The John Hunter Story

We are all more connected than we think.

When we wrote “The Frog and Prince: Secrets of Positive Networking” we began with The John Hunter Story because John was just a regular guy, but he was a good networker. It is a classic networking success story. The subsequent reprinting our book as “Work the Pond: Use the Power of Positive Networking to Leap Forward in Work and Life” by Penguin Prentice-Hall included John Hunter’s story shown below.

It was a warm summer’s evening and John Hunter was patiently waiting in line to see The Phantom of the Opera. The musical had just opened on Broadway. John, a self-admitted “Phantom nut,” had flown in from the West Coast just to see it. Over the noise of the traffic, John heard a tourist behind him speaking Spanish. Many years earlier, John had worked in South America as an engineer for the energy firm Petróleos de Venezuela, and was fluent in Spanish. So he turned and started chatting.

To his amazement, John realized that this man was his Venezuelan manager’s boss—someone he hadn’t seen in over fifteen years. What were the odds?

Two months later—out of the blue—John was invited by an international engineering firm to be a senior consultant on a large Venezuelan energy project. Guess who had put his name forward? It is indeed a small world.

Networks are powerful things, especially human ones. As it turns out, and as you will discover in this book, John’s small worlds experience is not all that unusual. Similar stories happen all the time. It’s the magic of random and unexpected good things that flow to those who network well, and to those whom they touch.

Do you have a great small world story? Share it with us here.

Gayle Hallgren and Judy Thomson