Nobody Assigned Any of This

A year ago today I hung my own shingle, after thirty-five years inside other people's companies.

Mostly what I have been thinking about since is how I ended up qualified for this at all.

The Transcript Says Mechanical Engineering

It does, and aside from critical thinking and the simpler parts of math and physics, I use almost none of it.

What I do use came from five people, in this order. Two of them are on the transcript, in a department that had nothing to do with my major. The other three I found on my own.

This is a narrow list and a deliberate one. The partners, managers and mentors who grew the career are a separate roster, long and distinguished, and so is the foundation my parents laid and the support of my wife. None of that is what this is about.

This is the parallel path. The one nobody assigned, running alongside the one everybody could see.

Two Who Taught Me to Speak

Professor F. Joseph Routman and Dr. Danielle Ripich, communication sciences, Case Western, late eighties.

I did not go looking for either of them. I took COSI 100 because I was an engineering major in search of an easy A, and I found the thing that differentiated me for the next thirty-five years.

They did not teach me to speak. I could already do that, in the way an eighteen year old can already do something. What they did was take a natural ability and make it a skill, which is a different thing and takes somebody standing there telling you what actually happened when you opened your mouth.

Every seat I sat in after that, the thing that separated me was not what I knew. It was that I could stand up and make it land.

One Who Taught Me to Structure, Answer First

Barbara Minto, and I did not find her. Gartner did.

The Pyramid Principle was core training, and it rewired something. Conclusion first, then the support, then the detail. You do not build to the point. You open with it and spend the rest earning it.

That is not how stories work and it is exactly how a busy reader works, which is the first time I understood those were two different jobs.

One Who Taught Me to Structure, the Other Way

Nancy Duarte, and I have bought and given away more copies of Resonate than I can count.

Duarte says move back and forth. What is, what could be, what is, what could be, and the gap between them is what pulls a room forward.

Which is the opposite of Minto. Minto says lead with the answer. Duarte says withhold it and oscillate.

They are both right, in different rooms, and I learned them in that order. Everything I have built since is some arrangement of those two instincts arguing with each other.

One Who Taught Me to Show

Stephen Few, on how numbers actually get read. Show Me the Numbers and Now You See It.

Everything I write about cutting a chart down to what decides came from him. With apologies to slide:ology, he did more to change my slides than anybody I ever worked for.

Those three are on the site, under Library, along with the rest of the shelf. The two who mattered most never wrote a book I could buy.

None of It Was Assigned

Two professors in a department I did not belong to. One consultancy's internal training. Two books I bought myself.

Nobody put any of it on a syllabus and nobody put it in a review objective. It accumulated in the margins of what I was actually being paid to do, over three and a half decades, and it turned out to be the thing.

Which Is Probably True for You

That is the part worth taking away, and it is not really about me.

Whatever separates you in a room is unlikely to be the thing you were hired for. The engineer, the accountant, the operations lead: the skill that makes them the one who gets listened to almost never came from the training that qualified them. It came from somewhere adjacent, usually by accident, from somebody who was not assigned to teach it.

Which means waiting for it to be assigned does not work. Nobody is going to schedule the thing that differentiates you, and no review objective will name it. You have to notice what you are quietly getting good at in the margins, and then go get more of it on purpose.

I did not see this clearly until this year, when the margin became the whole job.

Nobody assigned that either.

-BZ