Jon Childs: Out of the bottleneck

摘要

He'd worked his way up in the company from an apprenticeship - but though he'd advanced, his 'toolkit' just hadn't kept pace. "It was extremely frustrating. I'd be spending days, if not weeks ploughing through Excel spreadsheets and batting studies backwards and forwards to customers with the relative merits of this or that solution. And I kept telling my colleague that given the time, I was sure I could get a computer to iron out the process." It might have been left at that, but when that same colleague reappeared as his boss over a decade later it seems the conversations hadn't been forgotten: "He drew me to one side and asked if I remembered all those great ideas... and then he said, 'take a year out and just do it'."