If in doubt, leave.
When someone moves from one hub to another, they automatically create the possibility of new weak links–probably many–between their old hub and their new one. So job mobility–like social or geographical mobility–helps create more weak links of the most valuable kind: those that bridge previously unconnected groups. It is characteristic of an open and dynamic society–one inevitably thinks of the United States–that there is frequent mobility from hub to hub. Every time we move from one to another, we help sew together society.
Links from the past, where we’ve been deeply engaged, toiled side-by-side, shared formative experiences, endured hardship, suffered failure or enjoyed success, are bound to have a deeper quality than recently formed contacts. Whether it’s a hard season on an oil rig, an Internet start-up, the McKinsey analyst programme, or the crucible of the Special Air Services, intense shared experiences forge trust and bonds of personal loyalty. When you reach colleagues from the past–even after decades without any contact–the old collaborative responses snap back into action. There is automatic rapport; communication is rich and fluid. As many of our interviewees have attested, there is real joy in meeting a colleague from the distant past who now lives in another world, and experiencing again the trust and ease of a different time and place–with the added bonus of tapping into decades of their insights and ideas, one of which may provide the missing link in your life here and now. We saw in Chapter Seven how Paul Judge arranged a party for colleagues he’d known a quarter-century earlier, and how there was instant rapport. Three interviewees, all in their fifties, mentioned that they had recently started attending college reunions, having never gone before. ‘It’s a strange sensation,’ one said, ‘seeing someone you knew at eighteen. Apart from the fact that they look so much older, it’s just the same as back in 1968. You can talk about your life with absolute frankness.’
When we asked our interviewees to describe their history of hubs, and the moves they made in their careers, few sounded very logical. None marked smooth, linear, upward progress. Perhaps that’s not surprising. Imagine choosing your first set of university courses, or your first job. At that stage we don’t know what we don’t know; we can’t even say what we should know. Yet, our image of people who make it to the top–an image that is often reinforced by what they claim in interviews–is that they planned their careers perfectly from the get-go.
By contrast, the people who talked to us frankly acknowledged the role of trial and error–especially the latter–in their careers. They told us that the only way really to understand the world and one’s place in it is to sample different experiences; and this involved some casting about. Errors were unavoidable. We asked all the interviewees: ‘If you could have your time in hubs over again, would you do anything differently?’ No one invoked Edith Piaf. Everyone said they would change at least one thing.
Jim Lawrence says:
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. But then again, you might catch it on the way down or fall off altogether. What can you do? You can’t plan all that. You just have to experiment until you end up where you want to be. You remember when I went to work for that airline? It didn’t work out how I wanted, but the experience enabled me to become an outside director of another airline, which I greatly enjoy. And by becoming chief financial officer of the airline, it meant that I could be considered for any CFO job in the world, whereas that would never have happened otherwise. I thought at the time it was a disaster for me, but I moved on, and things have worked out just fine. Even when you make a mistake, you can turn it to your advantage.
Chris Outram advocates what he calls end-gaming:
The idea is to be specific about the type of hub you want to work in, say in ten years’ time, and what your role is in that hub. Then you can test your activities and hubs to see whether they are taking you from here to there. You may need two or three hub changes en route. If you keep the endgame in mind, you’ll know if it’s time to move on.
But Stephen Sherbourne doesn’t think planning is necessary:
I’d worked for Mrs Thatcher for four and a half years, and as you know I think five years is enough in any job, even one as fascinating as that. So I gave myself a target to leave by Easter 1988. I had no idea, no clue what to do. The first person I approached for advice was advertising guru Tim Bell–he wasn’t a friend, but had advised us during the 1987 election. ‘You know a lot of people,’ I said to him, ‘so tell me whom I should talk to, so I can decide what to do next.’ He told me he was setting up a new kind of agency, with people from different backgrounds–public relations, advertising, management, politics and media. To my great surprise, he offered me a job. I took it and it was fantastic. I have never, ever, thought about the next move. Yet as one thing has come to an end, something else has always opened up. So am I lucky? Yes. But on the other hand, if an acquaintance says, ‘Come and have a drink,’ I always say ‘yes’.
I was at university with Mary Saxe-Falstein–a glamorous mathematician, a combination I’d thought impossible before meeting her. She belongs in these pages because she has struck out on a remarkable series of different careers, creating new hubs as she goes:
Up to the age of thirty-six, I had a conventional career, mainly in marketing and advertising. I enjoyed my work and did well, but then I thought, It’s time for a new adventure. Somebody else could have done everything I’d done up to then. What could I do that nobody else could do in quite the same way? I decided to take a holiday with my boyfriend, who was a well-known artist, and hoped inspiration would strike.
One evening, relieved that Mike and I hadn’t argued all day, I told him that I’d always wanted to try sculpture. This wasn’t entirely true, but I had been toying with the idea. ‘I’ve never even seen you playing with stones on the beach,’ he said cynically, ‘so don’t bother, you won’t be any good at it.’ Back in London, his friends reinforced the message: ‘Let Mike be the artist, and you stick to marketing.’ Now, this was all the encouragement I needed to become a sculptress of bronze portrait busts. It was terribly thrilling and I loved doing it and my clients were delighted.
After five years, I wanted to try something new again, so I moved into portrait painting. I loved that too, and it led on to teaching art to the wives of some of my subjects. Then, in 2000, someone I’d known twenty years before started a pet-food company, and asked me to do all the market research and advertising ideas. There I was, right at the centre of a new venture that took off. Sometimes I worked nineteen-hour days but it was great–I did all the writing, I designed the packaging, and wrote the advertising scripts.
In 2005, he sold it to a French company and I wanted a new adventure, so I set up the Extraordinary Mind Company, working one-to-one with clients and applying techniques–hypnosis, coaching, relaxation–to develop the mind. Now I’m working on rejuvenation, turning back the clock on people’s faces and bodies. I present myself as a kind of cosmetic sculptor–I have a vision of how clients could look, how they could change the lines and muscles on their face, and how to re-program the mind to lock in the changes. I know it sounds outrageous, but it does actually work; the clients can’t believe how much younger they look and feel. For me, the most exciting thing is the zone of ideas, adapting and improving other people’s techniques and inventing my own. It is early days, but I believe we’ll create a new approach to rejuvenation.