I Remember Knowing Nothing
I remember walking into the office at Computer Innovations in 1984. I was just a few months out of community college with a Computer Repair Technician certificate. This was the first day of my first job as a computer repair technician.
I was scared.
We had been rushed through the two-year training curriculum in 60 weeks. I had never seen or owned a personal computer. When we reached the end of our course and had passed all our exams, the lead instructor handed us our diplomas saying,
“You don’t know anything. This is your licence to learn.”
That didn’t inspire confidence, but it was very true.
The next twelve years were a blur as I used that “license to learn” to learn all I could about computers, computer components, local area networks, application software, and troubleshooting technology issues. I gained certifications and rose from field technician to network support specialist on the national technical support team – the top technical team in that company.
Then I switched industries.
I remember walking into the Mastercard Canada office in September 1996. It was my first day in the payments industry. I didn’t dare tell anyone that I had only had a credit card for 6 months. When Mastercard had called me to come in for an interview, I thought they were calling me to say I hadn’t paid my credit card bill.
I remember knowing nothing about the payments industry.
This time I wasn’t scared.
OK, I wasn’t AS scared as the first time.
I knew my greatest assets were:
The ability to learn. Being able to learn is far more important than knowing. Knowing means I got somewhere. Being able to learn means I am still growing on from what I have already learned and achieved.
The desire to know how things work. In the computer repair industry, I didn’t just learn computer repair PICs (Problem Isolation Charts). I had learned how computers and networks worked. I had built networks from scratch to understand the principles behind them. I self-studied. I attended courses. I wrote exams to gain network certifications. I brought this same discipline to the payments industry. I didn’t just want to be the guy installing Mastercard MIPS (Mastercard Interface Processors), I wanted to know how everything in a payments network worked.
A heart for partnerships: Office politics and matrixed corporate structures kill organic partnerships. Organic partnerships - learning everything I can about the people and roles whose work links with mine – are what make smooth processes staffed by knowledgeable workers.
Office Politics: My first Mastercard role was as a Network Engineer. I was supposed to remember that our network engineering team didn’t like the implementation team we handed off to. I didn’t have time for that nonsense. I partnered with the implementation team and learned so much from so many awesome people.
Matrixed Corporate Structures: In our local Mastercard office, we had a very experienced Fraud and Risk expert. Unfortunately, he hated computers. This was 1996 after all, and personal computers were still very new. I was the “IT guy”. We developed a wonderful symbiotic relationship: he taught me about Fraud and Risk; I taught him about personal computers and how “the bad guys” were using this new technology for fraud.
Over the 26 years I spent at Mastercard, I had the privilege of leveraging those assets. I got to work on almost every aspect of the payments system. I partnered with customers and learned their internal systems and processes to the point that I knew them better than their own staff. We built things never seen before, created and implemented complex solutions, and, more importantly, created multi-discipline, multi-company organic partnerships that accomplished amazing results.
So, what about your company.
Who are the people in your company who have:
The ability to learn,
The desire to know how things work, and
A heart for partnerships?
Have they been stuck in roles far below their potential – and all because “they know nothing about the payments industry”?
Let’s partner together:
I will mentor them and instill in them knowledge from my over 40 years of technology experience and expertise. I can ground them in the payments basics; teach them how payment systems work and interact with each other.
And you? As they learn, you give them roles in your company to maximize their potential to make your company the success it can be.