Melinda French Changed My Life

At 25, I landed a job at Microsoft as a systems engineer within the enterprise sales team. At that time, there were only 19 systems engineers covering the entire country, and we had to support everything from the early versions of Microsoft Word and Excel to programming languages like FORTRAN and Visual Basic. Whenever a new version of a product was released, someone from headquarters came to our sales office to hype us up about the new features.

One day the Microsoft Word product manager came to tell us about the latest version of her product. She was incredibly sharp, presented the material thoughtfully, and was absolutely beautiful. I instantly had a crush on her and at the same time wanted her job. My understanding of how software products were built was a bit fuzzy until that point.

I had assumed the software engineers not only coded the software, but also made all the other decisions about how the software would work and appear to the consumer. Of course, it’s much more complex than that—there are many designers, business people, and other technical personnel involved in the production of a complex product like Microsoft Word.

I learned from that visit that it’s the product manager who oversees the whole thing. She managed which features would go in the next version of Microsoft Word, how those features were incorporated into the product, and how they’d be exposed to the consumer—its user interface.

As a systems engineer my work only affected at most a few hundred people at a time. Being the decision-maker on a product that made millions of people more productive and sometimes even happy would be so much more fulfilling. Plus, I could “fix” all the annoying things I hated about Microsoft products. I followed up with the product manager, Melinda French, and asked her how she got this job.

She said Microsoft recruited her out of Duke’s Fuqua MBA program. As I probed the organization more, it seemed that pretty much every product manager at Microsoft had an MBA from a top business school. At that moment I decided I was going to get an MBA to fulfill my newly found purpose—to be a product manager for a technology product.

As for my fleeting crush on Melinda, later it became clear that another Microsoft employee had a crush on her too, Bill Gates. If you didn’t recognize her name, Melinda French married Bill Gates in 1994 and continues to be the co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation today.

That chance meeting with Melinda French Gates sparked the career pivot that would propel my career for the next 30 years, yet I’m certain she has no idea who I am. If you’re reading this, Melinda, “Thank you!”

The Power of Weak Ties

In my forthcoming book Outsmart the Learning Curve, several other people I profiled had similar experiences to mine with Melinda Gates—fleeting relationships with loose ties who made a huge impact on their lives. Is it just a volume thing (many more fleeting relationships than close ones), or is there something powerful about weak ties?

Back in the 1970’s, Stanford sociologist Mark Granovetter theorized that weak ties are more valuable than close ones when it comes to career building. The paper suggests that because closer connections have largely the same network as you do, they’re less likely to help in finding new connections. This makes sense because you and your close connections know the same people, and finding new jobs or opportunities is about making new connections. Further, the weaker connections provide bridges to completely different social networks which in turn create more connection opportunities.

While it was one of the most cited papers in the social sciences over the last fifty years, the theory wasn’t rigorously tested until 2022 when a group of LinkedIn data scientists and academic researchers analyzed the networks of more than 20 million LinkedIn users over five years. Their findings largely supported Granovetter’s theory , that weak ties are indeed more valuable than strong one’s for job searches.

In addition, the 2022 researchers were able to establish a causal relationship between number of connections and job transactions as well as quantify what “weak tie” really means. The weakest ties, meaning people you have one or zero connections with, are actually not good at generating job opportunities, and as Granovetter theorized, strong ties don’t work well either because you have too many connections in common.?

Which Connections Are the Most Likely To Help?

The study found the sweet spot for number of mutual LinkedIn friends to optimize job opportunities is about ten. The data follows an inverted u-shaped curve as shown below. For friends who have much higher than ten mutual connections, the value of more connections gets worse. And as the number of mutual connections approaches zero, the likelihood of a job opportunity also falls quickly.

This article makes two related but distinct points to the value of loose connections:

• Inspiration can come from unexpected places. To take advantage of them keep your eyes open to inspirational people. Future newsletters will cover the value of the Openness personality trait and how you can increase it to give yourself more opportunities for inspiration and success.
• Your network is not just your friends, family, or the people you work with. In fact, opportunities are less likely to come from them than people who might be on the outer edge of your network.

As you navigate your career journey, nurture relationships that hit that "sweet spot"—acquaintances with some mutual connections but who also can bridge you to new networks. By staying open to these valuable weak ties, a chance conversation could spark the next big chapter in your professional life.

And if there's a weak connection who had a huge effect on your life, please shout them out in the comments.

I suspect you'll both feel great about it.

Credit the Gates Archive for the lead image of Melinda French Gates.