Brooke Allen

The only thing I’ve ever been expert at is programming in a language called APL that requires a special keyboard just to type the weird symbols that it uses. This is what happened.

In the Fall of 1972 I took a class that introduced me to APL two weeks before the semester ended at which time the computing center took the language off the mainframe rather than pay $500/month to IBM in licensing fees. But I’d fallen in love with the language and I really wanted to continue learning so I wrote to Ken Iverson who invented APL and who had just published a high school algebra text using the language. I asked him if I were to round up 10 students for a free summer course using his book would he give me 10 copies. He sent 11 and a note saying I’d forgotten to ask for one for myself.

It only took a day to find 10 students to give me their summers so next I asked IBM if they would waive the license fee. They did and then I told the computing center they were the only missing piece and so they let me use their computers for free. That is how I began learning APL one chapter ahead of a bunch of high school students.

That landed me a student work-study job at the computing center in the spring and later when my boss left I got her full-time job in the fall of my senior year. I worked for a pittance at the university for nearly four years after graduating and it was by maintaining code and teaching classes that I became good enough to land a job in operations research at American Airlines. When they moved headquarters from New York City to Dallas I took a job with a small systems house where I got to see the inner workings of a few businesses. When I completed an MBA at NYU I was a middling student but a fairly awesome programmer.

When Merrill Lynch offered me a full-time job  it was not to write programs but to invent new products and trading strategies. However, I used APL in every aspect of my research.

Everything I’ve done since has involved APL including all the software I wrote to support the trading desk I built and ran for the last 18 years. APL has made me wealthier than I ever could have imagined.

So, if you want to become expert in the only thing I learned really well then do what I did then, luckily for you, today it will take half the time and cost virtually nothing. Simply download the APL Manual for free and get yourself a free copy of the language interpreter. Get to work using it and see where it takes you.

Before you whine that you will only do the work to learn something new if you know where it is going, then please know that the only way I got to where I am today is because I wasn’t afraid to try new things and I didn’t care where I was going.

I learned APL because I could not help myself – it was that cool.

In the middle of July, 2013 I presented at the Practical Wisdom for Management conference at Yale. Click on this image to see my slides on SlideShare:

About a decade ago someone in accounting, or personnel, or wherever, asked me for job titles.

I said, “We don’t have job titles in our group.”

She went away.

Soon she was back saying that a new policy required that we have job titles, and that I had to give them some.

I said, “I can’t think of any.”

She said, “Make something up.”

I said, “OK, we’re all Senior Executive Vice Presidents.”

She went away.

She was back the following day saying, “Those titles won’t do. Nobody in your group is a vice president, senior, executive, or otherwise. Besides, we need functional titles.”

“As opposed to bullshit ones?” I asked.

She didn’t laugh but waited around until I came up with some stuff… Group Head (me), Analyst, Programmer, Trader … make that Senior Trader (never mind that we don’t have any junior ones)… I don’t remember and don’t care, although I can now find out if need be by asking everyone in my group for their new business cards.

Since our first day in the mid-1990′s, we have had a daily checklist, similar to what pilots find in airplane cockpits and janitors find on bathroom walls: do this by 8:15, start that computer before this one, run that program, file this report by 5:00, etc. The checklist gets updated as needed and has gone from perhaps 15 items to over 50 in 16 years.

A while ago our organization was restructured to come under a German parent, which meant that now we became subject to new regulators and rules. Auditors from Frankfurt arrived and were very impressed at the length and detail of our check-list, and apparently it got a glowing stamp of approval.

But they were back, and with a frown, said, “We can’t find your job descriptions.”

I said, “That’s because we don’t have any.”

“That won’t do; how can you run a business like that?”

I pointed out that we’d been doing fine for over a decade, but they would have none of it, and demanded something pronto.

I said, “We all do what needs to be done.”

They were not amused. They gave me a sample of what they wanted that looked like a checklist for somebody else. I complained to someone in compliance, and she explained that we must now comply with new German risk rules that require detailed job descriptions, among other things.

So we complied and divided up the checklist, assigning things by who does what. They were satisfied and went away.

However, the German regulators, (who are “principles based,” rather than “rules based” as are the regulators in the USA), our management, and everyone in our group all know that compliance with rules isn’t enough, and faithfully following a task list alone isn’t really doing your job.

We have a mission statement specific to our group which states, “Our goal as a group is to act such that every person associated with our endeavor will feel that at the end of the day they were better for it.”

We have a detailed document itemizing who exactly those people are, and we update it when stakeholders change. We document our principles and values, and update them too, although infrequently, since they seldom change. We have procedure manuals that remind us of how to do things, policy manuals that tell us what and why, and checklists that help us remember when to do things, and document when we forget.

But a job description is not doing its job if it only lists tasks better itemized in a checklist.

In essence, we all have only one job description, and that is “to care.”

All jobs and their descriptions must begin with an understanding of what it means to care, about what, and for whom.

What follows is an advertisement for an assistant I ran in early 2013. It goes with a story I wrote published in Quartz magazine called: How to hire good people instead of nice people. Read the story to understand what would have happened if you had responded to this ad.