Incredible Networking: Collect names, emails of all folks you meet. Be very careful about who your friends and keep in touch – after all you become the average of the five people you spend your time with. Call them up – Its incredible what people will tell you over the phone. (This is something, I have always fallen short – I can hardly get beyond emails).
Carry Chessick, the founder and last CEO of restaurant.com once told me after his lecture session at UIC, that networking as it is perceived is worthless. When you meet people, make sure you finish off by saying “If I can be of any help to you, please do not hesitate to get in touch”. That’s the only way that business card will actually fetch you some benefit. I met a sales guy from SalesForce.com, some time back at Chicago Urban Geeks drink … who sent out a mail immediately after the introduction from his phone with a one line saying who he was, where we met, and that he’ll keep an eye on tech internship notices for me. Brilliant.
360-s: If you want to find information about some company, of course you Google. So lets say if you are gathering info about Google, you’ll also want to talk to their competitors Yahoo, Bing … and find what they are thinking. Then you triangulate all that information to get in a good position.
Coaching: Make sure there is some one will consistently give you advice on what’s going on in your workplace.
Mentoring: Having a very trusted person outside your work who can give advice is invaluable.
Time buddy: How do you make sure that you are doing good time management? Get a time buddy, compare your calendars on how you are spending time. Bill Gates does this Steve Balmer.
Another interesting practice I’ve read sometime back on Hackernews is communicating with team members in two short at regular intervals:
(1) What I did last week/day:
(2) What I’ll do next week/day:
As my dear friend Guru Devanla(https://github.com/gdevanla) would put it “Its all about setting expectations … and meeting them”!