When you get into business school or enter business, people keep telling you to build your network to get ahead.. Networks are terribly important but if all you do is focus on the transactional nature of network building (think amassing lots of Linkedin connections) you lose out on building deep relationships. You don't have to make every network connection a deep relationship but you do need a small number of exceptional relationships to get further in your career and personal life.
Carole Robin and David Bradford have taught Interpersonal Dynamics to Stanford GSB MBAs for decades. These highly-driven students call this the Touchy Feely course and consistently rate it a top course every year.
Bradford and Robin have put their learnings from teaching the course in this book Connect. It isn't a book you are supposed to read from cover to cover (although I did do that for the purpose of this review) just like their course is not designed to be taught lecture-style. Instead, the book and course requires a huge amount of emotional investment on your part. So at the end of each chapter you have to do some self-reflection and go out to apply what you learn in a relationship of your choosing. It is daunting but decades of Stanford GSB MBAs have found this tremendously useful.