Premier Brands altered my life completely. Afterwards I could choose how to spend my time. I got enormous satisfaction out of revisiting one of my earlier hubs, Cambridge University, and funding what became the Judge Business School there. But did Premier Brands transform
me
? That had already happened earlier, with Cambridge and in Kenya.
This suggests that new hubs can provide two different types of transformation.
First we may encounter an intense emotional experience–a group of people and a set of activities that leave us feeling different, in some sense better and with more potential than before. In recounting their experiences in transformational hubs, many respondents talked in quasi-evangelistic language. They experienced something quite novel. They hadn’t even known that such an experience was possible. They realised what they wanted to do. They knew that they could do it. All they needed was the opportunity to open up somewhere down the line. ‘I was transformed when doing my MBA at INSEAD,’ says Chris Outram. ‘It may sound a bit arrogant, but it’s true–I knew then that one day I might do something more ambitious–though I didn’t know then that it would involve setting up my own firm.’
The second type of transformation–the actual experience of breaking through to unusual accomplishment–is the realisation of something made possible earlier, when we were transformed. We use the skills we acquired earlier to create something unique and personal; we realise our vision. ‘It was nine years after INSEAD that I co-founded OC & C,’ says Chris, ‘but when it happened I was more confident and less risk averse than I would have been if I hadn’t met the people at INSEAD.’
My own experience bears this out. My initial transformational hubs–those that changed me–were the University of Oxford and the Boston Consulting Group. Oxford gave me the tools to analyse events and work out the few elements that were important in achieving results, whatever the arena. BCG showed me the power of ideas in business, and convinced me that if you had new ideas and could communicate them to clients, then running a profitable consulting firm was not hard. Even though I was not successful in my time at BCG, I had total confidence afterwards that, as part of a two-or three-person group, I could start a new consulting firm. I knew that was what I wanted to do when the right time came along.
If you think about it, hubs either are or are not intense experiences. Have you been ‘transformed’ already? Is your present hub transforming you? Might it? If not, should you move on?
It is not always necessary to move organisations in order to move hubs. A single firm or university may comprise many hubs. Quite often, prominent individuals and their protégés comprise a pulsating, potent hub, though you won’t find it on any organisation chart. When he was Warden of Wadham College, Oxford, Maurice Bowra, a rotund and witty don, made a habit of inviting half a dozen of the sharpest undergraduates round to his lodgings for uproarious intellectual sessions. I never made the cut, but the privileged few were well aware of their special status, and I am told that the friendships formed by being in Bowra’s clique often last a lifetime.
But you don’t need to be an eminent professor to form ad hoc hubs of this type. When he was quite junior at management consultants Booz Allen, Chris Outram created the grand-sounding Stafford Club:
I invited anyone I’d met at my level whom I thought was interesting and might be going anywhere. We got in a speaker and met two or three times a year. Typically I invited thirty-five people and twenty would turn up. It ran for five years and it sort of ‘came with me’ when we started OC & C. Over the years it has been a tremendous source of social and commercial contacts for me, even though I never intended that.
Personalisation makes the hub more intimate and more like a club–you choose the people to work with inside and outside the firm. Alex Johnstone says:
I’ve found that you always have much more freedom than is generally recognised, as long as you’re performing. Your set of work contacts is
your
hub and nobody else’s; you choose a particular mix of people and how you interact with them. It becomes your unique hub. Everyone can have a unique hub within the same firm. You can then add useful outsiders to your work network.
Older interviewees had typically made the transition from working in one hub at a time to working in many. None regretted it. ‘After Premier Brands was sold,’ says Paul Judge, ‘my career changed. Before that I had just one hub. Now, with one exception, my career at any point in time has been exclusively many-hub. It is more interesting. You can achieve more.’
We asked everyone when they felt that their career really took off. ‘Not until OC & C,’ says Chris Outram. We also asked the first time they felt they had become central to the hub. ‘OC & C again,’ says Chris. ‘It was the first time I felt I was contributing as much as I could.’ Nearly all our respondents gave similar answers–they became really successful only when they became central to a hub. It seems that being at the heart of a small organisation is more rewarding than being on the periphery of a much bigger one.
About half of our interviewees say their aim was to make serious money. Most achieved this, and in the same way–through starting a hub and owning a chunk of it. ‘If you are in business, you might as well be an owner,’ says one. ‘It’s more interesting than working in someone else’s firm and the upside is tens or hundreds of times greater.’
‘I have started three businesses from scratch and I’ve made all my money from them,’ says another. ‘But this really isn’t the most important thing. I’m most fulfilled when getting something going with a small team and no politics. You have to make it up as you go along. It’s challenging and it brings out the best in people–it forces you to be resourceful. When a firm gets too successful, it gets political…and boring.’
It’s telling that the typical route to material success for our entrepreneurs was through doing something they enjoyed or wanted to achieve, with colleagues they liked and chose. ‘Put together the people and ideas you most like,’ one advises. ‘The easiest way is to start a spin-off from an existing hub, doing something you know how to do but adding your own special magic.’
‘People should think laterally about hubs,’ says Robin Field.
You can experience more than one hub at a time, even if you only have one job. My boat is a great hub. Through sailing, I have established or re-established contact with several people who are now my close and valued friends. They wouldn’t be, but for sailing. It’s been useful for business and it’s an enormously important social hub, as well as being what I love doing. Strangely, I’ve had more opportunities come to me when on my boat than anywhere else. If you don’t like sailing, find another reason to invite friends–a reading party or weekend away perhaps?
Ray Hiscox, an old school chum of mine, makes a habit of assembling about a dozen friends for a day-long walk in the country, punctuated by lunch in a pub. ‘This is ideal for talking at length in a relaxed way,’ he says. ‘You just walk alongside the person or people you most want to speak to.’
Robin has one final idea: ‘My wife is French and she brings a whole new world of people into my life. Dominique has been hugely influential–nearly all my friends in France and many Chinese friends came from her. Extending your overseas network is a great way of breaking the circle that limits your contacts and information.’