It was a cool October morning when I biked from my home in Fairmount to Center City to attend a Human Resources group event. Upon arrival at the Wanamaker Building, I locked my bicycle up just outside when I noticed another man had just locked his and was entering the same building I was about to. Inside, bicycle helmets in hand, we both stopped at the event registration table and then we both entered the elevator that would take us up to the event. In that awkward elevator space, and in true networking fashion where one works to find common ground with another, I commented to this man that we both had the best parking spots in the city due to our shared bicycle commute efforts. Little did I know that this man lived just down the street from me, that his wife was the head of an organization that had been my first Philadelphia client, and that he was also the head of Penn’s Organizational Dynamics program. In short order, Alan and I figured all this out and soon thereafter he would invite me to join the faculty in the Organizational Dynamics program. So, the moral of this story is, always wear you helmet, no matter where you are going, because you never know who you will run into! And in this case, I ran right into teaching at Penn.
– Brian Shapiro
