The doorbell
At the end of my MBA programme, I found myself in Hyderabad without a job.
I had turned down an offer in financial services because I wanted to work in IT. The consequence was that I could no longer participate in the rest of the campus placement process. I had made the decision deliberately, but conviction does not remove uncertainty. I was a graduate with a clear preference and no obvious route towards it.
Then, one afternoon, the doorbell rang at my apartment.
The man standing outside lived in the same apartment complex. I recognised him vaguely from a social function the building had held some time earlier. A small game had been organised that day, and I had won a prize. We had shared a brief exchange. That was all.
I had not thought about the encounter again. He had remembered me.
He told me that he was setting up a new e-commerce company and was looking for someone to join. Would I be interested in a conversation?
The first interview took place there in my sparsely furnished apartment. The second was with the venture capitalist funding the business. By the end of it, I had been offered a role and asked to bring four more fresh graduates into the company.
It was my first job in IT, and the man who had appeared at my door became my first manager.
A beginning that did not last
The company did not survive.
The dot-com bubble burst not long after we began. The market collapse, together with internal disagreements about direction, brought the venture to an end.
By the measures we commonly use in business, that first job was a failure. The enterprise closed. Whatever ambitions had accompanied its beginning were not realised. The roles disappeared, and the small group of people involved had to move on.
At the time, it would have been easy to see the experience only in terms of what had been lost. A first job is supposed to establish a foundation. Mine had ended almost as soon as it began.
Yet one of the most important things to come from that company had nothing to do with whether the business succeeded.
The company ended. The relationship did not.
More than two decades later
My first manager remains my friend today.
We live on different continents. We have not worked together for more than two decades. There is no organisational connection to maintain, no project requiring a regular conversation and no professional advantage on which the friendship depends.
Even so, he remains one of the first people to wish me on my birthday every year.
That small act has come to mean a great deal to me. It carries the memory of an unexpected beginning and of a person who saw something in me after little more than a chance encounter at a building function. It also says something about the relationship we chose to preserve after the organisation that introduced us no longer existed.
His judgement still matters to me. I value his perspective. The friendship has outlasted every organisation either of us has worked for since.
I could not have planned that relationship. When we first met, neither of us knew what it would become. That may be part of the reason it matters so much.
When relationships become a strategy
Professional relationships are often discussed in the language of networking.
We are encouraged to identify useful people, maintain contact, expand our reach and think carefully about who may be able to help us in the future. There is practical value in meeting people beyond our immediate circle. Careers do not develop in isolation.
But something changes when every interaction carries a calculation.
Most of us can feel when another person is interested mainly in our title, access or possible usefulness. Courtesy becomes selective. Warmth rises and falls with status. Contact appears when help is needed and disappears when the request has been answered.
The resulting network may be wide, but it is often thin. It contains many names and very little trust.
An enduring relationship is built differently. It begins with genuine interest in another person, not with a forecast of what they might provide. It grows through ordinary acts: remembering, responding, making time, being honest, offering help and staying present when there is no immediate reward.
Those acts can look insignificant while they are happening. Their value is revealed slowly.
After there is nothing left to gain
One test of a professional relationship may be what remains when its original purpose disappears.
When the project is complete, do we still care how the other person is doing? When one of us changes company, does the conversation continue? When a former colleague no longer holds influence, do we treat them with the same warmth? When there is no role, referral, introduction or commercial opportunity available, is there still a relationship worth having?
This does not mean every colleague must become a lifelong friend. Work brings us into contact with many people, and relationships naturally differ in depth and duration. Some belong to a particular season and end without bitterness when that season is over.
But it can be useful to notice the people whose company, judgement and character matter beyond the work. Those relationships deserve more than an occasional message sent when we need something.
Staying in touch need not be elaborate. A birthday wish. A call when we hear that someone has faced a difficult period. A note of congratulations with no request attached. The discipline of remembering what matters in another person’s life. Small gestures show that the individual has not become invisible simply because the professional context has changed.
What the failed company gave me
If that first business had succeeded, my career might have taken a very different path. It did not. The company became a short chapter rather than a long destination.
Yet I do not regard the experience only as a failure.
It gave me my first opportunity in the field I wanted to enter. It gave four other fresh graduates an opening when I was asked to bring them into the team. And it gave me a friendship that has lasted for more than twenty-five years.
Organisations matter. The work matters. Results matter. But a career is also made of people, and sometimes the relationship is the part that survives every other measure of success or failure.
Twenty-five years later, I still answer my first manager’s birthday message with genuine feeling.
The company ended. I remain grateful that the relationship did not.