Who's Got Your Back: The Breakthrough Program to Build Deep, Trusting Relationships That Create Success--and Won't Let You Fail [Hardcover]

Keith Ferrazzi (Author)

Book Description

Release date: May 19, 2009

Disregard the myth of the lone professional “superman” and the rest of our culture’s go-it alone mentality. The real path to success in your work and in your life is through creating an inner circle of “lifeline relationships” – deep, close relationships with a few key trusted individuals who will offer the encouragement, feedback, and generous mutual support every one of us needs to reach our full potential. Whether your dream is to lead a company, be a top producer in your field, overcome the self-destructive habits that hold you back, lose weight or make a difference in the larger world, Who’s Got Your Back will give you the roadmap you’ve been looking for to achieve the success you deserve.

Keith Ferrazzi, the internationally renowned thought leader, consultant, and bestselling author of Never Eat Alone, shows us that becoming a winner in any field of endeavor requires a trusted team of advisors who can offer guidance and help to hold us accountable to achieving our goals. It is the reason PH.D candidates have advisor teams, top executives have boards, world class athletes have fitness coaches, and presidents have cabinets.

In this step-by-step guide to the powerful principles behind personal growth and change, you’ll learn how to:

· Master the mindsets that will help you to build deeper, more trusting “lifeline relationships”

· Overcome the career-crippling habits that hold you back, once and for all

· Get further, faster by setting goals in a dramatically more powerful way

· Use “sparring” as a productive tool to make the decisions that will fuel personal success

· Replace the yes men in your life with those who get it and care – and will hold you accountable to achieving your goals

· Lower your guard and let others help!

None of us can do it alone. We need the perspective and advice of a trusted team. And in Who’s Got Your Back, Keith Ferrazzi shows us how to put our own “dream team” together.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Clayton Christensen is the world’s leading thinker on innovation and the New York Times bestselling author of The Innovator’s Dilemma, the only business book that Apple’s Steve Jobs said “deeply influenced” him. Most recently, he is the author of How Will You Measure Your Life?, an unconventional book of inspiration and wisdom for achieving a fulfilling life. Read his exclusive guest review of Dare, Dream, Do:

Every semester at Harvard Business School, on the last day of class I deliver a lecture, not on building and sustaining a successful enterprise, but rather on building and sustaining a happy life.

I often start with something like, “In just a few months you’ll graduate and embark on what to many, including your selves, will be prestigious, lucrative, high-profile careers. But if you want to also have happy lives, you need to know the purpose of your life. Take the time, even if it’s at midnight each night, to figure out what you are meant to do. Or in the words of my colleague Howard Gardner, learn to cultivate existential intelligence, or the ability to make meaning of life.”

One of my personal missions is to inspire others to discover their purpose in life. As such, what started as a lecture has now become a book I co-authored with James Allworth and Karen Dillon. While our book focuses on individuals across the board, Whitney Johnson’s book Dare, Dream, Do further drills down on the topic by thinking through the question of how do women build a happy life. Through powerful storytelling, she dares women to rethink their current fundamentals, to measure their life by the only yardstick that matters – what she specifically is meant to do, including the importance of teaching her children to dream. The book then moves to provide women with specific tools for identifying what it is they were meant to do, recognizing that creating a meaningful life emerges from answering the deepest questions about our life’s purpose.

It concludes with the injunction to simply begin. It may be frightening at first. There will be much that you can’t predict. But it is only in the doing, that you can ultimately build and sustain a happy life. For anyone who has pondered the question, “what should I do with my life,” for anyone who is seeking fresh inspiration, advice and tactics, I recommend Dare, Dream, Do. Whether your purpose is to circle the globe or draw your family circle, Dare, Dream, Do helps make that discovery possible.

Amazon.com Review

Amazon Exclusive: Dr. Mehmet Oz Reviews Who's Got Your Back

Mehmet C. Oz, MD, is the author (with Michael F. Roizen) of such New York Times bestselling books as YOU: The Owner's Manual, YOU: Staying Young, YOU: Being Beautiful, and YOU: On a Diet, and the health expert of The Oprah Winfrey Show. He is professor and vice-chairman of surgery at New York Presbyterian Columbia University and the medical director of the Integrated Medicine Center and the director of the Heart Institute. Read his exclusive Amazon guest review of Who's Got Your Back:

So many of us are caught in a constant tug-of-war between work and wellness. Keith Ferrazzi’s Who’s Got Your Back offers a strategy to execute on your most ambitious plans without costing your happiness, well-being, or sanity--in fact his program promises to enhance them by building deeper, more supportive relationships. Ferrazzi offers a nine-step approach to building what he calls “lifeline relationships,” an inner circle of deep, trusting peer support partners who serve as advisors, cheerleaders, and accountability watchdogs. These are more than colleagues, more than friends--they are true, caring comrades in arms who respect you enough to tell you like it is. The gem of this program is that Keith pays attention to the mechanisms that have been proven to make change stick--a striking difference between most self-help programs and Ferrazzi’s signature “let others help.” What’s more, with Who’s Got Your Back you’ll create relationships that are meaningful well beyond your shared success--a rare and welcome gift in the world of professional development.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: Crown Business; 1 edition (May 19, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385521332
• ISBN-13: 978-0385521338
• Product Dimensions: 6.4 x 1.2 x 9.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (112 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #18,145 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #16 in Books > Business & Investing > Business Life > Motivation & Self-Improvement

More About the Author

KEITH FERRAZZI is founder and CEO of Ferrazzi Greenlight. He recently served as CEO of YaYa media, an interactive company. Before joining YaYa, he was chief marketing officer for Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide, and CMO at Deloitte Consulting, where he was the the youngest partner in their history. Named one of the "40 Under 40" busines leaders by Crain's Business, Ferrazzi is a frequent writer and commentator for The Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, Inc., CNN, and CNBC. He lives in Los Angeles. TAHL RAZ is a former reporter at Inc. magazine.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

58 of 61 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Not as good as Never Eat Alone June 20, 2009

By Thomas J. Bates

Format:Hardcover

This book was o.k. and all in all worth reading. However to me, the good concept could have probably been conveyed fully in twenty pages or so. The concept is to form a personal board of directors/advisors, not necessarily family or friends but people you can trust to give you good and honest advice and direction, and that this group can change over time. Not an exactly new concept but a good one. The previous book, Never Eat Alone, had a similarly basic concept--the value of networking--but for me, the elaboration, illustrations and anecdotes in that book were more valuable.

41 of 45 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Back Support June 12, 2009

By M. Josephson

Format:Hardcover

I usually hate this kind of book. By page 20, the blinding insight is delivered and then the next 200 pages just repeat it. Not here. Keith draws you in quickly but then keeps deepening his points. By page 205, I was more absorbed than I was at page 20. (The profiles of various types of people whose personal glass ceilings get in their way (section 3) was priceless. I re-read it three times, then tried fitting everyone I know into one or more of them.)

Keith uses an interesting device to keep the reader engaged: he makes you complicit in his own mentoring or "lifeline" process, as he calls it. Far from lecturing, he is often, and very appealingly, an imperfect student of his own insights. Severals times I found myself saying "Keith, you are doing it again...". Just as his treasured lifeline people must do. This quirk really makes his point and lets the reader immediately relate to the value of what he suggests.

I read this book at an interesting time: finding myself at a personal plateau with no obvious mentors and, as well, being asked to mentor someone whom I had no clue how to help. This book was very provocative for me on both fronts.

44 of 50 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars We all have a dream ... we all need a dream team! May 19, 2009

By Tami Conner

Format:Hardcover

Why you should read this book:

1) The Four Mindsets: Intimacy, Generosity, Vulnerability, Candor
This follows up on the mindsets Ferrazzi explored in his first book, Never Eat Alone. Building relationships, and repairing relationships, using these mindsets will greatly enhance and fuel all types of relationships, and increase your chances of maintaining strong, successful alliances. These four mindsets are core to building trust.

2) Building a Dream Team: We all have dreams, and we need strong relationships to help us realize those dreams. Once we've accepted that conducting our relationships through the lens of the four mindsets contributes to our success, building a dream team to help us fuel our success is the next logical step. Ferrazzi outlines nine steps to building a dream team. Not sure if the steps work or not, since Ferrazzi doesn't present hardcore evidence that actual, real live individuals have used these steps successfully, but Ferrazzi's nine steps includes many practical and tactical ideas that logically should work, and seem worth trying.

3) Holding Each Member Accountable: Without accountability in the group and among individuals, teams become lazy, complacent, loose focus, and derail. Ferrazzi does a nice job of explaining safe ways to implement accountability measures into your organizational, or dream, teams.

What I Didn't Like About This Book:

As was the standard in Never Eat Alone, Ferrazzi does lots of name dropping. In Who's Got Your Back, my eyes again glassed over with all the name-dropping. Ferrazzi's message would have been much stronger and clearer without all the lip service.

23 of 28 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Valuable Concepts May 23, 2009

By Jake Klinger

Format:Hardcover

The concepts of team, accountability and having the powerful wind of strong relationships behind your back are definitely essential. Why I gave this a three was all of the name dropping, which makes Ferrazzi come off as insecure in his own skin. It's as though he's constantly trying to prove his self worth which for me takes away from his credibility on this particular subject. Also I would like to see some unique research that backs up these concepts to give them more potency rather than just being based on the author's own ideas. Nonetheless it's good common sense if you can get over the constant "aren't I important" name dropping --- it goes against many themes presented in the book.

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Twice as long as it needs to be.... August 5, 2009

By Harold Goldner

Format:Hardcover

Following on the heels of the spectacularly successful and useful "Never Eat Alone," Keith Ferrazzi has put out what he has called during his tour "the book I should have written first."

Maybe it is, maybe it isn't, but the editorial finesse of Tal Raz is missing, and, frankly, if I hear one more story about his other-side-of-the-tracks working class background in Latrobe I think I just might scream. Get over yourself, Keith. You've made it. Move on and let's get some business done.

The concept, however, is good, and well executed, even if in too many words. Some of the fundamental approaches to assembling a 'personal board of directors' have been discussed elsewhere and better, but Ferrazzi does pull together several of these varying approaches.

The additional workbooks available on Ferrazzi's web site make the ideas come alive, and the properly motivated reader can get right to work implementing the ideas.

But the middle third of the book is dreadfully slow and tedious, and it is nowhere near the breezy read "Never Eat Alone" is.