Stepping out of the Navy, my whole world had run on tight structure for years — you knew exactly what excellent looked like, because somebody had already written it down and made you say it back. Then I got out, and none of that translated onto a resume line a civilian recruiter could read. The only door that opened was the mailroom at a big financial company, so that's the door I walked through. I spent my first few weeks learning a company the strange way — through its outgoing mail, which...