Grunt Works!

 Charlie Munger once said: the best source of new work is the work on your desk

Meaning : that if you do a good job on the work in front of you, the right people will notice and give you more opportunities to impress.

That simple maxim is pretty much the story of Adam wright’s Life;

Wright started out as an intern at Mid America Energy – back before Berkshire Hathaway even owned the Iowa-based utility.

And as an intern he was often asked to do the grunt work that no one else wanted to do

For example. Mid American purchased Northern Natural Gas from Dynegy in 2002

And all of the company’s operating manuals had to be updated to reflect its new parent company name.

This meant thousands of pages of tedious reading and striking out every mention of Dynegy or Enron and replacing it with MidAmerican Energy.

This job fell to Wright:

While I was doing that, I was reading the standards, I was reading the operating manuals , and I started asking questions like, “What does this mean?” or “How does this work? “ or “Do we still do this?”

I started to learn how we operate systems.

And from there , When new programs had to be built, they would ask me, “Hey you know the procedures and standards , You’ve been through them all, How about you write the new one?”

After immersing himself in the Northern Natural Gas Manuals, Wright moved over to that company’s operations group and eventually rose to VP of marketing before re-joining MidAmerican en-route to becoming CEO

“If you just simple plow the ground beneath your feet, you will unearth all this value, all this opportunity. If the land that you’re standing on isn’t producing fruit, nine times out of ten its because you’re not plowing the field, you’re not tilling the soil. You’re not getting up early. You’re not doing what you have to do to plant the seeds to reap the harvest later. If your would just stand there and do that – work hard in that area- there will be opportunities in front of you. “