When I arrived on a global bank’s trading floor in the early 1990s as a Technical Analyst, I was handed a blank slate and a massive task: develop a way to monitor every workstation, server, and network component of a disruptive new force called the Internet. There is no greater professional high than starting with zero knowledge and emerging as an industry expert.
That journey began in a windowless room for a two-day intensive on SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol). The class was led by the father of SNMP education, who will remain nameless. He taught us the anatomy of MIBs and OIDs—the digital fingerprints of any connected device. Today, those OIDs are embedded in everything from your refrigerator to your irrigation system, sitting there like silent DNA, whether the world uses them or not.
The instructor taught us the beauty of the “fingerprint,” but the subtext of the course was the art of monitoring. Some called it proactive monitoring.
At the end of the second day, a line of exhausted attendees formed to thank our instructor. I was one person away from the podium, my own question ready, when the analyst in front of me took the plunge.
“So,” the man asked, “all of this is really about being proactive, right? The ability to predict an event before it happens?”
The temperature in the room seemed to spike. He pursed his lips, the heat radiating off him in waves. He paused, visibly struggling to maintain his composure, before blurring out: “There is no such word as proactive! I will not answer that!”
He turned and walked away. Two days of brilliance, and he ended it by slamming the door on the crowd. The analyst turned to me, mouth agape, muttering about what a jerk he was before stomping off. I stood there, paralyzed—because his question was exactly the one I had intended to ask.
For months, his response haunted me. I knew there was a directive hidden in his frustration, a lesson I was missing. It finally clicked on the day a sidewalk subcontractor accidentally sliced through a fiber optic cable.
On a trading floor, time is measured in milliseconds and registered in lost millions. The floor went partially dark. Because of the redundant infrastructure we had built, our monitoring systems identified the failure points instantly and the router teams could redirect traffic before the traders even had time to stand up and scream.
In that moment of chaos, I finally understood what he meant that day.
I could never have “predicted” a backhoe slicing through a cable on a random Tuesday. I couldn’t be “proactive” about a fluke accident. His point was that the word is a lie we tell ourselves to feel in control. In reality, you can only react.
The “proactive” person is actually just someone who has built a set of directives capable of reacting faster than the unanticipated outcome by those affected.
He was right. There is no such word as proactive. There is only the speed of your pivot.
David Nadas 