The Most Useful Person in the Room May Not Have a Plan

There is a comforting way to describe a successful career.

You identify an ambition, acquire the necessary qualifications, accept a sequence of increasingly impressive jobs and eventually arrive somewhere near the position you intended to occupy.

It makes a lovely diagram. It also leaves out most of the interesting parts.

Nathan Coutinho started studying accounting. A friend dragged him into a computer lab one night to show him the web. The demonstration proved rather inconvenient for the accounting plan.

He switched to management information systems, moved through consulting, spent 17 years at CDW and eventually joined Logitech. Along the way, he worked in technical roles, strategy, collaboration leadership, marketing and communications. More recently, he has become increasingly interested in filmmaking.

If you draw a line through those points backwards, it looks like a strategy. At the time, it involved considerably more uncertainty.

What interested me in our conversation for Before It Was Obvious was the capability underneath the changing titles. Nathan repeatedly found himself being asked to do something he had not done before. He learned enough to get it moving. Then the experience became useful somewhere else.

The career was accumulating before the explanation existed.

The project you would rather not mention

We tend to tell career stories using the moments that sound impressive.

The promotion. The board presentation. The major customer. The business milestone. These are much easier to put on a conference biography than a difficult afternoon spent trying to reconcile product information between two computer systems.

Nathan offered precisely that sort of example.

Following an acquisition, he became involved in figuring out how part numbers and product information would move between systems. He had no particular desire to become the world's leading authority on the subject. He also lacked a background in the specific problem.

Someone needed a person who could understand enough of both sides to get it done.

There were product images, warranties, e-commerce requirements and the various dependencies that make buying something online appear effortless to the person doing the buying. Effortless experiences usually require a remarkable amount of effort somewhere else.

He did the work. More significantly, he learned how the business fitted together and met people he would continue working with for years.

At the time, it was a job to finish. Later, it was part of the reason he could understand a broader problem.

There is a practical lesson here for anyone trying to decide whether an assignment is beneath them, beside the point or an unwanted interruption. Sometimes it is. Organisations are perfectly capable of distributing pointless work with tremendous confidence.

But sometimes the assignment gives you access to a part of the business you would otherwise never see.

The useful questions are what you will understand afterwards, who you will work with and whether that knowledge can travel. A task does not need an impressive label to have lasting value.

Curiosity needs somewhere to go

Nathan is curious about a great many things. This is a characteristic I recognise, partly because I have spent a fair amount of time being distracted by interesting things myself.

Curiosity alone, however, can produce an impressive collection of unfinished hobbies.

What makes it valuable at work is the connection between wanting to understand something and being willing to work through the awkward part where you do not yet understand it.

That awkward part is rarely included in the polished biography. It involves asking basic questions, discovering unfamiliar terminology and occasionally finding out that everyone else assumed you already knew something.

Nathan's move into corporate strategy required another round of learning. Technical knowledge helped him get there, but it could not substitute for understanding financial statements, research or acquisitions.

He had to expand the way he looked at the company.

It is tempting to describe this as transferable skills, which is true but incomplete. The transfer does not happen automatically. You still have to recognise which parts of the new job are unfamiliar and go and learn them.

A reputation for figuring things out is built through repeated delivery. After a while, people stop asking whether you have previously held the exact title. They ask whether you are the person who can make sense of the next problem.

That is a valuable reputation to have. It is also quite difficult to acquire without occasionally accepting work you would not have selected from a menu.

Let people see how the decisions are made

One of Nathan's most important experiences was being asked to explain cloud computing to CDW's board.

He expected to prepare his contribution, appear when required and leave when it was finished. Instead, he was brought into the preparation with the wider leadership team.

The explanation was straightforward: they were presenting as one team. He needed to understand the rest of the business discussion. Others needed to understand his section. The account had to hang together when questions arrived.

For someone still developing as a leader, that access was an education.

He saw the numbers, heard the questions and experienced the coaching. The senior team helped connect his material to what came before and after it. He learned how a business explanation was built, rather than merely being told to make his presentation more strategic.

This is something managers can act on without inventing another leadership initiative.

If you want someone to develop judgment, let them see judgment being exercised. Give them enough context to understand the decision. Make room for their questions. Explain why one argument works and another does not.

Keeping people outside the conversation and then complaining that they lack a broad view is an impressively efficient way to preserve the problem.

The unglamorous part of disruption

Cloud computing gives us another useful example of the gap between the announcement and the work.

A reseller could see that customers were moving towards subscriptions. Recognising the direction was one challenge. Making the business operate that way was another.

Nathan describes the effort of adapting billing systems while suppliers adopted different platforms and approaches. The commercial model had changed, and the systems around it had to catch up.

From outside, that may sound like an administrative detail. From inside, it can become a large, expensive and consequential project.

You still have to sell the service, deliver it, bill for it and manage the relationship. The exciting new proposition arrives with some distinctly unexciting dependencies.

This is why I am suspicious of explanations that treat market change as a matter of spotting the next product category. Seeing the opportunity matters. Understanding what your organisation must become capable of doing matters just as much.

It also explains the value of people who have spent time in several departments. They are more likely to ask what happens after the customer says yes.

My contribution to Nathan's first day

When Nathan joined Logitech, he called me to ask what I wanted him to focus on.

I told him to “do good things.”

This did not produce the immediate expression of gratitude I might have hoped for.

He had come from an environment with substantial responsibilities, a large team and clear commercial expectations. He was looking for a brief. I had apparently supplied the motivational equivalent of a fortune cookie.

There was a reason for it. Scott Wharton had given me the same instruction when I arrived. The point was to understand the business, identify where you could contribute and then get on with it.

For Nathan, that eventually worked. He spoke to people across the organisation, learned how regions differed and found where his experience could help. Analyst relations became an important part of his work, alongside other responsibilities.

But it would be much too convenient to tell this story as proof that my management method was obviously correct.

Nathan was able to operate with ambiguity. Others who worked for me needed clearer objectives and a more defined role. I did not always provide them.

That was my mistake.

A person asking for structure is giving you information about the conditions they need to succeed. Treating that as a character flaw saves the manager from doing any adaptation, but it does not improve the result.

Freedom needs a manager attached

The distinction is easy to lose because autonomy sounds so attractive.

Who would not want freedom, trust and room to make a contribution?

The answer is that people may want all three while also wanting to know what success looks like, which decisions they own and when someone will tell them they are heading in the wrong direction.

Those are reasonable questions.

Some work is about defining the next problem. Some is about delivering an established process reliably. Companies need both. Individual people may move between them as the work changes.

Nathan describes that movement in his own career: leading teams, returning to individual contribution and taking responsibility for a team again when the opportunity calls for it.

The management job is to understand the work and meet the person where they are. An instruction that energises one colleague can leave another anxious and stuck.

There is no particular virtue in making everyone decode the same three words.

Learn the craft before you buy the promise

Nathan's growing interest in filmmaking might look like another change of direction. In practice, it follows the same pattern.

He wants to understand how a film is made: the production, the edit, the pacing, the colour. He is interested in the craft, and he is doing enough of it to learn where the difficulties are.

That has a second benefit.

If you understand the work, you can brief an agency better. You can ask useful questions. You have a basis for deciding whether a proposed change should take minutes or weeks.

Expertise still deserves to be paid for. A complicated task can look simple to someone who has never attempted it. But learning the mechanics gives you a better chance of distinguishing complexity from a confident explanation of why the invoice needs another zero.

This applies well beyond video. Managers commission work all the time. A little practical experience can make them better customers and better colleagues.

The objective is not to do every job yourself forever. It is to understand enough to know what good work requires.

The audience did not receive 150 slides as a gift

Nathan's account of learning to present is worth the conversation on its own.

His first substantial attempt involved 150 slides in 40 minutes. He finished delighted with himself. He had got through the deck.

A colleague then explained that people had been falling asleep or leaving.

A small difference in interpretation, but quite an important one.

He had treated the amount of content delivered as evidence of success. His audience had experienced an information problem at high speed.

With practice and coaching, he learned to think differently: move with purpose, read the room and build the story before producing the slides. He describes working out what he wants people to take away, then assembling the material around that.

We agreed that a presentation should inspire people to learn more. Listing every fact you know does not guarantee that anyone will care about any of them.

The same applies to teaching, marketing and leadership. Knowing the subject is necessary. Helping someone else understand why it matters is a separate skill.

That skill created opportunities for Nathan, including the board presentation that helped expand his career. Communication made his technical understanding useful to people making business decisions.

He also offers a final practical test: prepare as though your notes and confidence monitor will fail. If you cannot continue without the slides, you probably need to understand the story better.

A pattern worth keeping

There is a limit to how neatly any of this can be turned into advice.

Nathan did not control every opportunity. People took chances on him. He benefited from managers who gave him access, colleagues who corrected him and roles that let him learn.

He also had to respond when those chances arrived.

What he could control was the willingness to become a beginner again, do the unfamiliar work and keep adding to his understanding.

The result is a career that connects much more clearly in retrospect than it could have done at the start.

For the person building a career, that is permission to take a useful detour. For the manager, it is a reason to notice the colleague who keeps making sense of difficult things, even when their CV does not match the next job description perfectly.

The most useful person in the room may not have a grand plan.

They may simply be the person prepared to find out.

Explore the Before It Was Obvious interviews at B4Obvious.com.