I buy the idea that avenues of opportunity come from people we don’t spend much time with, because they are outside our world. Whenever I see people I ask, ‘What’s happened to X?’–someone we both remember. Ms X is usually walking on a different planet. In a fixed network people become inbred, which is why it’s essential to have a jumbled and assorted network. If you wait until you have a reason to see someone before you contact them, you may never meet and you miss so much.
Does this seed-planting sound rather aimless, at odds with the advice we are constantly given to ‘focus’ our lives? It needn’t be.
Focused ends; random means.
Here’s my own story. As soon as I became a management consultant in my mid-twenties, I wanted to start my own firm, with one or two colleagues. It struck me that to shape and direct my own firm would be so much more fun, that it was the only way to stop being a wage slave and start gaining control. But I didn’t want to do it on my own (too lonely, too risky) and there were certain things, such as the day-to-day business of running a firm, at which I knew I’d be hopeless.
So I’d always wanted to do this, but never saw an opening.
Then it came, but in such an oblique, sideways manner that if I had not always been on the lookout, the chance would have slipped by.
After four years at BCG I jumped ship and joined what was then quite a small offshoot, Bain & Company. I moved to London and two of my colleagues there were Jim Lawrence–initially my boss–and Iain Evans, who was promoted to partner at the same time as me. I liked and admired Jim and Iain, but they were acquaintances rather than friends.
Then, in my third year at Bain, something strange happened. It was a Saturday morning and I was calling another Bain colleague, Ian Fisher. We chatted about a case we were working on and then he suddenly blurted out, ‘Something bad is happening.’ I asked what he meant, but he was cagey–he’d witnessed something in Boston, but had been sworn to secrecy. However, he did admit, ‘It’s really bad, Richard.’ Putting two and two together and making fifteen, I asked, ‘Is it to do with Jim and Iain?’ He wouldn’t say, but he didn’t need to.
As soon as the conversation finished, I tried to call Iain and Jim. Both phones were engaged for ages. Were they off the hook? Were they in cahoots? Had they resigned to start their own firm? If so, could I get in on the action?
I cycled from my house in Bayswater to Iain’s riverside pad at Kew. I found them together, shocked and bedraggled. They’d flown from London to Boston to offer their resignations in person to Bill Bain, expecting him to appreciate the gesture. He’d responded by calling in a federal marshal to slap an injunction on them, stopping them setting up in competition or taking clients.
I said I’d like to join them–if they ever got started. They were impressed that anyone would want to throw in their lot with them in their darkest hour. Within a few months, we had co-founded Lawrence, Evans & Koch, which became LEK.
Opportunity’s knock is often muffled. It may come, as it did for me, from weak links and faint signals when you least expect them.
Your skill at cultivating and using weak links will be reflected in how open and varied your networks are. A simple way to assess this is to count the total number of social or business meetings–even quick cups of coffee or drinks–you have had over the last few months with friendly acquaintances you don’t see very often, or new ones. And can you think of the people with whom you last discussed something significant in your life–a big decision, a favour needed or given, a plan or project not directly related to your work? Are these people very different from you and from each other by age, sex, ethnicity, religion, social, educational and occupational group, political views, workplace and hobbies? Tellingly, if they are a diverse crowd who don’t know each other, the chances are your network is open and assorted. If they all know each other and are similar, or if you discuss important things only with your close friends, your network is closed and introverted, so it might be hard for fresh information to seep in.
Failing this test can be a good thing. The more we fall short of a big, open, varied network of weak links, the greater the opportunity.
In listing our weak links, we shouldn’t forget people from our past. The past, it is said, is a foreign country. Maybe, but it’s also eerily familiar and easy to revisit. Most of us have huge latent networks that can be reactivated easily.
I met Paul Judge through the Wharton alumni network. He’s one of the most superconnected people I know, and has achieved a tremendous amount in business, financial circles, politics and education. An Englishman, in 1973 he left Wharton and returned to the UK. Later, he was knighted for his creation of the Judge Business School, which is housed in a fabulous new building in Cambridge. Paul has more weak links than anyone else I know–he is always getting on or off a plane to some remote part of the world for a meeting, and he never seems to be visiting the same people.
For Paul, connecting is driven by social urges, by his fascination with meeting people, and sometimes by reliving good times from the past:
For instance, recently when I was moving I found my work phone directory from 1976. And I thought, Gosh, I remember all these people! I got two of the secretaries to contact all the other people and we had a big party. Everyone was thrilled. It was twenty-five years on, yet everyone knew everyone else instantly, just like with school friends. I think that is why old contacts are such great weak links. You can resume your old relationships with no cost, it’s easy to do. You
know
them and can immediately have a deep conversation if you want. But I think it’s important to be spontaneous and not to look for any benefit over and above the pleasure of seeing people. Serendipity happens, but it happens when you’re not expecting it, and you certainly can’t bend it to your will.
The main way we can build and maintain a large repertoire of excellent weak links is to keep a broad circle of friendly acquaintances and to be open to new people or worlds while continually thinking–at a patient, submerged level–how they might be relevant to our aspirations. Some people–Richard Branson, for example–always carry a ‘day book’, an A4 bound notebook, to jot down conversations, ideas and the contact details of anyone they meet who could prove useful in the future.53
Besides openness and serendipity, we see three other tactics–much less important, but worth a quick mention. One is to target a new world deliberately and immerse ourselves in it. We add a new social context to our life–by taking up golf, joining a cycling club, doing yoga, getting a new job or doing volunteer work. Clearly we can’t do this all the time, so one new activity a year might be a sensible target.
We can also position ourselves in a variety of places where there is plenty of opportunity for random contact with strangers or acquaintances–read or just watch the world go by on a park bench; walk the dog in a popular locale; patronise a specific coffee shop, with or without a laptop; become a regular at a club, bar, restaurant, bookstore, market or other spot where people congregate. People have been socialising in particular places for millennia, but it was only in 1999 that Ray Oldenburg coined the phrase ‘the third place’ (after home and work) to describe locations where we habitually relax.54 Regular visits to familiar third places, and irregular forays to new ones, are good ways to renew or forge weak links.
The third way is ad hoc, in response to a pressing need. If you desperately want to change jobs, for instance, you would use all your existing contacts, revive the old ones, and create new ones, such as friends of friends who may have some connection to your target position. (Online social networks can come in handy here. They can reveal chains of contacts and a path to the desired introduction that you’d never discover otherwise.)