Big Time Serendipity

Comedian Steven Wright has said, "It's a small world, but I wouldn’t want to paint it!"

Most of us have experienced the ‘it’s a small’ moment at least once in our lives, if not many more times. Last evening, it happened to me once again...big time.

I was enjoying a wonderful dinner here in South Florida with Ernesto Uscher, partner in the RBL Group and Managing Director Hispanic Markets. Our wide-ranging conversation covered latest trends in leadership development and executive coaching as we caught up on recent activities and discussed plans for further collaboration.

Ernesto had recently returned from delivering several RBL programs in Colombia, where he is from originally. Talking about Colombia reminded me of a colleague and friend from Bogota from my time with Citibank’s Financial Institutions Consulting Group in the late 1980’s. We had worked closely on assignments in Hungary and Portugal.

While I shared some vivid memories about this person with Ernesto, he was looking at his phone. After a moment he showed me a photo and asked, “Is that him?” I replied yes with great surprise; and learned that several weeks ago they were introduced by a mutual friend. They are now actively working on a project proposal together. Amazing coincidence!

A few seconds later Ernesto was on the phone speaking Spanish with someone. He handed it to me and on the other end was my former colleague. We quickly tried to catch up on the past thirty-five years since we had last seen one another. I reminded him of the gifts he gave when he stayed at our home in Brussels: a traditional Colombian hammock, a ceramic Chiva bus, and a bottle of aguardiente. We made plans to meet up in Bogota in the hope that Ernesto and I can get set some of our business plans in motion.

Serendipity is the occurrence of finding or experiencing something delightful, valuable, or beneficial by accident or chance, rather than by design. 53 million people in Colombia and we hit on someone we both knew. Life’s magic.