NEW YORK, 2014

I met Richard Edelman for breakfast in downtown New York City. He is a tall, gray-haired man, with a firm handshake, and every inch a gentleman. The CEO of a large PR firm, he embodied the ways of his company: elegant, empathic, convincing. He was wealthy, too, of course, having kept his family's company in private hands throughout decades of high growth. But Edelman was not bling-bling, and he didn't act as such. I could just as well have met him on my subway ride to our breakfast meeting. As he did every day, that morning he had taken the red 1-2-3 line downtown, just as I had. Edelman lived on the Upper West Side (as I did), liked to go shopping for groceries in Fairway (my favorite supermarket), and ate at places like the Japanese sushi restaurant on Amsterdam Avenue, where I once bumped into him on my way home (it has since closed). He came across as a modest man, who liked to read and to ask questions. The last time I saw him was right after the Paris terror attacks that were linked to my country's capital. “What can you tell me about Molenbeek?” he asked, referring to the Brussels district where the terrorists came from.

Edelman was also a very successful man. As CEO of Edelman, the world's largest privately held public relations firm, he oversaw 5,000 employees in 67 offices around the world, and his company had more than $800 million in annual revenues. Thirty years earlier, the company his father founded was only a fraction of its current size, at $6 million annual revenue. How did Edelman transform the family company into the PR powerhouse it is today?

Talking to Edelman quickly revealed that he attributed a lot of his success to his family background, most notably his parents. Despite having personally built the largest privately owned PR firm in the world from a small base, he credited his parents and grandparents for almost everything he achieved. Edelman's maternal and paternal grandparents were all Jewish and came from Europe to the United States under circumstances similar to those of many other Jewish families described in this book. As was the case for so many immigrants, they had to start building their fortune and family from the ground up. And they did. Richard's father set up a small public relations firm in Chicago and continued to work in it until just before his death. “My father was the first generation born here of my family,” Edelman said. “He had to share a seat in the public school with another pupil. I still have that work ethic. That immigration mentality remains with me.”

Richard Edelman as a young boy with his parents

Richard's mother was similarly engaged in the family's success. She stood by her husband every step of the way, Edelman said. The young Richard was the one to benefit from it. He told me that he started “stealing with his eyes” at a young age. “You learn a lot with your eyes; I learned the most from my parents by observing them,” Edelman said. When he was still in college, for example, he once saw his parents networking at a cocktail party. Much to his surprise, his mother daringly approached Henry Kissinger, then secretary of state and a guest of honor at the reception. She introduced first herself, and then his father. It worked, and it left Edelman speechless.³ It taught him that, with the right amount of self-confidence and a mentality that “the cup is always half full,” you can get to know almost anybody. When I first met Edelman in China in 2013, I saw firsthand just how well he had learned the skill of networking. Speaking at the same meeting where I met Steve Davis, he was one of the most-sought-after conversation partners.⁴ When I approached him, he immediately made time to speak to me, and he gave me the impression that all his attention was focused on our conversation, even if it was just for five minutes.

Edelman had seen his parents hustle to make it in business. But when his father asked Richard to run the company's New York office, Edelman hesitated. He was 24, fresh out of graduate school, and thought he might be better off gaining experience elsewhere. He had the offer from Playtex, and wanted to make it on his own. Was he going to let his father down? “He was thinking of selling the agency,” Edelman said. “But he wouldn't do it if I came in. He wanted the company to go on. He wanted a dynasty.” In the end, Edelman accepted his father's offer. “I did it because my father asked,” he said, because “I didn't know how it was going to work. I had never worked with my father. It could have gone the other way.” But in this case, the father–son relationship worked pretty well. His father left him the space to take his own initiatives, and his son appreciated it. “I advise: leave some distance. Let the kid make some mistakes,” Edelman said. “Looking back, I was too young to know what I couldn't do, and that worked in my favor,” Edelman said. On the positive side, it meant that he managed to attract clients he did not think were within reach just a few years ago. For example, Edelman signed Fuji Film for a major campaign on the Los Angeles Olympics, breaking into the consumer industry. It also meant he made “beginner” mistakes. He forgot to include a “noncompete” clause in his employees' contracts, for example, and as consequence, employees were free to lure Edelman's clients to their new employer after they left. The office lost quite a few clients because of that one mistake, but it also helped Edelman. “I'd make the mistake, but I'd never make it again,” he said.

However, daringness does not always work in tandem with modesty, which is the trait he now embodies. But as with many young people, it was a trait he only mastered over time. When Edelman was in his twenties, he felt on top of the world, and he may have acted like it. He got an MBA from Harvard, he managed a company in New York, and he thought he could solve any business problem. “I had a self-confidence that was excessive,” he told me. It was through making mistakes, and losing money because of it, that Edelman landed with his two feet firmly on the ground. “When you get to the edge like that, your confidence falls off the cliff,” he said. Since then, Edelman has learned to stay humble, as much through his habits as through his attitude. He takes the subway to work every day, just like tens of thousands of fellow New York commuters, and he doesn't show off his wealth. He also often wears his father's old suits.

From his mother, Edelman learned that when judging people, you shouldn't just look at their resume. “My mother was deeply intuitive,” Edelman said. “She focused on the way people behaved.” Throughout his decades at the helm of his company, he also focused on having a trusting relationship with people. But he learned that lesson the hard way, and not before “breaking [his] nose first.” In his early years of managing the Edelman New York office, he once hired a CFO based on the fact that she had been working for a renowned Fortune 500 company before. But the decision turned out to be disastrous: the new billing system that the CFO introduced failed. As a consequence, the company missed three months of revenues, and several clients disputed their invoices. It was a mistake Edelman could have been fired for. But his father, then CEO of the company, preferred a forward looking approach. Edelman recalled him saying, “You messed this one up… What are you going to do next?” It's another lesson he learned from his parents: Give workers the space to take initiative and to make mistakes, because “it's as much about how you get up when you're knocked down.”

Yet another lesson that Edelman told me he learned from his parents was to not “bet the bank.” That surprised me a little. Wealthy people, I always thought, are wealthy at least in part because they have more and better access to finance: they can raise corporate debt, invest (more) money in the stock market, or engage in “mergers and acquisition” (M&A) activities. They take risks. But Edelman is the antithesis of that theory. His company has “zero debt,” and he never engaged in risky M&A activities, which could double Edelman's size or, conversely, threaten its existence. He told me that people call him crazy for never taking on debt, but he doesn't mind. He takes a long-term perspective, and counts on his own efforts to make his wealth. “But if I can't finance an acquisition now, my children can always do it later,” he said. That cautious and long-term perspective comes from his parent's immigrant mentality that he still preserves: “It's the idea of saving, and then investing the coins you saved,” he says.

That left me with one question. If Edelman's parents were so important to him, how important is his personal life and family time? At 61, Edelman didn't want to give the impression he mastered it all. “I wasn't perfect, but I really did make a huge attempt,” he said. “When you are competing [in business], you play to win.” It meant that, at times, he made big sacrifices for his company, such as when he was commuting to Europe to run the Edelman offices there. But throughout his career, he did set the following rules for his private life, many of which he still lives by:

• “On Saturdays and Sundays, I try not to work.”
• “On workdays, I turn off my cell phone at 8 p.m.”
• “I sleep well and work out five to six times per week.”
• “When my kids were in a sports league, I attended almost every home game.”

Richard Edelman learned the most from his parents, but when it came to building his company, he said he couldn't be “perfect” at home. It was the sacrifice he had to make to continue his family's legacy and provide the same opportunities to his children that his father gave to him.

LONDON, 2014

“I picked up four things from my twenties that helped me hugely later in life,” Sir Andrew Likierman, the dean of London Business School, told me in his offices when we first met in 2014. “They are to makes choices that give you flexibility, be aware that things don't always go up, gain exposure to foreign cultures, and understand the importance of communication.” He said it with a certain objectivity, as if lecturing. But there was a much more personal story to those lessons than I initially thought.

I spoke to Likierman, then 70, on one of those rare sunny days in London, when the sky was clear and the temperature at T-shirt level. Not that it affected Likierman's wardrobe choice. As a member of the British elite and the dean of the school, he looked exactly how you expect: gray wavy hair, small glasses, English suit, and tie. (When I interviewed him a second time, intriguingly, he wore a pink T-shirt in order to blend in with his school's students who had organized a team activity.) But anyone who has visited London knows that sunny weather doesn't happen often there, and so I was happy to be visiting England's highest-ranked business school on that very day.

From the outside, the school looks more like a series of brick working-class houses than like one of the most renowned business schools in the world. But it is the school's back that impresses. There, a large white façade resembles the Taj Mahal, causing the typical visitor to gaze at it in awe. Moreover, the campus garden borders Regent's Park, one of those famous Royal Parks of London, and the grass of the school's garden is as green as that of the park behind it. From Likierman's office window, we had a great view on both the garden and the park. We were meeting to discuss London Business School, but at the end of the conversation I asked him about his personal journey. It was the start of a remarkable exchange, which turned into a rediscovery for Likierman of his past life and choices, and the learning of valuable life lessons for me. “I don't think I ever recounted my story in the way we just did,” he said when we ended a lengthy conversation in 2016.

In a way, the appearance of London Business School is in opposition to that of Likierman. The distinguished dean at first sight looks exactly like what you would expect from someone with the title “Sir” (an English title given by the Queen) and a London Business School dean (the prime educational institution for the bankers, traders, and venture capitalists of London). His appearance is like the beautiful façade of the side of London Business School that borders the park—but digging a bit deeper into Likierman's personal story, the brick worker-house side appears. Likierman was born in Lancashire in 1943, in England's industrial heartland on the west coast of the country. Far away from London, Oxford, and Cambridge, the closest large cities are blue-collar ones like Blackburn, Liverpool, Leeds, and Manchester, with houses that look exactly like those that come to mind when you see the front side of London Business School.

Likierman is the son of Eastern European immigrants from Poland and Romania, Jews who fled the darkening political climate in their home countries in the 1930s. Like for so many others, it had been a difficult decision. Likierman's paternal grandfather was an entrepreneur, having founded a flourishing textile business in Poland, which he later moved to Romania. But with the threat of Nazism, he felt compelled to move his factory again. “My grandfather's story was very inspiring to me,” Likierman said. “He had already moved countries and he prepared to do it again, even though he didn't speak English and was 60 years old. It taught me that you are never too old to do something difficult.” The family opened Qualitex, a textile factory, in Lancashire, with Likierman's grandfather as the expert and Likierman's father as the energetic executive.

For Likierman, growing up in a small town in industrial England was “strange.” He was caught between three cultures: the “unsophisticated environment” of Lancashire, the “very different background and culture” of his Eastern European family, and the elitist, imperial culture of the Stowe boarding school in Buckingham, where his parents sent him from ages 13 to 18 (he attended another boarding school in Northern England from age 8 to 13). Eight months during the year, he would attend boarding school, far away from the textile plants, and the other four months, he would be home in Lancashire. Likierman didn't specifically say this, but it seemed as though taking in those different cultures was not the easiest of challenges for a young boy. He told me that when he was growing up, the United Kingdom was still very controlled, conformist, and traditional. “In the 1950s, society was very obedient,” he said. “The UK went through a tough time with the war, and it was pleased with what it had.” That was reflected in Likierman's education. “My parents wanted my brother and I to be part of the country, with its formal, particular set of values,” he said. “My education was based on the virtues of the British Empire: self-reliance, personal discipline, and sports. It wasn't very intellectual.”

For Likierman (and most of English society), liberation came in the following decade. “The 1960s [were] different,” Likierman said. “All of us who grew up at the time could feel in the air the difference.” On the musical front, bands like the Beatles (who, like Likierman, came from England's industrial north) and the Rolling Stones (who came from London), heralded a new era for pop and rock culture. Likierman experienced it firsthand. While studying at Oxford, he saw the Rolling Stones play a concert at a university ball, when they were still young and unknown. And he recalled that when the Beatles' songs came out, “I remember thinking this is really great.” For the first time, people that had not gone to university suddenly were famous. It put the United Kingdom at a very important learning point, where traditional barriers were broken down.

Somehow though, Likierman always found himself a little removed from the epicenter of change. In the early 1960s, when the Beatles roamed the bars in Liverpool in the north of England, he just moved out to pursue university studies in Oxford. When student protests broke out in Paris, Berkeley, and other places around the world in 1968, and the Flower Power movement was at its height, he had already left university. And as “a lot of the action was happening in London,” as Likierman put it, he had returned to Manchester, which he said was then “still a nineteenth-century manufacturing town, with a strong sense of Northern identity.”

Perhaps these historical coincidences helped explain why Likierman wasn't pursuing a radically different career than the one that was expected of him. Or perhaps it was because he said that he “wasn't very rebellious, and came from a home where rebellion wasn't encouraged.” In any case, while change was sweeping across England, Likierman at first largely continued the traditionalist life. When his father chose for him to study a year abroad in Vienna to learn German, he did. When he got a chance to enroll at Oxford, he did (despite not having been fond of learning at boarding school). And when, after his studies at Oxford his father suggested he meet with a chartered accountant (CA, or CPA in the United States) to see if this could be his career of choice, Likierman dutifully agreed.

But then something happened. When Likierman met the man who was supposed to sell him on a career as a chartered accountant, he tuned out. It would turn out to be a watershed moment.

The meeting's setting though was impeccable. Likierman met the British CPA at the Great Eastern Hotel, a grand five-star hotel adjacent to Liverpool Street, in a majestic dining room reminiscent of Great Britain's illustrious past. It was the hotel where in Bram Stoker's Dracula, vampire-hunter Abraham Von Helsing stayed.⁵ But as illustrious as the setting was, it didn't convince Likierman. “The CA escribed three years of drudgery, boring preparation which he said was essential to become a chartered accountant,” Likierman recalled. “He said I was lucky to get that chance. But to me, it looked like a nightmare.” It was clear what Likierman should do: decide against becoming a CA. Instead, he pursued a more exciting accounting career: that of management accountant, or financial advisor in a specific company.⁶ Minor as that distinction may seem to an outsider, it was a life-changing decision for Likierman as it was the first time he took hold of his own future. “It was pivotal,” he said. “I knew management was what interested me.”

In the following years, Likierman worked as management accountant with Tootal (then called English Sewing Cotton) in Manchester, about 30 miles from his family home Lancashire. Tootal was a textile conglomerate and very much a byproduct of the industrial revolution that swept through North England 150 years earlier. Most of the workers were blue-collar, and most of the management work was down-to-earth. “I sat in very simple offices in manufacturing plants, talking to real people doing a real job,” Likierman said. “This was not high-flying management. That stayed with me. I didn't look down on people.” In retrospect, he said, that first work experience on the manufacturing floor made him humbler. “People that go directly in the stratosphere of management don't have a feel for what it is like to be an ordinary person with an ordinary job.” He still values that learning experience today.

Working in Manchester and as a trainee also allowed him to return home every day and pursue further studies. “The idea of graduate trainees was new, and there, it simply meant I had to sit next to people and come up with some idea to improve how they worked,” he said. At night, he used his spare time to study. At Oxford, for the first time in his life, he had come to genuinely like studying, and now in Manchester and Lancashire, he wanted to continue to learn. In 1968, that lingering interest in learning almost led to a professional academic career. At a conference in his old college at Oxford, a Leeds University professor inquired about his academic interest. “Have you ever considered it?” he asked. When Likierman answered negatively, he planted a seed. “If you ever think about it,” he said, “let me know.” Sometime later, Likierman took the professor, Gavin Whittaker, up on his offer, and for a year became assistant professor.

In 1969, however, Likierman's life took another turn. Qualitex, his family's business, had become a public company with thousands of employees, and was seen as a small stock market star. Moving out of weaving, which was the main focus in its early years, it was now focusing on fiber processing, as the material allowed for a stretch in clothes. “My brother, who had become CEO, was ambitious,” Likierman recalled. The ambition translated into a bold move: Qualitex acquired Klinger, a competitor. The resulting company had plants in England, the United States, Germany, and Malta. To manage the growth and acquisition, the family called for Andrew to join their ranks, and he accepted.

It was a big challenge and a huge responsibility. “[In] some respects, it was very interesting, as I had experience in manufacturing but not at this scale,” he said. At his family's request, he moved to Monchengladbach in Germany's industrial Ruhr area, and ran the company's plant there. He also supervised the plants in Malta and the United States, effectively becoming the overseas managing director of Qualitex. But the initial excitement soon dwindled. The plants were not well set up. To make matters worse, the machines were inferior, and the workforce wasn't well trained. “It became clear after a while that these plants could not survive,” Likierman said. By 1972, the inevitable happened: Qualitex shut its German plant, and sold its Maltese and United States plants. “That was really difficult,” Likierman said, “but we couldn't go on.” The decision by the family a few months later to agree to a takeover by Imperial Chemical Industries, then one of the largest UK companies, meant that he could resume his own career.

Likierman had done what was asked of him. He had walked in his father's footsteps, helped his family out, and done what he could to ensure the success of Qualitex, even if that meant making difficult decisions. But it hadn't been what he wanted. If it were up to him, he'd rather not work in the family business. He knew what he wanted instead: to pursue his own interests and ventures, and enter academic life. So from 1974 onward, Likierman finally forged the path he knew he really wanted to pursue. He became a professor at London Business School, and rose to the top of the management accountancy profession in England. By the time I met him, Likierman had spent a 10-year period as one of the managing directors of the UK Treasury and head of the UK Government Accountancy Service, as well as a Director of the Bank of England. He had also served as president of the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants and a member of the steering committee for the review of oversight and governance of the United Nations, and a non-executive director at companies such as Barclays bank, one of the largest banks in the world, and The Times newspapers group, one of the oldest and most revered newspaper publishers. And by the time I met him, Likierman had been the dean of London Business School for several years.

Likierman's story had taught me a lot. It taught me, for example, that you can't judge a book by its cover. Likierman had appeared to be a fine English gentleman, but also a man in the ivory tower of the elite. From hearing his story, I learned that nothing could be further from the truth. This was the story of an immigrant, a man whose family in two generations rose from the obscurity to the top of English society—but all because of hard work and merit. His story had also taught me that pursuing the most obvious career path—following your parent's footsteps—is not always the most satisfying one. It may lead you to become CEO and earn you a lot of money. But if it isn't your passion, it will certainly not lead to happiness or satisfaction. And it taught me that a life's journey can be altered by other people you meet along the way. Had Likierman not met Gavin Whittaker, the Leeds professor, he may have never become a professor himself. Had he not met the chartered accountant in London, he may have taken several more years to realize what he didn't want to do. It's worthwhile to remain open to such moments and meeting such people, as they may change your life for the better.

CONGO, 1964

Chris Burggraeve's parents, Monique and Eric, were adventurers, but not by birth. Burggraeve's maternal grandparents were mid-level employees in a respected pharmacy near the famous old market square in the former medieval port city of Bruges. His paternal grandmother and grandfather were a seamstress and a shoemaker in the Belgian military, respectively. There were worse places to hail from than Bruges, with its magnificent medieval center, and its rising standards of living in post-war Europe. But the Europe that Chris Burggraeve's parents came of age in during the 1950s and 1960s was also the Europe of opportunities, rebellion, and emancipation. They were no exceptions. So when Eric was selected for the Brussels-based military academy, which would have saved the family a lot of money as well, he instead “rebelled” and convinced his father to let him go study engineering in free-spirited Ghent instead.ⁱ After that, in 1963, he made a similar conscious choice to go work abroad in educational development instead of completing a classic compulsory military service. Eric married his fiancée, Monique, and after many discussions got the family blessings to go on a journey very few of his generation would ever consider. He got the opportunity to move to Congo, the former Belgian colony, as a math and science professor working for a Roman Catholic missionary order. The newlyweds ultimately landed in Luluaburg, now Kananga, a city in the deep heart of Africa close to the center of Congo, where in 1964 its first constitution was drafted. In that same year, Chris Burggraeve was born.

Congo at that time was going through a turbulent post-colonial period. The giant country had gained its independence from Belgium in 1960. The transition towards being a self-governing democratic republic, however, had been difficult. In 1961, the country's first elected prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, was deposed, detained, and killed. He had been in office for less than a year.⁷ At the around same time, several provinces declared their independence from the newly founded republic. For a while, it looked like the situation might improve, as the army managed to end the secession of the provinces, and a conciliatory tone between the different political factions was struck. But it was the lull before the storm. In 1965, after a failed attempt to set up a democratically elected government, army colonel Joseph Mobutu successfully mounted a coup d'état. It meant the start of 40-year de facto authoritarian regime, and the end of the road for many Westerners. In 1966, Chris, now a two-year-old toddler, left the country in the arms of his parents. They would never return. His parents, adventurous as they may have been at first, stayed in Belgium for the rest of their lives.

Their son, Chris, however, speculates that those early years in Congo possibly made him into the adventurous and challenge-seeking professional he still is today. “It is probably all due to story-telling at family gatherings, to browsing through albums full of fascinating yellow/black/white pictures, and to reading the many letters my mother wrote to her mom on that special crispy light airmail paper, but somehow I feel like I inherited a sense for adventure on my father's knee,” he told me. “In my mind, it is as if I can still hear the sound of the tam-tams and of the crickets. Each time my dad would prepare us moambe later in life (a chicken in palm oil delicacy), the smell brings back visions out of Africa. So maybe it is all romantic post-rationalization, or maybe I did somehow get my desire to live an international life via the mother's milk in Congo?” He laughs as we share his life stories gazing over the Hudson from the terrace of his 46^th floor penthouse in midtown Manhattan, on a bright but cold February day. His dog watches me curiously. Back inside, while the TV shows the preparations for that year's Super Bowl, we continued to talk about his journey from toddler to chief marketing officer of Anheuser-Busch InBev, the largest beer company in the world (and the brewer of Budweiser and Stella, amongst other beers).

The family might have wanted to go abroad again after their Congo adventure, but Chris's mother, Monique, tragically died when he was 11. Chris's father, Eric, was now the only breadwinner and the only parent. Instead of venturing out into the world, Eric moved his two sons back to Bruges, where Chris's grandparents and family helped raise both boys over the next years while their father continued to work in Brussels at ITT, an American telecom conglomerate. He would visit every weekend, until he remarried years later, and the boys finally moved back to Brussels. But the sense of adventure never died. Eric encouraged his son to seek out adventures in his stead. “My father was a bit eccentric in some of his educational choices,” Burggraeve said. “Going to parties in the weekend or staying out late with friends was always a fight, even until 18 years old, but on the other side, as of when I was only 15, he encouraged me to travel by Interrail train across Europe by myself—while none of my friends' parents allowed them that.”

The world would be his proverbial oyster. It became his filter in life. He studied international business and economics for that reason, obtained scholarships to continue his graduate studies in European economics and politics in France and Italy, and aimed for a career in diplomacy or at the European Commission. But at age 25, he also got selected for an international fellowship with the Prince Albert Fund, a fund set up to promote Belgium's business presence abroad. His role was to start the U.S. office for Atlas Consult, a niche consulting firm. It was a dream come true for Burggraeve, who had always looked at the United States as the ultimate land of opportunity.

Moreover, it was 1989, and the Western world was going through exciting times. In Europe, the Berlin Wall fell, and a wave of optimism filled the streets. In Charlotte, North Carolina, where Burggraeve was based, the mood was equally optimistic. “The Monday after the Wall fell, you could buy pieces of it in Charlotte,” Burggraeve said. With his enthusiasm, Burggraeve set to his task of building a U.S. office. He found a nice office space, purchased a phone and a fax, and even hired his own boss. There was no Internet back then, and international calling was expensive, but Burggraeve's enthusiasm made up for his isolation.

After 15 months, however, things turned south. Atlas Consult had wanted to expand internationally too quickly and in too many countries, and a result, was drained for cash. Burggraeve couldn't pay his office bills anymore, despite the local income that started to be generated. The electricity company threatened to turn off the lights, and in the end, it did just that. Burggraeve and his five coworkers were literally left in the dark. Apparent as the problems were, the headquarters in Belgium didn't throw a lifeline. It couldn't. Even worse, the CEO asked Burggraeve to delay paying his payroll and taxes. It put the young entrepreneur in an impossible position. Complying with his boss's request would mean running the risk of criminal charges in a U.S. context, but not complying could lead to the end of the company. It was a terrible experience for Burggraeve, and one that he says he would never want to live again. “Our company was put on a blacklist by Duke Power, our reputation was [ruined], and I had to live with the bums on the street,” he said. “It was a very humbling experience.” To avoid a bankruptcy, he used some of his personal savings to keep the company afloat. He kept his faith in a good outcome. “A Burggraeve never gives up,” he told himself. It was a force from within. And while the rest of his family was across the ocean, his girlfriend, Nadine, was there to support him. He wasn't going to back out.

But Burggraeve was driving himself into a wall. It's in moments like these that an unabated motivation and a will to never give up can become detrimental. There are things in life that even the most motivated, creative, and self-sacrificing humans cannot overcome. The world around you is moldable, but there is a limit. In such cases, you need someone in your surroundings to help you out. Burggraeve had such a person: Luc Tayaert de Borms, who worked for the Prince Albert Fund. He felt something was up and pulled Burggraeve out of the project. With hindsight, Burggraeve realized it was the right decision. He learned the most valuable lesson for any entrepreneur: “Finance matters, and cash is king.” There was nothing wrong with the company and its product, but this scale up was under-resourced and overextended. From then on, in any venture, he took into account the cash position, and thought about governance and how to structurally grow any company from inception to scale-up, and beyond. He vowed to never make the mistakes his employer made—if he could avoid them.

Back at home, Burggraeve had to take a step back and think about the next step of his life. After reviewing the diplomacy route again in detail in a USA-Europe context, he nevertheless decided there was more to learn from business first. He got a job with Procter & Gamble, the multinational consumer goods company. It was an excellent opportunity, where he learned the basics of what would later become his true passion and forte: marketing. But P&G only hires fresh out of university, so whatever experience Burggraeve already had was discounted, and he would have to start again at the bottom of the ladder. He was also back at square one when it came to building an international career. It would take up to five years for him to get an international assignment. “It didn't bother me,” Burggraeve said. “You have to learn to take a step back to take two steps forward,” he said. At least, that was what he made himself believe, but he got itchy…Before he knew it, he had turned 30 and four years had gone by.

Going into his fifth year at P&G, he gently reminded his bosses of his ambition—he wanted an international assignment. The company did open the door finally. However, one great pioneering position in post-Apartheid South Africa fell through, and another position in Saudi Arabia, where the company had more than 90 percent market share, didn't interest the ambitious Belgian, as it was more of the same in a larger market. Burggraeve was conflicted. He loved P&G but the world was calling. Right at that time Coca-Cola came looking for him, and offered him a job as international service associate, or “corporate mercenary.” He would join the ranks of a small group of people that would be universally deployable: anywhere in the world, at any time.⁸ It was a special statute that he didn't fully understand when he signed it (not unlike Matt Damon in the movie The Bourne Identity⁹), but which he enjoyed an awful lot once he got started, and which in the next 13 years would make him and his family move eight times (twice in the same country) and propel him to become one of Greater Europe's most sought-after marketers.

In one of his first postings, Burggraeve got tasked to help convert Central and Eastern Europe countries from Pepsi-dominated to Coke-dominated. He was assigned to the recently formed Czech and Slovak Republics, countries that were created just three years earlier after the dissolution of Czechoslovakia. These were the mid-1990s, and the former communist countries were going through a huge transformation, economically and culturally. “Very few people wanted to go work there. But it was a paradise for entrepreneurial marketers. We came in with the idea of our Freedom Coke, to contrast with what we labeled as the more communism-era Pepsi,” he said. It was part of what people then called the “cola wars,” in which the former Soviet Bloc was a particularly important front. With more than 150 million people, consumerism that was newly being developed, and an ongoing economic boom, whoever won here, won globally.¹⁰

Burggraeve was pushed to think big. “Dreaming big or dreaming small requires the same amount of energy, my CEO at AB InBev would later say,” he told me. “I experienced that firsthand with Coke in Central Europe. You had to think big, to inspire big, and most importantly, to execute on a big scale.” If his first experience abroad in Charlotte had taught him how a lack of finance precludes any success, his experience in Prague showed him that if money is available, the only limitation to your success is your and your team's own ambition.

During the European soccer championships in 1996, he installed big screens on Prague's central square for the first time ever. The Czechs made it to an epic final against Germany. It was the start of what later would be called experiential marketing and proved a huge popular and sales success. When the 1998 Winter Olympics came around, Burggraeve pushed for an encore. It was a risky but warranted bet. The Czech team made it to the ice hockey finals, and its adversary was Russia, its former Soviet ruler. It was –20 degrees early morning on Prague's old market square, while the game took place in Nagano, Japan. With the entire Czech government and the inspiring president Vaclav Havel behind him, Burggraeve was among the tens of thousands who gathered on the square when the dream became reality, and the Czech Republic beat its archrival.

The atmosphere was incredible, the Washington Post reported:

About 70,000 jubilant fans jammed Old Town Square on Sunday to watch the Czechs' landmark hockey victory, prompting an outpouring of champagne toasts, honking car horns and waving flags. Many waited overnight in nearby pubs and restaurants—and many on the square itself—to catch a spot close to the screen before the game, which ended with a 1–0 win over Russia in Nagano, for the Czech Republic's first Olympic gold medal in hockey.¹¹

For Burggraeve, the victory was a breakthrough. Coca-Cola had stood by the Czechs' side, enabling a mass celebration of freedom in a timeless victory of its national hockey team. The next day, it doubled down on its sports coup. It pushed thousands and thousands of special commemorative Coca-Cola bottles and cans in the market, each carrying the name of a player of the national hockey team. “It was the greatest moment in the sport history of the Czech Republic,” Burggraeve said. “And many people to this day have a Coca-Cola can or bottle on their mantelpiece to remember it.” Media all over the world covered the event, and internally, Burggraeve got a lot of credit for his original campaign. He got bigger budgets, and was soon sent to look after top 20 markets.

In 1999, he got sent to Turkey, where he would face his biggest challenge yet as a young manager: to not fall apart when PR and natural disasters strike on top of a macroeconomic down cycle. Here's a recounting of that experience in Burggraeve's own words:

My Turkey period was technically probably my real career breakthrough on a personal level. Local management had enjoyed stellar years and expectations remained high. But I was entering into a looming massive economic crisis in Turkey. The tide was turning fast. Inflation was hitting 1000 percent on some days, and PKK (a Kurdish militant organization) bombings were everywhere in the city. I learned to live with the unexpected.

Then, in summer '99, there was a double punch. First, a Coke public health crisis in Europe affected markets everywhere, ultimately leading to Doug Ivester's resigning as CEO. The Turkish government closed many plants for health reasons, and consumer user base dropped 25 percent in a week. My colleagues and I scrambled to put crisis measures in place to win confidence back and successfully restarted production. But as we recovered sales, real human disaster struck: a massive Earthquake hit Istanbul and the whole surrounding urban metropole area. Over 35,000 people died that night. We fled our home with our young daughter and camped out two weeks. Luckily, there was a lot of solidarity among our neighbors. People camped out in our garden as homes got rebuilt and checked. At the same time, I was again working through the Coca-Cola response, under the leadership of the division president, Cem Kozlu. I learned a lot from his calm in these storms. He taught me indeed that “crisis is an opportunity” or “crisis is a terrible thing to waste.” He showed us how to handle the immediate aftermath, and how to make plans to come back as a team and as a business. Coke showed us and the country it was more than just a brand. The unbelievable solidarity of the country after that event made me appreciate what matters most in life: positive personal relationships, and healthy societies. It also reminds me on a personal level to this date to live life to the fullest, every day.

During his time at Coca-Cola, Burggraeve lived through the highest highs and the lowest lows. But he had found a company he deeply appreciated (Coca-Cola), a job he loved (now running marketing for all Europe), and a way of life he thrived on (international service associate). If it was up to him, he would never leave. Not aware of the irony of his quote, he told me: “I was loving it.”

Then InBev, the unknown world's largest brewer, came around, and “they shook my world,” he said. They offered him to become worldwide chief marketing officer (CMO). To Burggraeve, it felt like he just got upgraded from being a top football player in college to joining a team set to win the Super Bowl:

After I met their board and possible future colleagues, and after many months of reflection, I could not imagine working for a more brilliant category of product [beer], with a phenomenal portfolio of brands to shape and nurture (including at first Stella, Leffe, Beck's, Hoegaarden, and huge local brands like Brahma and Skol), and a group of extremely professional yet driven business people. I was hooked. I wanted to be part of this “giant startup.” There were many unknowns, but that is the thrill of life. I always wanted to work on a global scale, and here the opportunity knocked in ways I thought Coke would never be able to offer.

He accepted the challenge and stayed in the role for the next five years. In that time period, he achieved everything he could have possibly hoped for in corporate marketing. A year after he had joined the company, Belgo-Brazilian InBev merged with American Anheuser-Busch, and added iconic brands such as Budweiser and Bud Light to its portfolio. The newly created company would connect marketing and finance in much more direct ways than had previously been the case—and with great success. Today, mid-2016, AB InBev is the most profitable consumer goods company, and it is still getting bigger. It is on the verge of completing its next transformation via the acquisition of SAB Miller (the number two global beer company).

After 23 years in the corporate world of marketing, Burggraeve went back in 2012 to his first love of startups and economic diplomacy, and added teaching. He set up his own marketing premium advisory company, is now an “angel” portfolio investor and board member at fast growing scale-ups, president of several organizations, and adjunct faculty at the Trium Executive MBA program. He continues to live the intense international lifestyle he always aimed for, and which his parents had so encouraged him to pursue. But the big difference versus his corporate life: his agenda is now more under his own control.

Born in December 1964, Chris is the last of the baby boomer generation, and shared their desire to stay young forever: “50 is the new 30, and 100 the new 60,” he said. He bought his ticket for Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic as one of the first amateur astronauts many years ago, and patiently hopes to travel suborbital around the planet in the next decades. There is that one additional bucket list thing, he wrote to me, as he was boarding a flight from Dubai to Shanghai: step into his parents' footsteps, and return to Kananga/Luluaburg, his place of birth. “I tried to go back twice decades ago with my father, but each time last-minute Mobutu's regime was at odds with Belgium and visas got revoked. To date, neither he or I made it back yet,” he wrote. “Amazing how sometimes a place on this earth might prove so elusive. The closest I got to Luluaburg is Arusha, only 1,000 kilometers away. Maybe it is meant to be. Still, one day…” and he boarded his flight.

LESSONS LEARNED

Sooner or later in life, we all decide whether or not to follow in our parents' footsteps. This can be literally, by continuing a family business or profession, or mentally, by copying the lifestyle our parents have. There is no right answer to this: Edelman and Likierman were in quite similar circumstances, and they both took a completely different decision, each being happy with his choice. Sometimes we don't even have a choice, as was the case for Burggraeve.

But if there is one take-away shared among the three leaders we met in this book, it is that it is always worthwhile to copy at least those traits you admire most in your parents. For Edelman, it was for example the trust from his father, the sense of intuition from his mother, and the go-getting attitude from both of them. For Likierman, it was daring to start all over again, as his grandfather had done. His grandfather had started all over again in a different country, he had started all over again in a different profession. And for Burggraeve, it was the sense of adventure both his parents had.

Beyond this, there are some personal lessons the leaders in this chapter wanted to share:

1. Early on, make choices that give you flexibility. “I studied politics, philosophy, and economics in college, and was determined to get an additional qualification with flexibility in mind: accounting,” Likierman told me. “Today I would recommend people to get an MBA, but back then [the early 1960s in Europe], accounting was the established option to give flexibility. What remained true is that you open up options for yourself with an education. The fact that people that graduate from an MBA do so many different things, is an indication of that.”

   Edelman and Burggraeve are two cases in point: they both got an MBA, giving them wider options after graduation than before. For Edelman, it gave him an option to get a taste of business life outside the family business. For Burggraeve, the Trium Global Executive MBA was a chance to give his marketing career global impulses. As we have seen in previous chapters, people will have different assessments of whether or not the MBA is the right course of study for them. What remains true is that when starting out, you might want to choose a study which gives you flexibility.

2. Understand the importance of communication. “You can have brilliant ideas, but you cannot do anything with them unless you communicate them well,” Likierman said. “Early in my career as an accountant, I saw that certain people were really good, better than me, but that because they couldn't communicate well, they didn't advance in their career. It's one of the things I still hold dear: that school is a safe learning environment to learn such things. It's much better to make a mess of a presentation here than later in your career in front of a crucial client.”

   Richard Edelman is again a good example of this: his business stands or falls with communication. The same is true for Burggraeve, for whom marketing and communication was the key to business success with Coca-Cola and Anheuser-Busch InBev.

3. Be aware that things don't always go up. “When I started my career, there was an economic crisis: one of the major oil shocks that disrupted the economy [that of the 1970s],” Likierman said. “That's when I learned that what goes up can also come down. My personal savings were affected as well. I was really exposed, and it was a shock. But it was good learning. Everyone needs a financial crisis, preferably early, so you learn business cycles are pretty important. We've had them for the last 250 years, and they won't go away now.”

   A consequence of going through a downturn, as everyone in this chapter has, is that you learn what degree of risk you appreciate. For Edelman, for example, the rule is clear: never bet the bank. He prefers to not have any debt, and not take risky bets.

   For Burggraeve, that balance is much more tilted toward taking risks: risks in making career choices, and financial risks by investing in start-up companies. The important thing, he says, is this:

   1. If you take risks, do it without regrets. “Looking back, leaving Coke proved to be the most important and most defining professional and life ‘bet’ I ever made,” Burggraeve said. It was a bet that could have gone either way—good or bad. “Many people counseled me against it at the time,” he said. “[But] the reasons to leave one employer for another are deep and complex. They always need to be seen in the context of its time. Many factors come into play, but in the end you make an emotion call. You go through the newly opened door or not. If you do, there should be ‘no regrets.’

      The concept of risk is a very personal one, though, Burggraeve acknowledged. In his case, his attitude is “no guts, no glory”—if you don't dare, you won't win. But for other people that attitude may not be as dominant. “I have kept taking bigger risks since then,” he said. “I probably failed more than before, but I also won more and learned more than before no regrets. Life has been more colorful than ever. Every morning, I wake up and think, ‘OK, let's make this a day to enjoy and to remember.’… And with baby boomers living to 100+, the best is yet to come!”