I graduated from college with a BS in Computer Science back in 1982. The timing was unfortunate. Interest rates had gone through the roof, cratering hiring, so the tried and true 1980s “every programmer graduate can find a job at an airline or oil company” situation was gone. My school’s BSCS was a very new program and really was more like a general engineering degree (lots of calculus, plus diff-e and more math, several physics courses, etc) with some programming courses tacked on. There wasn’t much resemblance to what most would consider a classic BSCS curriculum, but it didn’t matter too much back then.
My first job after college was at Ross Perot‘s EDS. Skipping forward several months, I came out of their training program, which everyone went through regardless of their degree. Whether you had a CS degree or a history degree, you went. After training, my first mentor was a guy named Randall.
My first serious career lesson
Randall was few years older and had become a rising star in that area of the company. He was easy to look up to. He was smart, a bit of a jokester and someone people came to when they needed solutions to tough challenges. You could see what that meant to him and others. Unlike some in the tech space, he was happy to teach and provide access to resources to experiment with and learn from.
35 years later my strongest memory of Randall is a conversation that had a massive impact on my business life. It became a lifelong career lesson.
One day when I was tinkering around with something that probably had nothing to do with my job at the time (like a IBM mainframe virtual machine), he stared me down and said (paraphrased) “If you want to go places and move ahead (in this company), always be willing to take on new things even if you know nothing about them, then do whatever it takes to learn what’s needed.”
It was years before I realized that his advice had become a consistent theme across that all the work situations I’ve been in since that time. It’d repeatedly been a door-opening differentiator. Thanks Randall, your advice that day was the most valuable thing a boss / co-worker / peer ever gave me.
What about “Business is Personal”?
I didn’t say there could only be one lifelong career lesson. “Business is Personal” is a business foundation, while Randall’s advice became a personal mindset & perspective.
The seeds of “Business is Personal” grew out of watching my photographer clients about 20 years ago. The level of personal touch that these folks maintained in their business was something much different than I’d ever seen. They thought about their relationship with their clients very deeply and used it to not only improve sales, but to create clients who stuck with them through each of the seasons of life.
In true “when the student is ready, the teacher will appear” fashion, my business life turned a corner thanks to these folks. I suddenly saw every business through a different lens.
As an employer and business owner, “Business is Personal” took on a litany of nuances, year after year. It became the foundation of my consulting and writing because it has a broad application and touches so many parts of the business. It not only became a foundation for running a business, but it’s also a filter for businesses that I’ll do business with.
Ripples
Some non-traditional (for me) work eventually exposed “Business is Personal” as a nuanced connection between businesses, their employees, and the local community. Acquiring, caring for and retaining clients stabilized and helped grow those businesses and make them more resilient.
That stability ripples across families, schools, and quality of life in a community, impacting job creation and retention, crime, local funding, tourism, etc. Yes, it’s Economics 101.
That said, when explaining the “obligation” to get better at sales, customer service and marketing to a business owner as a means of impacting quality of life in their community, rather than “just a way to make more” – the big picture jumps out at them.
I’m curious what your core career lessons are. Have you thought about it? Have you thanked those who first instilled them in you? I just did.
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