Career Narrative
Thank you for your interest in my professional background. My goal in this narrative is to provide you more detail regarding my accomplishments and a sense of how I progressed from position to position over the course of my career. In chronological order:
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
I began my professional life as a technical project coordinator for JPL — Cal Tech's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. JPL is an amazing organization, at the forefront of modern technology as it applies to the aerospace industry. To give you an idea of how well regarded they are: JPL is the consulting firm NASA turns to when their own rocket scientists are stumped.
After being hired, I joined a small group of JPL'ers in Reston, Virginia, working in NASA's Space Station Freedom Program Office. The SSFPO, as it was known, was responsible for coordinating and cross-checking the work being done by each of NASA's research and development centers. Our JPL group was known as the Program Engineering and Assessments group.
Upon arriving in Virginia, I was assigned to two work streams. The primary effort was to create a set of Space Station availability requirements. The term "availability" is meant in the technical sense — the Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF) divided by the MTBF plus the Mean Time To Repair (MTTR). There are other related definitions, but I won't bore you.
My role was to collate the input of various experts in the field and draft the "Strawman" (first draft) specification. This was my first exposure to technical — and I do mean technical — writing. It was also my first exposure to operations as an engineering discipline. I have a scanned version of the final report available for anyone who's interested. Highly recommended as a sleep-aid. In May 1989 the JPL team threw me a lovely send-off to Air Force flight school with high hopes that someday I'd get to visit the station in person.
Click here to visit the JPL homepage. Return to top.
United States Air Force
I entered Undergraduate Pilot Training in June 1989. At the time, this was a year-long program with about 5-6 months of training in the T-37, a subsonic jet, followed by a full 6 months in the supersonic T-38A (pictured at left). I completed flight training at the top of my class in June of 1990, and was selected to return as a T-38 Instructor Pilot. The preparation to become a full-fledged instructor pilot was my first exposure to the discipline of adult learning. In my time training student pilots, I accrued the highest student pass rate in my flight, and also became the Flight Scheduler, responsible for the training flow of each student. This was my first practical exposure to the discipline of project management. Also, I trained a lot of foreign students and have some funny stories if you're interested. I spent a very gratifying two years in the T-38 before they closed our base in 1992.
After leaving Arizona, I transitioned into the C-130 aircraft. You've seen it quite a bit on dirt runways in remote war-torn regions of the world, often serving as a backdrop to Anderson Cooper or Christiane Amanpour. After training as a C-130 aircraft commander, I got to visit a number of these troubled regions, including a couple of tours of duty in Saudi Arabia and Oman. Being an aircraft commander was a very gratifying experience. The experience in small-team leadership I received has been helpful to me to this day. I also continued to gain project management experience, though we tended to refer to these complex, demanding projects as "missions".
Once I had mastered the aircraft commander's role, I was selected to train as a formation leader, which meant the missions I flew involved coordinating multiple aircraft in the service of mission (project) objectives. In other words, the ante was upped. At about the same time, I was selected as the commander of D Flight. Our group was responsible for the IT infrastructure, and I got my first exposure to IT project leadership in this position. Being a flight commander also meant people management responsibilities, so I took on HR and performance management responsibilities for a team of 15.
After my stint as a flight commander, I became the squadron's executive officer, working directly for the squadron commander. Talk about educational. I garnered real insight into practical operations management through this experience. Also, in this same period, the Air Force was going through a "quality/management by metrics" initiative — very much a predecessor to the Six Sigma discipline in use today. I was responsible for designing meaningful metrics for our squadron and instituting the measurement and review systems. After our program was underway, we decided to submit our squadron for the Baldrige National Quality Award. I wrote the submission in full. While we didn't win, the Air Force used broad chunks of our submission as the example for other units seeking the award in the following years.
Based on my execution of these roles, I was selected to an operations leadership position, working directly for the commander of the entire airlift group and reporting regularly to the base commander, who was a general officer. My "current operations" group managed all C-130 missions worldwide including a number of high visibility presidential, rescue, and combat missions. I instituted a number of improvements to technological and operational processes (you can read more about these in the letters of recommendation on my endorsements page). In 1998, though it was a very hard decision given my career trajectory, I elected to leave the Air Force. The reason? Family. The peace dividend meant doing more with less, and our crews were spending up to 6-7 months out of the country supporting operations in the desert, Bosnia, etc. I had just had my first child, and I just didn't want to miss that much of his early life. Before leaving the Air Force, I brokered my operational leadership and technology experience into an operations leadership role with a rising internet consulting firm.
Click here to visit the United States Air Force homepage. Return to top.
iXL, Inc.
I joined the San Francisco office of iXL as the VP of Operations in April of 1998. This office had started life as Green Room Productions, an internet development firm focused solely on the travel and hospitality vertical. Logically enough, our office became the home of iXL's travel and hospitality practice. At the time I joined, we could count Disney, Starwood Hotels and Resorts, Travelocity, and a number of other mid-market travel companies as clients. Shortly after I joined, we began a pursuit of Virgin Atlantic Airways, ultimately winning that account. The Virgin pursuit was my first in-depth involvement with management of the sales process, and I had the chance to author broad swathes of our winning proposal. The Virgin work, which included the creation of a new booking engine in partnership with EDS, was to become one of the jewels in iXL — San Francisco's crown. Through this all, while retaining a focus on travel, we broadened our base to include clients like ITT Cannon, Wells Fargo, and others.
Needless to say, this was an exciting time to be part of the internet world. Competition was fierce. We were on the leading edge of the progression from internet brochure-ware to internet applications at a time when there weren't standard or accepted approaches. Java was gaining ascendance. Methodologies such as Rational's unified modeling language were in play. Numerous "middleware" companies were making a grab for market share. There were a lot of moving pieces that required serious operational leadership. I'm happy to say that our office did very well in this regard, maintaining annual profitability while growing from 28 to 220-plus staff, acquiring two companies, undergoing a major office development project, all in two years.
My time at iXL was also a tremendous learning experience, though it was of the "drinking through a fire hose" variety. I managed all of our functional groups, from client services (account and project management) to creative services to technology services and even internet marketing. I learned quite a bit about the care and feeding of these groups, and the creation of environments that would make each productive. In this capacity, I continued my training in the discipline of project management, acting as the de facto program and projects portfolio manager for most of my tenure. iXL also provided my first real exposure to operational finance, the constant updating and review of trends and metrics in support of smart business decisions. I was lucky to have some amazing mentors in this regard, as well as a significantly GAAP-minded CFO. No Enron funny-business for us. In addition, I got to take part in two business acquisitions from qualification through close. In both cases, after closing, operationalizing these acquisitions became my responsibility. There was a steep learning curve, but I did pretty well. Despite the relocation of one of these companies — which became iXL's learning practice — from San Jose to San Francisco, we only had 12% turnover — well under the industry average at the time.
After about a year and a half with iXL, my boss assumed the regional vice presidency and relocated to the Denver office. I assumed the acting general manager's position, a role I performed for most of my remaining time with iXL. In my last few months with iXL I realized that the market was softening and that services buyers were noticing too. Not only that, the big consulting firms, who'd been slow out of the internet gate, were now becoming increasingly competitive. I and a few other office leaders became proponents for more paced, managed growth in light of this trend, and we had some success in this regard despite the difficulties inherent in transitioning from a hunter to a farmer mindset. At around this same time, a contact made me aware of an opportunity with a start-up selling a combined product-service in the data storage sector. The opportunity was doubly attractive as it would allow me more direct involvement in formulating business strategy, and the base service was one that customers were required to perform by law — a normal industry setback wouldn't do away with the customer's need for our offering. Taken together, these points were sufficiently compelling and I moved on. iXL merged with another internet consulting and development firm, Scient, and within a year of my departure went the way of so many internet companies of that period. Accordingly, there's no website extant, but you can find mutual connections using LinkedIn .
Return to top.
The SARAA Corporation
The SARAA Corporation provided a compelling opportunity. It was "off the radar" but had rich market potential. The company was still in the conceptual stage, seeking partners with the technologies necessary to make the vision a reality. The vision was this: around the country, there were over 7000 document storage service providers well behind the technology curve — the best known of these, and the sector "gorilla", was Iron Mountain. Still, most of these businesses were "mom and pop" concerns, but generally highly profitable. The most advanced partnered with service bureaus to have document images scanned in for use by their clients, but it was then the service bureau that did business with the client when images were required. These relationships were helpful to storage providers from a market share perspective, but much less so from a profitability perspective. The SARAA Corporation aimed to provide a turn-key, in house, next generation service bureau capability. Selling to select customers, this would enable market consolidation and the economies of scale enjoyed by larger providers such as Iron Mountain. Our initial interviews with potential clients were very promising.
The technological aspect of the plan was also promising. Very high speed networked scanners capable of handling heterogeneous paper sizes and weights were beginning to hit the mass market at affordable prices, providing a practical means of digitizing information as it arrived at the storage facility. These same scanners had improved OCR capabilities, greatly easing the most labor intensive aspect of document storage — accurate indexing and retrieval. At the same time, we became aware of a technology vendor with a solution hunting for a marketable problem. Ricoh Silicon Valley had created what they called the eCabinet. This was a networked storage device that made and stored a copy of every document transmitted over the network, whether an email, a fax, or a scanned document. This was initially conceived as an in-house device, but my team was able to modify it so that it was capable of near real-time synchronization with centralized servers — in concept the same servers which stored scanned paper at the document storage facility. This had the potential of being an add-on service that storage vendors could provide their clients to leap-frog the service bureaus. It also was poised to capture a trend then gaining momentum — larger companies were beginning to enhance their own digital document capabilities. The eCabinet offered these firms a drop-in solution, with recourse to paper when required. More attractive, this technology in no way cannibalized the storage vendors' markets, as paper document retention was a matter of law.
Sadly, like many good ideas in the period after the internet bust, our concept struggled for funding. Nevertheless, we had one investor committed for initial development, and three others ready to commit. In the aftermath of 9/11, however, the capital markets dried up and the company folded. Shortly after the SARAA Corporation closed its doors, my family picked up and moved from the Bay Area to the Triangle in North Carolina.
Return to top.
Square D / Schneider Electric
Once in the Raleigh-Durham area, I quickly found work that took me back to my engineering roots. I joined Square D, the US subsidiary of Schneider Electric, in an engineering capacity. Almost from day one, I was involved in an interesting development project that was very important to Square D's profitability. Though my engineering skills were rusty, they served me well as I began my work on the program. We got the product qualified and launched in good time, and the returns were better than predicted. Following this effort, I joined another development team in more of a software capacity, helping create the platform to qualify a motor control product. This was also a return to my programming/IT roots, especially with regard to the work I'd done in the Air Force, and was great fun. The program was international in scope, and I was an integral part of the team, meaning I sat through and contributed to a lot of long, detailed calls with our colleagues in France. Overall, this period was very gratifying. If one is going to manage technology initiatives, it doesn't do to get too far from the content of the work.
As will happen though, my contributions were noticed, and I was promoted to a position where I was managing the safety reviews for "cross-channel" product launches. Each of these launches was a project in itself, involving coordination with teams in France, Germany, etc. to conclude successfully. The internal customer was the marketing group responsible for the North American unveiling. Entering into the position, I studied all of the governing policies and laws, both those internal to Schneider and those maintained by standards bodies such as IEEE, ISO, etc. I was quickly recognized as an expert in the product safety field, and as a result became part of two major corporate safety initiatives. The first was the creation of a Schneider-wide Product Safety Primer. The second was the creation of a two-day training course for all domestic and foreign technical writers regarding the safety requirements for product literature in the United States. I was the principal author of both, and both were very well received. While my time with Square D was enjoyable, and I enjoyed the people I worked with, I was also beginning to desire a greater challenge again, with an increased say in company strategy and direction. By chance, one of my neighborhood friends was aware of an opening, and showed my résumé to his employer. Shortly afterwards, I transitioned to Performance Impact.
Click here to visit the Schneider Electric homepage. Return to top.
Performance Impact
Performance Impact ("PI") is the Fortune 30,000 company that counts two Fortune 200 pharmaceutical giants amongst its chief accounts. I'd be more specific, but I'm bound by confidentiality agreements. I joined PI as their Director of Operations, and rapidly became involved in the creation of adult learning products for one of these pharmas. PI, like many small companies, runs on a "working foreman" model. As such, the CEO also acts as an instructional designer, the COO provides IT support, and I spent much of my time there as a front-line Project Manager. Still, the work I was involved in was gratifying. I began my tenure managing the creation of training in support of the rollout of an HR application. This included a rich, scripted PowerPoint/Flash presentation for use by managers introducing the application to their staff, quick reference cards for both employees and managers, and a Robohelp help engine with animated "show me" capabilities. This work was well-received and led to a similar project with another division the following month.
After that project was completed, I had a one-month breather to address some operational and process issues and focus on the people management aspect of my position, then took on a series of projects with another account. In late spring 2006, I assumed project management responsibilities for what turned out to be the largest single project undertaken by PI at $1.4M dollars over nine months. The resulting programs were rated very highly by audiences composed of habitually critical thinkers. Despite the hard work involved, I'm happy to say that the projects I directly managed were also PI's most profitable in 2006.
I decided to leave my role as a full-time employee of Performance Impact in December 2006, but continued to work for them full-time in a consultative capacity until June 2007. In the course of this work I built an MS Access/Excel application to provide decision support for operational finance. For more information on the types of consulting work I do when I'm not working full time, click here. Performance Impact is composed of a truly talented group of instructional designers, graphic artists, and technology types. If you have adult learning needs, particularly with respect to coaching and performance management, click here to visit the Performance Impact homepage.
Return to top.
Schneider Electric
After handing off the decision support tool to PI, I considered setting out on my own as an independent consultant, and began the search for other clients. In the course of this effort, I reached out to my contacts, including my old friends at Schneider Electric, and was made aware of an immediate need. That led to discussions, and in short order I found myself back working at Schneider. On returning I was overjoyed to see how far they had carried the process I had been part of starting in the two intervening years. The safety primer is now corporate policy. The safety in literature training is now used to certify design centers around the world in many different languages. Truly gratifying. And since that time, I've had the great good luck to be part of a number of interesting projects, and even to make a few trips to Nice, France. Life is good.
Click here to visit the Schneider Electric homepage. Return to top.