It was a normal Tuesday.
Susan Kish was sitting on the 29th floor of her building, looking over Manhattan, when she got mad. She was in a meeting with young man named Mattan Griffel (before he founded the company now called One Month), and they were talking about his experience in teaching himself how to code. He was building a class to teach other young entrepreneurs how to code, and something snapped.
“Why is it that everyone assumes young people are the only ones who want to learn to code?” she asked.
Kish is the Head of Cross Platform Initiatives at Bloomberg LP, and she manages a strategic portfolio of projects across new products, sales, finance, and media. Yet she found that she wasn’t able to have strategic conversations with the technology teams in terms of media and project scheduling. So, she challenged Mattan, our CEO, to teach her how to code.
“If you can teach me, you can teach anyone,” she explained in her 2013 TED main stage talk.
The last time she coded, however, it was in BASIC: with little green tapes, hand-held, when she was a young child. “I am the definition of a digital immigrant. I am also a mother, a super-commuter, a former banker, and an executive,” she said, “and my schedule does not allow me to sign up for biweekly classes downtown.”
So what did it take to get this busy executive to learn code?
She signed up for lessons with Mattan online, once a week. She said it was frustrating, at times — she threw her hands up in the air, sometimes stalled for a week or two.
After a few months, however, she started to get the hang of it. She learned that “coding” means having the command of at least 5 languages, no easy task. It also requires a problem-solving mentality, a keen sense of aesthetic, and a sharp eye for grammar and punctuation.
Taking coding classes improved her mental clarity, her ability to focus, and reminded her of just how precise and dedicated her technology teams are when designing new prototypes and building out projects.
She found that learning to code and the act of coding itself delivered an extreme joy of accomplishment. Coding is the future, and not learning to code was akin to taking a huge professional risk: “In the professional world of tomorrow,” she said, “you have to know two things: you have to know the basics of business, and the basics of coding. Without both, you are taking an enormous risk. And if you start with the technology side, you have a tremendous advantage.”
Learning to code helped her reboot her computer, it lets her understand the jokes and allusions in team work sessions, and she can walk into meetings with other senior execs and speak knowledgeably about timelines, costs, and prices. Knowing technology is a tremendous advantage in the business world of tomorrow, she says.
Learn the language of technology and build a better business.
