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October 10, 2007
A Part Time Golf Pro Who Studied What?
I generally don't write about the work that sustained me and my family for thirty some years and now allows me to pursue my abnormal interests at considerable leisure, but a post by Charles Halton at Awilum stimulated a memory. Charles begins his post by asking, "What do financial speculation and Bible and ancient Near Eastern have in common?" Charles' question and his answer, which you should read, reminded me of one of the strangest and happiest episodes in my professional career.
Once the president of the division of the major company for which I worked asked me to interview a college student who was about to graduate. I was looking for someone I could groom to do help with strategic planning within a complex financial environment, with a very high technology product line, serving dynamic market. I was looking for someone with either a finance or marketing education but was open minded because what we needed didn't match any academic discipline but overlapped several.
Well, the person that the division president wanted me to interview for the job was a government major whose senior paper was on communism. Worse, our president knew him because the candidate was a part time gulf pro at his club! The truth is, I spent time trying figure out how to get out of interviewing the guy. But bosses are bosses. I knew the boss well enough to know that if I didn't like the part time golf pro with a government major, that would be good enough but I did need to interview him.
Five minutes into the interview, I knew why our president wanted me to interview him. He was very bright, very open and very energetic and didn't have the foggiest idea why we were interviewing him. But most important, he asked all the right questions. All his questions were about the process of the tasks of the job and not a one was about the job itself. He didn't pretend to have any answers but it was clear from the beginning that he wanted to learn and he was willing to work hard.
We made him an offer that he accepted and within one week after graduation, he was a contributing member of the team. Within one year, he had mastered, and I mean mastered, the financial, marketing and technology background that propelled him into his own very successful career. But to this day, he has never stopped asking how things work.
Over the intervening years, I have from time to time discussed some of my abnormal interest with him. His questions, and he often has lots of them, are consistently enthusiastic and without a hint of criticism. They are also always predicable. How do you know that? What is the evidence? Where does it come from? Help me understand the thought process. How was that discovered? Where can I learn more? And strangely (or perhaps not so strangely), he frequently made an effort to learn more even about things he had no need to know. At first, I was flattered. Then I learned that he approached everything and everyone he met in the same way. I'm also told that he can still play a very respectful game of golf and help you with your stroke.
Posted by Duane Smith at October 10, 2007 7:16 PM | Read more on Odds and Ends |
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