Alina Okun

I research the origins of modern working life. Almost none of it is older than a hundred and fifty years. It was invented, recently, for reasons that made sense at the time.

I became an accountant for a practical reason, which is that accountants are always needed. I started as an auditor at Arthur Andersen in 2000 and left in the spring of 2002, a few months before the firm ceased to exist.

Publishing came next, and it remains my favorite job I have ever had. I spent two years at Simon & Schuster as a senior financial analyst, reading books months before anyone else could.

Several years in accounting policy followed, first at UBS and then at A&P. I was global controller of a marketing analytics company for seven years after that, and finished my corporate career as the CFO of a technology startup.

Along the way I invested in seven early-stage companies, earned a doctorate in strategy and innovation, and co-authored two books, Luminary Leadership and Meet You in Calabar.

In 2021 I co-founded a career intelligence company. Two years of working on how people navigate their careers left me with a question I could not answer, which is where the modern career came from in the first place.

The manuscript of The Brief Experiment came out of that question, and so did Nariway, which is now an archive of nearly six hundred entries tracing the origins of resumes, weekends, retirement, offices, job interviews, and most other arrangements people assume have always existed.