Your Next Hire: Chief Serendipitist

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Let me tell you about Greg.

Officially, Greg is a salesman. He works for a computer company, securing significant corporate contracts for data centers. He is very good at this job.

Unofficially, though, the value Greg brings is not his ability to talk features and benefits. It is his ability to serendipitize.

When you go out with Greg, magic happens. He goes to get another round of drinks -- and finds a new customer. He heads to the bathroom -- and comes back with sponsorship for your charity event. A few years ago, a group of us got a t- shirt as a gift for a friend with cancer; Greg happened to have it with him when he bumped into the All Blacks (the New Zealand national rugby team) in a hotel lobby and got them all to sign it.

Greg does all of this spontaneously, irrepressibly. You can’t stop him spotting opportunities any more than you can stop him breathing. It’s not about his KPIs or the bottom line, although these are definitely important to him. It’s about the delight he gets from making connections, about how useful he feels when he can bring people together and know that everyone is better off because of it.

To be effective, Greg needs a reasonably free rein. He needs to have his head, to be able to say, “What? A random pro-am golf tournament? Sure, I’m in.”

Fortunately, he works with people who understand this, who realize that – Greg being Greg -- far from having a blow-off waste of an afternoon, he'll more likely than not end up getting partnered with the former professional golfer-turned-tech company CEO who happens to be looking for a new data center.

His luck also relies heavily on randomness; these opportunities arise precisely because Greg does not have a routine. If you always travel the same path, the only opportunities that show up are the ones that come to you. But by consistently straying from the well-trodden path, Greg regularly stumbles upon situations overflowing with fortuitous coincidence. He engineers these occurrences, inasmuch as they can be engineered. He is a serendipitist.

I suppose in the Venn diagram of “jobs that people understand” and “jobs that generate unpredictable value,” there’s a reasonable overlap between salesperson and serendipitist. But there’s no rule that says the function has to be performed by a salesperson, and there are lots of opportunities beyond closing deals.

A visionary organization understands the delicate balance between planned execution and openness to the unknown. Survival and growth call for periods of stability and jolts of transformation, predictable progress and quantum leaps that require two different approaches and are both essential to the long-term viability and vibrancy of a company.

If you have one of these people in your midst, acknowledge him. Celebrate her. Articulate the role. Your Chief Serendipitist could well be the source of your company’s next transformative leap. And, sooner or later, you’ll need one.

Have you had the pleasure of working with a Serendipitist?

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4 comments on "Your Next Hire: Chief Serendipitist".

1. Richard Reisman from Teleshuttle Corporation
   

   commented on: August 24, 2012 at 3:29 p.m.
   Nice concept, well put. Very parallel to something we need in our information networks -- a way to selectively pierce the "filter bubble" to be exposed to ideas we did not know we needed to know about, but that resonate when we see them. This is especially timely with regard to seeing reasoned counter-positions to positions we hold, in this age of increasingly blind polarization.
2. Steve Shimek from Independent
   

   commented on: August 24, 2012 at 3:47 p.m.
   Yes!! Thanks for writing this. This is what I do for a living, and I love it. The freedom and the people that I meet make it all worthwhile.
3. Paula Lynn from Who Else Unlimited
   

   commented on: August 24, 2012 at 8:32 p.m.
   Great story. Greg is right. It was fun and the more one can do this, the more fun it is (was).
4. Ted Rubin from Collective Bias / The Rubin Organization
   

   commented on: August 25, 2012 at 5:05 p.m.
   Love this post Kaila. So many orgs do not recognize this value and the fact that it can be present in may employees at once. So important to empower these people. I am fortunate to be working with a company Founder, John Andrews, who totally gets this and allows me the freedom to bring value to Collective Bias in much the same way.

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