[shenoyroopesh]

I think one important step is to genuinely care about people and what's happening in their lives and being in interested in just knowing them, whether or not they are useful to you immediately.

Most good networkers I've seen are very much interested in people, whether or not they can be useful to them. They will speak to everyone in the social hierarchy, and remember important details about their lives. While this may not be "necessary" to gain some advantage from networking, I don't think you can do this long-term without just deriving pleasure out of just getting to know other human beings and learning from their experiences.

[GFischer]

I agree that "good" (as in, succesful) networkers speak to everyone and remember little details about everyone.

However, the best networker I know (we call him "el trepador", that would be "the climber") spends a disproportionate amount of time on his superiors.

It's incredible the amount of time he spends networking or at social events, when he was at the company I work for he learned the President's and CEOs favourite sports and activities, organized an in-company tournament of the President's favourite sport, played golf with the CEO, played football (soccer) with his coworkers, organized outings, invited other CxOs to barbecues at his house.. he hardly had a night to himself. He also kept track of everyone he met at any kind of event.

He was hired as a programmer, but he managed to avoid any kind of task that involved working in the backend and always maneuvered to work in client-facing or high profile tasks, his favourite trick was building a fancy (but simple) web interface on top of complicated backends (and getting designer time, which was key), which usually resulted on his getting most of the credit.

He's now a CEO (at another company in the group of companies which he's buddies with the president), and he has no university degree and didn't spend any time studying - at the same time he was doing all that stuff, I was working towards an MBA and spent about as much time after work as he did, his time investment definitely paid off a lot better.

[anon4]

It's a bit sad how you often have to choose between actually making useful things and being paid a lot of money.

I'd call him a douche, but this is a clear case of don't hate the player, hate the game.

[GFischer]

He pretty much played by the rulebook outlined by this article:

- " Be flagrant in your pursuit of the powerful and the soon-to-be-powerful, and when you have their attention, praise them to the skies"

- " Discover similar interests or experiences." he did that

- "you need to work hard at networking" he did that, he put an incredible amount of effort at networking after hours, managing events, organizing dinners and barbecues, etc...

He was a bit of a douche, mostly by shirking low-visibility projects and getting disproportionate amounts of credit - he didn't shirk "hard" projects per se, but he'd only take them if they were very high visibility, and he'd priorize small but visible over obscure but necessary work.

He was also very good at getting credit without being obvious about getting other people's credit.

However, he did put in the hours, and he is a very good motivator and very charismatic. He was just very good at playing the game.

[jeffreyrogers]

It doesn't sound like he's not doing anything useful. In fact, it sounds like he has a strong idea of how business works. Lots of people can do the job (unless you're doing something super technical), the person who gets the job and the credit for it is usually the one who gets along best with the people in charge. Its not about a flaw in the system, it's about acknowledging how the world works and acting accordingly.

[golergka]

Why hate for the game? The dude sounds like he's really good at what's he doing, and I think that the company that he leads will profit a lot from his skills. Would be a shame to keep a person like that in engineer position.

[GFischer]

Indeed, I thought he was going to make an excellent presales consultant or sales guy, he was wasted at a "junior programmer" position. He vastly exceeded my expectations.

That kind of skills are pretty good for a CEO, I'll give you that.

But I've seen another CEO at work with the same general style (oodles of charisma, very strong networker, no studies or technical background) and he really messes up technical and financial decisions, he basically has to blindly believe whatever his CFO or CIO say (and the CIO messed up pretty often, the CFO seems pretty solid OTOH).

An actual example: he spent an entire meeting speaking about returns on "bonuses", buying "bonuses", etc.. when he meant "bonds" (he was blindly parroting what the CFO told him, only he messed up).

[gress]

The skills he has are all about receiving a disproportionate amount of credit for work accomplished by a team. How will the company profit from this?

[MrDom]

A programmer in a management or CEO role could make the lives of every programmer underneath him better. After all, he actually knows how to make software. By extension, he knows what's possible and what's not, what's reasonable schedule-wise and what's not. Most managers/CEOs don't.

[gress]

Does he? It sounds like he avoided responsibility for anything that might have carried risk, and only picked easy wins with good visibility in order to make himself look good.

[amelius]

> I'd call him a douche, but this is a clear case of don't hate the player, hate the game.

In other words: put too much effort in networking, and hate yourself for being a douche. Put too little effort in networking and hate yourself for missing out on opportunities.

Like most things in life, it's about finding a balance that works for you.

[MDCore]

> a fancy (but simple) web interface on top of complicated backends

That, at least, seems valuable to me. Turning the complicated into the simple is a valuable skill.

[amelius]

Note that he used "designer time" for this.

[GFischer]

He was REALLY good at getting management signoff for expenses and subcontrating... that is an incredibly valuable skill to have, to be sure, but it sucks if it's one-sided (other projects had such requests denied).

He personally did very little programming or designing himself (I guess that does make him a good manager :) )

[serve_yay]

I agree, and this is why I don't do very much of it. It's pretty exhausting to keep up a charade of caring about people in order to come by opportunities so it's better if you really care about them. I don't really know how people do that part, though.

[shenoyroopesh]

It's easy actually - once you realise that everyone new you meet has an interesting story, and that you can learn something new from pretty much everyone, you automatically start caring about them. Humbling experience actually - even the people that others sometimes term as "unambitious" or "not-very-productive" have their own priorities in life and can give you a unique perspective about things.

[claypoolb]

Authentic leaders are the most successful networkers - there is no effort in their ability to connect, genuinely, with others.

A great example of this is this type of leader is Ron Conway - actually, great article from yesterday "The Ronco Principle" by PG.

One thought this article does not contemplate is the impact of people who are not self-aware. There are many people I have met who truly believe they are great networkers, but they lack the leadership trait of authenticity.. be afraid, very afraid.