A Day in the Life of a Senior Leader

Chapter 23. Going Full Pascal

First year of college at UC Santa Cruz. First computer science class. Introduction to Programming. The language: Pascal.

Failed it. Failed it badly. Knew I was going to fail it halfway through the class.

This was my chosen profession. I’d been a grocery store clerk, a butcher, a video store clerk, the guy who backs up the system to tape drives on Saturday, and a bookseller. I wanted to be a computer scientist, and I failed my first class…badly.

There were situational reasons. First year in college. Adjusting to living in a dorm. Meeting all sorts of strange new people. The distractions were innumerable, but the real reason was character.

This is how I work. I walk into a situation, and I’m furiously trying to figure it out: “Which situation is this?” I am parsing the people, the words, and the mood, and I’m searching for familiarity. I am not calm until I find this familiarity, and when I do, BAM. OK, what’s next? How do we make progress from here? Let’s go.

You think this approach results from years of being a leadership type who is constantly thrown into random situations where I am required to build situational awareness quickly, and you’d be partially correct.

Here’s the thing: “I’ve always been this way.” Voracious consumer of information, professional introvert, and owner of a painfully short attention span. Combine all those, and you get me: usually well informed, very aware of what those other shifty humans might be plotting, and probably ...