On June 18, 2022, the world lost a quiet master of human connection. Ron Sukenick passed away peacefully at his home in Indianapolis, Indiana, surrounded by family. He was 72 years old. By the time I learned he was gone, months had passed. We hadn’t stayed in touch after our work together, but the lessons he taught me in 2016 have outlasted the time we spent on the phone. They’re still teaching me now.
Ron was the rare kind of expert who didn’t need to remind you he was an expert.
He was a relationship strategist who made you feel like a friend within ten minutes. He was a networking philosopher who never once used the phrase “leverage your network.” He was a published author who would interrupt his own interview to introduce you to someone he thought could help your business. He was, in his own words, a giver. And in a world increasingly full of takers and posturers, he gave like it was breathing.
This is a story about a man I knew briefly, learned from deeply, and continue to quote almost a decade later.
How We Met
I met Ron Sukenick in 2016 through Donna Serdula’s LinkedIn Makeover program. At the time, I was writing executive LinkedIn profiles for Donna, optimizing the language and structure so senior leaders could show up in search and still sound like themselves. Ron was one of those clients. The irony wasn’t lost on either of us.
Ron didn’t need anyone to teach him how to use LinkedIn. He’d been on the platform since May 2004, one of the first 200,000 users worldwide. He had already written 21 Days to Success with LinkedIn. He was a published authority on the very tool he was hiring us to help him optimize. He hired the team anyway.
That was the first lesson he taught me, although neither of us called it a lesson at the time.
Knowing how to do a thing is different from having the time and detachment to do it for yourself. Ron understood that being good at something doesn’t mean you should be the one doing it. He invested in expert help because the work mattered, not because he couldn’t have done it himself.
When the profile was finished, I asked if he’d be willing to sit for an interview. I was building a series called Interviews with Influencers, and Ron was exactly the kind of person I wanted to feature. He said yes immediately.
The interview ran much longer than scheduled, because Ron didn’t talk about LinkedIn so much as he talked about people. Once he got going on people, he had a lot to say. The result became Book 3 in the series: Ron Sukenick’s Tips on Expanding your Business by Building Relationships.
It was published in 2016. The book is no longer in print. That’s part of why I’m writing this tribute. The stories deserve to outlive the paperback.
Listen to the 2016 interview
Ron Sukenick on the Net Being philosophy, the giver’s mindset, and the eight magic words of networking. Recorded 2016.
The Philosophy He Built His Life On
Four ideas from Ron Sukenick that outlasted the paperback.
Ron coined his own phrase for the underlying philosophy of his work. He called it Net Being. He always spelled it out: B-E-I-N-G. The point was the word inside the word.
“You have to be before you can do. You do to the extent of who you are. And who you are is based predominantly on how you think.”
Ron’s structure came out in the middle of explaining why old-school networking was dead. He believed networking as a transactional activity had collapsed. People walked into rooms wanting to sell and almost nobody walked in wanting to buy. The disconnect was structural. What remained was relationships, and relationships required a different posture. You had to be a certain kind of person before the connection mechanics could work. Ron’s whole career was about teaching people to be that kind of person.
“Networking, in my opinion, is dead. I said it in 2004 when my second book came out. Consider this: it’s awkward, it’s hit and miss, it’s situational, it always lacks support, and it’s never about you.”
He saw the future clearly. Networking events full of business cards and rubber bands had already become noise. What replaced them was something quieter and more durable: relationships, built one human at a time, sustained by giving without remembering. He’d been preaching it for two decades by the time we met.
The Eight Magic Words
Ron had a phrase he called the eight magic words of networking. He repeated them often enough during our interview that I never forgot them.
“I know someone that can get it done.”
His argument was simple. If you build real relationships across enough industries, you become the person who routes opportunities to the right people. You’re not selling. You’re not pitching. You’re connecting. And the money follows because eventually everyone routes back to you. It was a strategy for becoming useful in a world that confused activity with accomplishment. He had related lines I still use.
“Become the most interested person in the room, not the most interesting person.”
The interesting person performs. The interested person listens, asks questions, and follows up. Ron said the interested person always wins because everyone wants to be heard and almost nobody wants to be impressed. He told me he made a deliberate practice of becoming the most interested person at every event he attended. He treated curiosity as a discipline. He also liked to quote Brian Tracy.
“Always give without remembering. Always receive without forgetting.”
Ron framed giving as an investment. You don’t give expecting a return, but the return is built into the system. When you give to people, it triggers chemicals in their brain. It creates serotonin. It makes them feel good. And over time, your giving becomes a savings account you can draw on when you need support. He called it the giver’s main idea.
The Moment That Defined Him
About halfway through our interview, Ron interrupted himself. We’d been talking about LinkedIn connection strategy. He was making a point about engagement when he suddenly paused and said he wanted to introduce me to someone.
He had a friend named Rhoda who ran a ghostwriting service called Say It For You. He thought we should know each other. He gave me her name, her contact information, and made it clear he’d personally vouch for me if I reached out. Then he picked back up exactly where he’d left off in the LinkedIn discussion.
To him, the interruption was the work. He’d identified an opportunity to be useful to someone in real time, and he took it without ceremony. He didn’t register it as generous. To him, it was just what you did when you saw a connection to make. In that moment I understood Net Being wasn’t a slogan. Ron lived inside it. He moved through the world looking for places where two strangers could become useful to each other, and he made the introduction the moment he spotted the match. It was a reflex.
We never used Rhoda’s contact information. It didn’t matter. The gift was the move itself, and the move was Ron.
The Bronx Kid Who Built His First Business at Five
On July 1, 1949, Ron Sukenick was born in the Bronx, New York. His father Sidney was a working man. His mother Yetta raised the family. By Ron’s own account, he started his first business at age five.
“I was living in the Bronx in New York. For some reason, I wanted some money for candy and to go to the movies. I would ask my neighbors if I could take their garbage to the incinerator. Each person was paying me 10 cents a week. I ended up with 12 clients.”
Twelve clients at ten cents each. A buck twenty a week. Enough for the movies, with candy money left over. He laughed about it when he told the story, but he also pointed to it as the moment he discovered something fundamental about himself.
He liked people. He liked being around them. He liked the feeling of being useful and getting paid for it.
The pattern set early. He graduated from the New York High School of Printing in Manhattan, where he was on the bowling team. He studied Graphic Arts and Advertising at New York City Community College.
He spent seventeen years in the Los Angeles music industry, doing marketing for major recording studios.
He had a band of his own, briefly, in the 1960s. His band’s drummer was a cousin of a kid named Carmine Appice. Appice became a hugely revered rock drummer, playing with Vanilla Fudge, Jeff Beck, Rod Stewart, and Ozzy Osbourne.
Decades later, Carmine became one of Ron’s coaching clients. The two had reconnected, and Ron was helping him transition from drumming to public speaking. That was Ron’s life. Threads from one decade reconnecting in the next.
Vietnam and the Army Reserves
Ron joined the Army on November 27, 1967. He served in Vietnam as a petroleum specialist, delivering jet fuel up and down the Mekong Delta. After his active duty ended, he spent three years traveling Europe and South America before returning to the United States.
He continued serving in the Army Reserves, eventually being mobilized as an Army Career Counselor in the 88th Regional Readiness Command. He retired as a veteran.
Military service stayed with him for the rest of his life. He was selected as one of twenty-five national Cadre speakers for the Yellow Ribbon Reintegration Program through the Office of the Secretary of Defense. As a Cadre speaker, he motivated and inspired tens of thousands of service members and their families for many years. He spoke about coming home. About what reintegration meant for people who had been deployed. About the practical work of returning to a civilian life that had moved on without you.
In lieu of flowers at his passing, Ron asked that donations be sent to the Veterans Support Council. It was the cause he kept returning to. Service members supported him. He spent the rest of his life supporting them back.
The Move to Indianapolis
In 1988, Ron moved to Indianapolis. He brought networking with him. He’d become involved with what would later become BNI, Business Network International, the largest networking referral system in the country. At the time it was simply called the Network. Ron had been part of expanding it in California. When he moved to Indiana, he brought the same expansion energy to a new state.
He founded the Indiana Business Network. He produced the Indianapolis Business 500 networking event.
He was named the international winner of Best Networlder in 2004, the same year his first book came out. A member of Gold Star Referral Clubs starting in 2009, he often pointed people there as a highly effective way to build referral business.
He married Yvonne Odle on October 11, 1980, in Beverly Hills, California. They built a life together that lasted more than four decades. He went on to study Marketing at IUPUI, adding academic credentials to the practical experience he had already accumulated.
The Body of Work
Ron’s books were never bestsellers in the celebrity-author sense. They were better than that. They were tools.
“I think that if there were any closing comments, you just become a giver. You look for more ways to become resourceful and useful to people. And I find that the more people I meet, the more opportunities I have to help others. That’s it. I mean, it’s that simple. No mystery behind any of it.”
His first book, Networking Your Way to Success, came out in 2004. His second, The Power is in the Connection: Taking Your Personal and Professional Relationships to the Next Level, was where he laid out the Net Being philosophy fully. He contributed to Masters of Networking. That became a New York Times bestseller.
Then came the Gnik Rowten books, co-authored with Ken Williams: 21 Days to Success Through Networking: The Life and Times of Gnik Rowten and 21 Days to Success with LinkedIn. Gnik Rowten was Ron’s fictional networking guide character. Spell the name backwards and you get “Networking.” The joke was hidden in plain sight. Ron liked teaching through stories instead of lectures, and he didn’t mind if some readers missed the wordplay. The point was the lesson.
He was a member of the National Speakers Association. He spoke full time. He raised his rates every year because, as he put it, “as you get older you might as well charge more.” He spoke anywhere in the world he was invited. He’d been to Guam three times.
The Last Talk
Ron’s last public speaking engagement that I know of was on May 25, 2022. He spoke at a Network in Action event titled “Embracing and Leveraging the Power of LinkedIn.” It was vintage Ron. Still teaching the platform he’d been on since 2004, still pushing professionals to engage instead of collect. Three weeks later, on June 18, 2022, he passed away peacefully at home in Indianapolis. He was 72. His family surrounded him. He’d been working until the end.
Ron’s Legacy
What Ron Sukenick left behind wasn’t a fortune or a viral moment. He left behind a method. A way of thinking about other people that made connections more meaningful and business more humane. He left behind books that still teach networkers how to build real relationships in a world that keeps trying to automate them away. He left behind tens of thousands of service members who heard him speak and felt better prepared to come home. He left behind a wife of nearly forty-two years and the city he had brought networking to in 1988.
“Networking is a place you come from, not a place you go to.”
I quote that line all the time. Usually I don’t credit Ron because I’ve internalized it as my own thinking. That’s its own kind of legacy. The ideas that travel furthest are the ones people forget where they got.
He believed in giving without remembering. He believed in becoming the most interested person in the room. He believed in social capital as the glue that holds families and communities together. He believed in introductions as small acts of building. He believed that the joy of interaction was the point.
He proved it by living it. Every minute we were on that interview, Ron was practicing what he taught.
Rest easy, Ron. Thank you for the introduction to Rhoda. For the eight magic words. For the giver’s philosophy. And for showing me what Net Being looks like when a human practices it consistently for seventy-two years. The world has fewer people like you in it now. We’re paying attention to the gap.
Books by Ron Sukenick
“I love this concept of networking. That’s what’s so great about networking. I get to access people. I get to meet more and more people. It’s all about the joy of interaction. It’s fun.”
- Networking Your Way to Success (2004)
- The Power is in the Connection: Taking Your Personal and Professional Relationships to the Next Level
- Masters of Networking (contributing author, New York Times bestseller)
- 21 Days to Success Through Networking: The Life and Times of Gnik Rowten (with Ken Williams)
- 21 Days to Success with LinkedIn: Business Social Networking the Gnik Rowten Way (with Ken Williams)
- 21 Days to Success Through Networking: The Life and Times of Gnik Rowten, Information Today, Inc.
Frequently Asked Questions About Ron Sukenick
Share Your Ron Story
If Ron Sukenick was your friend, your mentor, your speaker, your coach, your connection, or your introduction to someone who mattered, I would love to hear about it.
Leave a comment below or reach out to me directly. Share a memory, a quote, a moment when he made you feel seen. Because Ron believed the story was always in the connection. And his story keeps going every time someone repeats one of his lines without remembering where it came from.
