Awful," he reports. And it's true. The entire experience had the feel of a first date. When I did manage to speak, I actually stuttered. My questions weren't particularly passionate or insightful. And when at the very last moment I went in for the metaphorical kiss, I instead got a chummy punch on the shoulder. Ferrazzi stepped in -- because I'd forgotten my business cards -- to say he'd get us in touch. I now ask him to grade my performance. He gives me a preposterously charitable C-minus. "You can do better," he says. "You just have to work on it."
