Never Turn Down A Mission
Weekly Sentiment, August 30, 2022
Before business school, when I worked in the office of a retail music chain, I was a programmer focused on various assignments. Some related to accounting. Some to point-of-sale tracking. Some to Human Resources. As a junior programmer, I worked on whatever was required.
At the same time, the company was building a new warehouse for storing records, cds, and other product available in their stores. This included a new, state-of-the-art inventory processing and tracking system. Instead of requiring the employees knowing where product was stored in the warehouse, everything was tracked through scanners and bar codes, with instructions created every day for retrieving and shipping product.
After a year of work, and 5 days before the warehouse was due to open, my boss walked up to me and said he needed me to change what I was working on. The technology for the warehouse wasn’t ready, and the team working on the project was just let go. He needed my help.
It got worse. We looked at what was completed, and saw what little there was. When looking at what was created, we saw that the program files just included a description of what the program was going to do, and an “end” statement.
I started working on the project. In fact, in a way, we started the project from close to the scratch. 5:30 came around, and I had 2 choices. Go home on schedule, or do whatever I could to help the company.
We worked for 6 straight days, 18 hours a day. I took ownership of the implementation of some of they key components of the platform. Between 2 of us, we got the warehouse open and running only 1 day late. The work continued, though at a slightly slower pace, over the subsequent months. The leaders of the company were deeply involved, as this was an existential threat to the company’s existence. It was incredibly hard, and some of the most fun I’ve ever had at work.
As the dust settled, even my boss left, and I was given ownership of the entire product inventory and distribution platform for a retail chain of over 140 stores. As a 23 year old. Which I then leveraged into my acceptance into business school. And then into my job on Wall Street.
None of this might have happened had I not embraced a seemingly impossible task and a totally unreasonable request on my time.