Finally, cutting across everything, let’s not neglect to connect people we know who don’t know each other yet but might be better off if they did. That is the first step towards doing a little superconnecting ourselves.
Weak links are so interesting and useful because they are predictably full of surprises. They’re our outreach to distant planets. They supplement our world and put it into context. They enlarge our empathy and humanity, and our ability to enjoy the infinite variety of people and the stories they have to tell. Yet weak links are not the only reason why people enjoy remarkable lives.
The other half of the story concerns hubs–the groups we join. They are wonderful and dangerous things.
CHAPTER EIGHT
HUB TO HUB
How to choose hubs, and when to move from hub to hub
It’s not a corporate ladder; it’s a corporate trapeze. You jump from one swinging trapeze to another. If you’re lucky, you catch the new trapeze as it’s about to go up, and then swing to an even higher one.
Jim Lawrence, chief financial officer, Unilever
London, England, 1983
My life was transformed by the six years I spent in LEK, after resigning as a partner of Bain & Company. In that time, LEK went from three professional consultants to a team of 350, opened new offices around the world, and doubled its size every year.
Anyone who has started a new venture will be familiar with the buzz it provides, particularly when the firm grows very fast and things mainly go your way. I was able to pick some incredibly talented young people and watch them develop in the new company. I learned a lot about myself, too–what I did well and what I did badly. I used LEK to test some theories about business, particularly the idea that most firms do far too much and can multiply profits by halving sales. By bringing in extraordinarily gifted raw talent, then honing it, I felt that I was helping to build a great firm. When I left in 1989, I was able to look back with pride at something unique and self-sustaining.
That, I thought, was that–a compelling chapter of my life closed. To my great surprise, though, LEK has proved most beneficial to me since I left. This first manifested itself in my social life, as four people from LEK became very close friends. But the business benefits kept on rolling, too. Over the years, people in the LEK network have brought me four great new business deals. Two of these have already been mentioned: the rescue of Filofax and the launch of Belgo. The third was to buy Plymouth Gin, a great name if you went back far enough, but at the time a defunct brand. The last was the online betting exchange Betfair. These four ventures have made my fortune; and two decades after I left LEK, the links made there are still working brilliantly for me.
In my experience, then, if you’ve been a key part of a fine hub, it will automatically help you later. You get two lives for the price of one: the one you’re living now; and the one you lived before, which continues to deliver significant emotional, social and economic dividends.
This sheds new light on effective networking. It’s not a frantic fight to connect superficially with anyone you happen to meet. The lesson I learned accidentally is to select a new hub and work creatively inside it, every few years, to make life even more fulfilling. Work networks in particular build cumulatively–each move creating a new network that we can use for our next upward leap. This inspires me. A career is a chain of events; each step can be the springboard for the next, whether business or social, because we know more people and are known by them.
My instinct seems to be supported by research. Mark Granovetter, the sociologist we met in Chapter Three, says, ‘Mobility appears to be self-generating: the more different social and work settings one moves through, the larger the reservoir of personal contacts…who may mediate further mobility.’55
All the accomplished people we interviewed recognise the value of previous hubs and have stories about how former hubs helped them. Jim Lawrence–my former partner, the ‘L’ in LEK–is well aware of how important LEK was for him after he left: ‘LEK gave me money, stature and reputation,’ he says, ‘as well as a network of great people that just keeps getting more and more valuable.’ Many interviewees refer to former hubs that they have used increasingly over time. But there is no universal pattern–some former hubs prove very useful, usually for social and business reasons, while others are no use at all. ‘It’s a funny thing,’ says Jim, ‘the hubs I’ve got most out of after leaving are also the hubs where I’ve been able to help a lot too. PepsiCo is a great example of that. I stay in touch with many former colleagues there, and try to put them in touch with other people in my network whenever I can. And the contacts from PepsiCo have proved enormously useful to me.’ This was echoed throughout our interviews–a hub will be most useful if you feel affinity with the people, make small efforts to stay in touch, and try to give something back, such as a deal, job or contact that might be interesting to a former colleague.
Our interviewees give many examples of how they had benefited from former hubs. One says that, in a general commercial career, hubs are even more valuable after we leave because we now have distance and perspective, which help us work out how to use our contacts more constructively. To do this, we have to keep moving in our career: ‘Infuse it with kinetic energy,’ he says.
Another notion is that success in a hub gives kudos and confidence in using that network later. For example, everyone I hired directly from university for LEK has benefited from their experience with the firm, and I have no hesitation in approaching any of them. Some are now in top jobs and very busy, but they always respond quickly.
There is also general agreement that the most successful hubs are the most useful for subsequent networking.
But not everyone concurs. A few point out that failure in a hub can contribute to future success through the productive use of the former network. ‘I think the most important thing in determining success’, says Chris Outram, the co-founder of OC & C Strategy Consultants, ‘is the willingness to take risks, to leave a hub even if it is well paid and go somewhere else.’ Chris and another interviewee both cite the Boston Consulting Group as one of their most valuable hubs after they left, although neither thrived there. ‘I learned a tremendous amount from my time at BCG,’ says Chris. ‘I met some amazing people and participated in some great work, but there were just some things that I was less strong at than other people. I learned that my strong points were conceptual strategic thinking, relationship building and connecting with people. There are four or five friends from BCG I’ve kept in touch with who have been terrific in terms of social and business contacts.’
Refreshingly, one interviewee says that we should not view leaving firms where we did not thrive as failure: ‘You keep going, you keep moving, until you find the place that fits you entirely.’ Another confides,
I worked for Virgin for a couple of years and I absolutely loathed it. My boss had poached me from another firm by offering me much more responsibility and a big salary hike. But my relationship with him was difficult and I felt miserable. I realised my mistake almost at once but I thought I’d better stick with it, to prove myself. I learned many things from the job–especially how
not
to treat people–but I wish I’d had the confidence to leave earlier. It’s interesting that I only see two people from my days there, which is much less than anywhere else I worked.