However, after earning an MBA from Harvard, the early part of Adrian’s career was not so smooth. ‘I was clear that I wanted to get a job in industry and become a chief executive eventually,’ he confided over breakfast in Luxembourg.
When I left Harvard I tried to find a job in high tech in England, which in those days meant principally Plessey and GEC. But they were staggeringly uninterested in MBAs, even those like me with a technical background. I never wanted to become a consultant–I like to do things, not advise–but I had to join a consulting firm as a fallback. I told myself that I would stick at the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) for three years maximum and then move into industry.
But that plan failed. Adrian spent eight years of his life at BCG, and though he did well and became a vice-president, he wasn’t happy. ‘The last two years were particularly hard. I had no ladder left to climb, I didn’t feel I was contributing much; it was a thoroughly miserable period.’ Eventually, though, Adrian was approached by venture capitalist Ronald Cohen, who ran a very small fund, Apax, in London. Ronald got in touch after talking to a former acquaintance of Adrian, John Baker, who had been one of eighty people in the same section of Harvard Business School, but not one of his closer friends.
Joining Apax was not obvious at the time. They only managed ten million pounds, and they would pay me only a third of what I made at BCG. Would I enjoy working in a three-person start-up? They courted me for ages and eventually, with many misgivings, I said ‘yes’, because I wanted out of BCG.
Well, I realised that I would have to find my own deals. I had no idea how to do that. But that is where two weak links came from left field. I belonged to a cricket club in Cropedy, north of Oxford. A chap there I didn’t know well introduced me to a friend of his who owned and ran a chain of small record shops. This became my first deal. Six months later we sold the chain on to W. H. Smith, a big UK chain, for three and a half times what we’d paid.
That helped to establish my confidence and reputation in my new job. My second deal was Computacenter, a chain of stores selling computers, which was run by Phil Hulme. [Phil had been one of the bosses at BCG.] But I didn’t get the deal from Phil. Instead, I bumped into John Burgess, whom I knew had left BCG before you and I joined. John mentioned the deal to me, so I called up Phil and we did the deal. We put in £10 million over a period of time and got out £270 million.
Of course, weak links operate well beyond the business world, and in personal lives as well as careers. Whenever we talk to anyone, however casually, about networks and weak links, we find almost everyone has a story to tell of how the course of their life pivoted on an accidental contact.
Hampstead, England, 1990s
Alice Wallace was an artist holding a private view in a Hampstead gallery. She invited Petra, someone she’d met only in passing,
very much on the off-chance she’d buy one of my water-colours of the area. Anyway, she brought along Ann, a friend of hers but a complete stranger to me. Both of them were very much the type to drop into a private view every weekend.
Neither of them bought a painting, but I got talking to Ann and she told me it was her fortieth that day and invited me to her bash that night. Ann, looking stunning at her party, had invited Dave, a jazz pianist, a brilliant accompanist who made every girl sound like Ella Fitzgerald. There was no shortage of women who wanted to sing with him, at the very least.
Meanwhile, I’d always wanted to sing jazz and blues, but never had in public. Since childhood I’d played piano for my mother, who had a beautiful voice and had sung jazz standards on Karachi Radio for many years. Somehow, twenty years of frustration at being in her shadow reached fever pitch, and I did something completely out of character. Fighting off the other women who were squeezing up to Dave, I grabbed the microphone. I chose ‘Organ Grinder’, a raunchy blues song from the 1920s which was not too well known but with which any pianist could shine. It finishes rather provocatively, and I milked it:
Your sweet music seems to ease my mind,
Well, it’s not just your organ–it’s the way that you grind!
A few notes were all it took to seal a completely unexpected musical and romantic partnership. For the next five years, Dave played and I sang in basement jazz clubs and chichi restaurants all over London, and we had a ball. I discovered a great new career as a singer and later as a song composer. None of that would have happened if I hadn’t spoken to someone I didn’t know earlier that day, who was a friend of another person I barely knew.
Cape Town, South Africa, 1995–2007
At the end of a recent tennis lesson my coach, Stan Hasa, originally from the Czech Republic, asked me what I was doing at the moment. I said I was writing a book, and quickly explained about weak links. He got the idea right away and told me about two important events in his life:
When my wife and I arrived in Cape Town from Germany in 1995, we stayed in a guest house owned by a gay couple and we remained in brief contact after we moved out. I was not sure what work to do in South Africa and was looking around. Four months later, I hadn’t found anything that interested me, money was running out, and I was a bit down about it. Then, out of the blue, one of the guest-house owners called to say that the Health and Racquet Club in Green Point, where he did his gym, was looking for a tennis coach. I had been a semi-professional tennis player but never a coach, and I hadn’t even thought of that. So it was actually that gentleman who figured it out for me and made the connection.
After an interview I got the position, and remained coach there for twelve wonderful years. I gained a number of great friends while I was there, and was able to bring together quite a few other people who hadn’t known each other before, who became close friends of each other. You might say it was all pure luck, but I think at some level I was really looking for that kind of job, not just to teach tennis, but to connect people I met on the court. Certainly I was very happy doing it.
There is a flea market in Hout Bay, where we used to buy honey from a beekeeper. One day in 2007, he told me about an international yogi master giving a blessing in Cape Town. I had become interested in spiritual issues and decided to go along and it really clicked with me. I didn’t think too much about it, though, and not long after we decided to return to Germany, mainly because of the girls’ education. But then I discovered that the yogi has a spiritual centre less than two hours from where we are living. I now make regular visits to the centre and am learning from him.
I do not believe in accidents or coincidences. I think that we will receive in life what we are looking for, even though we may not know exactly what that is. The world is a giant radar machine and what we are radiating will not go unanswered. Our needs vibrate in a universe where everything is interconnected and related. Most of this help comes from people we don’t know well, as long as we are open to receiving help from them, and as long as we give other people the help they really need. That may sound a bit far-fetched, but it’s what’s happened in my life so far.
Cambridge, England, 1970s
Colin Smith is a highly respected artist. One great accolade in his career was when London’s Tate Gallery decided to purchase two of his large works for its permanent collection. (It is highly unusual for the Tate to buy more than one work from a living artist.) Colin’s leap forward came about through a couple of weak links, one of whom he had never met but who had known of Colin more than thirty years previously:
About ten years ago, I ran into an ex-tutor of mine, someone I hadn’t seen for ages. He said he’d just found out, quite by chance, that twenty years ago [as it was then] I had nearly been given a prestigious art residency at a Cambridge college. I had been considered for this award without knowing anything about it. Anyway, the director making the decision had eventually decided that, though he thought highly of my work, I was too young. At first I was just bemused, but then I thought, Why not get in touch with the director now, wherever he was? I asked around and through another acquaintance I found out that the former director now worked at the Tate Gallery. I was filling in an application for a grant at the time and it required two referees, so I sent it to the man at the Tate and asked if he would mind vouching for me. He agreed, but then asked if he could visit me at my studio in Hackney. He and another curator turned up and that led to the Tate buying my work.