..Seek and One Shall Find

“It is seekers, then, who make prophets, and the initiative of any one of us in searching for and responding to the voice of contemporary prophets may mark the turning point in their growth and service_[1],” This passage resonated with me because it described the most dramtic turning point in my own career in November of 1995, when I literally searched for and found my prophet in Basel, Switzerland.

It had already been three years since I made a career transition by leaving Exxon Engineering and Research to join a pharmaceutical company. Ever since a traffic accident had seriously injured my parents I had been considering such a career change. And when I joined American Cyanamid in 1992, I was finally able to team up with others to help bring drugs to market sooner. But I, similar to most people, did not appreciate that drug discovery and development is a very time consuming and resource intensive process. Fortunately for me, however, I quickly realized that I was in a knowledge industry and that a more effective collaborative knowledge creation process may make a life or death difference for some patients and a quality of life difference for many others. I became a seeker for ways to improve the drug discovery to marketing cycle.

It was as a seeker when I joined the US branch of Sandoz in November of 1995 as a “groupware evangelist” and within one week one of my US system administrators came to me for permission to remove some applications. He complained that “some Swiss” had forced onto us some applications that took up server space and were not being used. I took one look at these applications, named the Knowledge MarketPlace_[2], and I saw the handiwork of a fellow seeker and evangelist.

Luckily this “Swiss” had included his name and telephone number, so I called him up and volunteered to help him spread the word. I mentioned that I would be visiting Basel in a few days to educate scientists about IT-assisted collaboration and to teach them how to use some collaboration tools that I had developed. He invited me for a short meeting and gave me directions to his office. His name was Dr. Joerg Staeheli.

Because this was my first trip to the Sandoz campus in Basel, Switzerland, I had to literally search for Joerg. And when I found him I was taken aback when I walked into his office. It was in an executive suite and Joerg turned out to be the Technology VP for Sandoz Research. In subsequent years, always informally but connectively, working in different business units and at different hierarchical levels of Novartis and located in different regions of Switzerland, we would combine his organizational and interpersonal strengths and my collaboration technology and process knowledge and together we would set out to improve the Knowledge MarketPlace and to evangelize about its benefits and to teach the ways to use it.

Joerg became one of my mentors and I learned how to become a better mentor for my mentees. Together, as connective leaders_[3], Joerg and I mentored many others, as the next section, The Shepherd and His Flock, illustrates.

The lesson for the aspiring connective leaders is that one should not be afraid to seek. Serendipitous events such as mine happen daily and to many people. Furthermore, one of the proven strategies that both Joerg and I had followed may be classified as that of the servant-leader and the Achievement Styles we used successfully were presented earlier in "Connective Leadership and the Technology Server."