Career advice from George Bauer: embrace serendipity

Olin BlogOlin Blog

“There’s a lot of serendipity in terms of how things happen to you,” George Bauer tells Kurt Dirks in an interview for the new Bauer Leadership Center. “Sometimes the impressions you make on people have a serendipitous effect on how things happen to you, ultimately.”
Mr. Bauer shares three important career tips in the short video above. And here we excerpt a story he shared about the role serendipity played in his early career:
“I got a bachelors and master’s degree in engineering here at Washington University in the 1950s. In those days, IBM kept its personal records on punch cards and a number 7 was a bachelors; a 6 was a high school degree; a 7 was bachelor’s degree; an 8 was a master’s degree; and a 9 on the IBM punch card indicated an employee had a PhD. They didn’t make a distinction between a master’s degree in engineering and an MBA.
“So, IBM wanted to get some people with some product experience out of the marketing side of the business into the finance side, get some end user experience into the pricing algorithms for example. And so they were sorting cards in IBM headquarters and low and behold, my card with an 8 punch fell out with every other MBA card with an 8 punch and the listing went to a fellow I knew in Chicago who had hired me in St. Louis.  And my name was the only one he recognized on that list.  And the point I’m making is, sometimes the impressions you make on people have a serendipitous effect on how things happen to you, ultimately.
“So he called me up in Milwaukee where I was the marketing manager in Milwaukee for IBM and he said, “George, how you doing?”  I said, “I’m great.  I’m ahead of quota.  Things couldn’t be ...

Read More