Customer Reviews

The Secrets of Savvy Networking: How to Make the Best Connections for Business and Personal Success

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I just finished listening to this on my iPod yesterday, and feel more than a little ripped off. Why:
1) Ms RoAne has an incredibly annoying, high-pitched, Minnie Mouse voice. Reading it herself makes it a very unpleasant experience.
2) The book is not about networking. There's a lot about very basic etiquette -- stuff like, if you're out on a business lunch, don't order lobster, caviar and chamagne. Gee, thanks.
3) She's an incredibly bad writer. She loves cliches, and she skips from one superficial topic to the next. For instance, I was listening to the chapter on business lunches. The second it started, I thought to myself, "I'll bet this woman is going to use the phrase "break bread", which is an incredible cliche. I wonder how many seconds it will take until she does?" I started counting. It took six.
4) The book is way out of date. It hasn't been revised in a long, long time. She writes about "car phones" when I think she means cell phones -- perhaps they hadn't been invented when she wrote this. She writes at some length about the etiquette of using fax machines. I, and most people, rarely use one.
This book reeks of a fairly ham-handed attempt to make maximum money with minimum effort. Don't buy it.

This book has a lot of potential, but mostly fails to teach things you wouldn't have otherwise thought of yourself.
There are several useful suggestions scattered throughout the book, but no sustained sections of good quality writing. Every time I came upon something that I wanted to read more details about, the author skipped onto to some other self-evident tangent. Also the author uses a lot of examples from her public speaking life, which are generally uninteresting and not relevant to most people's business life.

Susan Roane touches several aspects of networking, many of which will add a new perspective of how you may or may not continue to operate in the business world. This book will make you cognizant of everything from business card etiquette to the importance of a mentor. Great introduction for a novice networker; super review for a pro.

This book was published over a decade ago, but I still seem to overhear all the buzzwords the author fandances with, as well as the underlying ideology of genderized success-mongering. It's not what you do or what mission you might have, if any (other than your own vaunting or subterranean ambition) but who you are as a function of who you know and can pretend to know. An old story, but always re-occurring in the dress of the era, now micro-era.
A terrible book, really, but I think the people for the whom the title has allure will actually like the thing. Even if it is "out of date".
I have to say, Ms. Roane seems to dislike cell (she calls them "portable") phones and seems inclined to admonish against the use, in excess anyway, of personal electronic devices generally. So the book definitely needs updating there. Only a real Luddite nobody (or is "Luddite" a male word?) wouldn't be maxing out their look with the most current diminutive beeping and ring-toning gadgets, and pitching them into the landfill within three months. You know how some books have "exercises" and quizzes and have-your-say chapters? Just pretend that Ms. Roane has invited you to observe how people are doin' it (electronically I mean) and to fill in those blanks for yourself. If you can't keep up, you'll never arrive in any network, other than the kind the spider weaves.