Professional History

21 years teaching operations management and supply chain in the Management Department, later in Aviation Management & Supply Chain. The practitioner-teacher identity — and the daily frustration with how education systems waste teacher time — is the origin of much of my later work on education and marketplace design.

I was briefly drawn into the efforts of Morris Brown College to resurrect itself from oblivion. Their situation was dire, so I tried to think outside the box and find a teaching model that could work at much lower cost. Nothing came of it, but the exercise gave me some insights and ideas. My idea is to restructure Higher Ed so it stays true to its heritage, but uses new business tools to “manage” how they teach the traditional subjects.

Even before we moved to Atlanta, I was fascinated with the idea of using mobile networks to teach. Universities had been teaching remotely for years and I taught for 6 years in Auburn’s Executive MBA. But on-campus students desperately need to see the reality of the outside world … and it is very hard to bring that back to campus. The occasional guest speaker doesn’t really cut it. By 2012, the technology pieces fell into the puzzle. I hopped around Atlanta with a laptop, a webcam and Verizon 4G. I delivered live lectures from the floor of a shipping dock, from a trade show floor, from the offices of Home Depot and Chick-fil-A logistics executives. Reality baby!

I worked for a while with an industrial engineering PhD student and, from that interaction and with iPOV on the side, I commissioned a series of graphics that summarized what humans can see versus what a video camera can see.

A Deeper View (ADV) was a web-based, cloud-hosted SaaS platform that captured real-time classroom observations of student performance. It was built on the principle of "one-touch technology" — observations recorded with a single button press in naturally occurring time gaps during class.

ADV was piloted in 300+ public and private schools before a patent lawsuit forced it off the market for four years. The core ideas — micro-observations, individualized rubrics, process measurement over output testing — live on in the EduOpsLab project.

Since iPOV was always eagerly waiting for payments from big customers, I became interested in the implications of steadily lengthening payment terms. I ended up with a surprisingly simple model that largely upended all of the stuff we were teaching MBA students.

AC Motors are incredibly common and important. They are also amazingly simple and elegant, thanks to Nicola Tesla. However, it is no easy chore to explain them to non-engineers. I tried this for Siemens and I think I came pretty close to nailing it. This was the first project where I tried to use simplified visual models to explain a mysterious and obscure system.

I had several German students visit Auburn to study with me. Alex, Steffi and Fabian. Not sure why I was chosen, but they were great kids and all went on to good things. Fabian took an interest of mine and developed it into a Master’s thesis that was very thorough and coherent. It sliced and diced the concept of space-time diagrams as they applied to production and similar operations.

In the late 80’s manufacturing companies around the world faced demands to adopt a manufacturing quality standard: ISO-9001 … then endure audits to certify they conformed. I was fascinated because academic theory said that management practice cannot be standardized. Yet thousands and eventually millions of companies complied. Either management theorists were wrong or the standards writers were using smoke and mirrors. I spent 7 or 8 years digging into the phenomenon to try to resolve the contradiction. I think I succeeded because I wrote 4 or 5 journal articles that were accepted at good publications.

I collected large volumes of operator learning data at Chrysler. Two colleagues and I used that to build a model that accounted for patterns of learning, but also captured how performance was lost when a worker was moved away from the task.

Chrysler’s Huntsville AL electronics plant spent nearly 2 years investigating and evaluating how to apply cutting edge video editing tools to the production of plant floor training materials. The original technology came from Quantel … a global broadcast video vendor. Although Chrysler ultimately declined to move forward, this project set me off on a 25 year quest to understand how video can be used in day-to-day business operations.

Intel made a mistake with its Pentium chip and a university researcher caught them out. The resulting furor ultimately forced Intel to recall existing chips at a cost of at least $250 million. I used usenet and Internet chat records to document the process. It was probably the first scholarly analysis of what is now called a “viral” Internet scandal.

I was given access to corporate training data for an apparel manufacturer. There were records of thousands of employees who were learning how to sew t-shirts and similar garments. David Nemhard and I developed a model of learning that modelled individual behavior as a stepping stone to modelling group behavior.

I began my fascination with the concept of management control and it has continued ever since. Academics don’t like to talk about “control”, but it is central to the management process and we need to understand it in all its forms.

Susan Sanderson and I published a textbook (and a companion trade press clone). The textbook was adopted at University of Hong Kong, University of Singapore and MIT. I think we wrote it slightly above the mass market.

This was my PhD dissertation. I examined how product families differed on the characteristic of product variety and serial design change. I found a pattern that was stable and logical that applied across essentially all of the discrete products industries … at least at that time.