I recently wrote a post (see here) about the importance of taking notes in meetings and then using those note to improve organizational accountability. Note-taking is hardly a core area of focus for this blog… but improving organizational accountability sure is, so here goes with another article on the same theme.

I had a very powerful experience early on in my career that, in many ways, set me on a path (ok, a yellow brick road) trying to repeat it. After getting my graduate degree, I landed a job at one of the big accounting firms as a health care consultant. I was one of the first (maybe the first) staff member with microcomputer skills as I had become quite adept at using Lotus 1-2-3 to handle spreadsheet tasks. Consultants at the firm had developed mysteriously long calculations to support the creation of the various funds and cash flows associated with tax exempt bond financings… all by hand. OK kids, this was a thing.

During my first week there, one of the senior staff members grabbed a gigantic pad of accounting paper and then sat me down for what would be the first of many sessions to show me just how such a thing was done. Early on, I asked if they could do this with Lotus 1-2-3 and he looked at me as though I was speaking Mandarin. Yeah, never-mind, I thought to myself.

When the time came for me to fly solo, I built a proper working model in Lotus. The higher ups thought that I had whipped up some type of magical charm, a whipper-snapper’s witchcraft they said. Well, once it was built and I showed them how it worked and what you could do with it… let’s just say that was a pretty good day.

The ability to make modification minus the pencils, erasers, and stacks of paper was a revelation. And what used to take many, many weeks to complete (and rather poorly, I might add) now took just days. Oh, and it was awesome. And transformative.

To say that this helped launch my career as a consultant would be a quantum understatement. Word spread of this alchemist wunderkind who could perform magic with numbers. Within a year or so, more spreadsheeters showed up and in no time, the consulting practice was radically transformed. We began developing sophisticated financial projection models, what-if analyses, and all sorts of other wildly useful concoctions for our clients.

In the end, I was not a genius. I was just a little more genius and a little earlier than anybody else.

And so this then set the stage for my unending quest to always be cutting edge, always paying attention to what was coming down the pike to see if that might have the same kind of turbo mode impact on whatever it was that I was doing at the time.

I was the first guy with a Palm Pilot. I was even the first one with a Palm Treo, which was a Blackberry competitor. Imagine that, managing your schedule and tasks on a small device you could put in your pocket? And then email became prevalent and I appreciated the ability to write and respond to them untethered from a computer. Of course, we take all this for granted now but at that point, this was game changing.

Part of this automation quest flowed over to note-taking and to do list management. More next week…