Reading, according to me is a window to a new and an exciting world. During my school and college days, and even early part of my corporate life, I read more for pleasure, than to gain something useful. One incident flipped this thinking, in my fledgling IT career. By fate, I became an ERP consultant. I was neither aware of what a consultant should do, nor have any prior experience outside of IT world. This incident happened almost 2 years into my career. We had a product demonstration to the client. I was all dressed up, including a tie, standing in front of the client in a large conference room, talking about the product features.
An hour into the presentation, as I was explaining a key feature, and saying why it was important, I was stopped. The client CFO then started explaining that his industry didn’t work that way and he needed the feature to be customized. I was like a “deer caught in the headlights “. I did not know how his industry worked. I was not experienced enough to talk about customizing the product. Thankfully, a senior person pitched in stated, that we can discuss this in detail once we start the project.
During the break, another person from the client team casually stated that I need some industry experience. That was a turning point for me. I knew that I cannot go out of IT and gain industry experience. Also, there is no end to it. Tomorrow another person from another industry would comment that I did not know their industry. I started to think what could be the way out. The solution was “ to read “. I started reading books about various industry. The first few books I read were about basics of finances - profit and loss, balance sheet, cash flows etc. During the same time, I got interested in investing in the stock market. This incentivized me to read more. How to read and understand a company’s finances, understand their business and therefore make my investment decisions. I started to read about the companies, their business to be comfortable to invest in the stock. Sometimes, I would talk to people in that industry to gain a better understanding.
Over the next 15 years in my career, I read a lot of books. On an average about 20 books a year.. This did not include the books I read for pleasure - the fiction, comics, etc. These books were business books, biographies or autobiographies of successful business leaders. I became a “ Forrest Gump” for reading.
As I matured, I started to read books about failed businesses or leaders. Every book I read, every new and important piece of information was stored in memory. Some of them I tried to put into practice. Others were stored for a rainy day. Over a period of time, this habit broadened to reading a wide variety of things and storing for future use. Every time I started a new project in a new domain, I read the fundamentals of the how the industry worked. I started reading and learning about the nuances of that particular industry. Over a period of time, this helped me to gain respect from most of the clients that I worked with and sometimes even from my peers.
An interesting incident to finish this post. During a conversation for planning an offsite event, our leadership team was discussing on the travel, how we could not get train tickets, and how travel by road was difficult, I suggested that there is an option to hire an entire coach and attach it to the train, but it needed advance permissions from railway authorities. People did not believe it initially, but found that there was a provision. My reading helped that day.
Keep reading...
I will continue to write about reading, some of the books that influenced me personally, that helped me at work, etc, in the coming days.
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