TL;DR
Ron Sukenick’s first book, a 1995 guide to building a network of key business contacts through relationships instead of business-card collecting. It’s where the ideas he spent the next three decades teaching first appeared in print.
Ron Sukenick spent his career telling people that networking, the way most of them did it, was dead. Walking into a room with a stack of business cards and a sales pitch got you nowhere. Relationships got you everywhere.
Networking Your Way to Success is where he first put that in a book.
What is Networking Your Way to Success about?
A network of key contacts, built on purpose. The full subtitle spells out the plan: A Proven Method for Building, Developing, and Implementing a Network of Your Own Key Contacts. Kendall/Hunt, a publisher in Dubuque, Iowa, released it in 1995 as a 162-page trade paperback with a short bibliography and an index. Library catalogs list it under marketing, key accounts and business networks.
It’s a business book, written for people who need customers.
Ron’s message changed very little over the years. Go to events to give. Don’t go to sell. Follow up. Learn what other people need and connect them with someone who can help.
Most people in any room want to sell and almost nobody wants to buy, so the person who walks in looking for ways to help stands out immediately. Ron built a career on that insight, long before social media made relationships the center of marketing.
What was Ron Sukenick’s background?
Not what you’d expect from a networking author. He was born in the Bronx in 1949, studied printing and graphic arts in New York, and enlisted in the Army in November 1967. In Vietnam he was a petroleum specialist, delivering jet fuel in the Mekong Delta. Back home he worked as a paid musician, a record label executive and a real estate agent before he moved to Indiana in 1988.
In Indianapolis he led the expansion of a business referral organization, then went out on his own as a speaker, trainer and coach. He founded the Relationship Strategies Institute and the Indiana Business Network, sat on the international advisory board of BNI, and later served as an Army Reserve career counselor and a national speaker for the Yellow Ribbon Reintegration Program. The program helps reservists and their families after deployment.
I met him in 2016, when he was a client on a LinkedIn profile project, and he sat for an interview that ran far longer than scheduled. He died in June 2022, at 72.
What came after Networking Your Way to Success?
A second book, The Power Is in the Connection, where he laid out the philosophy he called Net Being. He told me he declared networking dead when that second book came out in 2004, and he meant the old business-card version. A contribution to Ivan Misner’s anthology Masters of Networking came in between. Then two books with Ken Williams built around a character named Gnik Rowten.
Ron’s own summary was simpler than any of them. Become a giver, look for ways to be useful, and the more people you meet, the more chances you have to help.
Keep reading
My tribute to Ron Sukenick: the relationship strategist who taught me the eight magic words of networking.
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