My Origins

I was born towards the end of 1949 when the World was a vastly different place. I come from a military and sales family, and to my knowledge, am the first in my extended family to receive a PhD and to find a home in academia. My grandfather fought in WWI and was Bernard Baruch’s logistics assistant in the European reconstruction (he spoke nine European languages, an invaluable skill in that line of work). His son received the Silver Star and that side of the family has had two West Point graduates. My aunt was one of the first women in the Navy, and later reported to Clarence Thomas in the Justice Department. My Dad served in the Army Air Force where he received multiple medals as a champion boxer. After discharge he became a sales manager at Westinghouse power systems. Both of my parents were polio survivors, a grim reminder to me that we live in an age of miracles, where so many of the scourges of history have been eradicated. My father contracted polio in the last US epidemic in 1952 while he was working at Westinghouse; the company took care of him through his illness and found him a position in their plant in Indiana. And that’s how I came to grow up in Bloomington Indiana, where Indiana University is located.

I attended and graduated from IU’s lab school, University High School. The school and university provided me with a rich, flexible education that I think for various reasons would be impossible to replicate in today’s school environment. When I was in grade school, I could go over to IU and sit in on chemistry and biology classes. I had a paramecium zoo at my home, samples from the Sonneborn’s lab at IU (James Watson of DNA fame was the Sonneborns’ student). Emperor Hirohito of Japan came to visit the Biology labs at IU during the time I was there.

I also sat in on chemistry classes, and in 4th grade took high school chemistry at University School. I became fascinated with mathematics, and finished my high school math in 7th grade, after which the school allowed me to take college courses at IU. In my junior year, I would stay up late to get console access to IU’s Control Data 6400 computer. This was the relaxed environment of the 1960s that I was fortunate to grow up in. I can’t see any school today allowing this sort of curriculum flexibility, and feel blessed to have had the engaged and innovative instructors at that school.

I ultimately graduated from IU with a statistics degree. At that time, statistics wasn’t thought to be very practical, as there were no computers or databases. So I went on to earn an MBA in Accounting, and subsequently worked as a CPA for Touche Ross in Chicago. I worked in industry for eight years, mainly on special projects for corporate executives. I subsequently entered the University of Michigan PhD program in Computers and Information Systems under Manfred Kochen. Kochen is most famous for co-authoring (with Derek de Solla Price, of Antikythera mechanism fame) the “Six Degrees of Separation” paper that has been the theme of movies and popular books. Kochen was also John von Neumann’s last research assistant, and brought his colleague Benoit Mandelbrot from France to IBM’s New York laboratories in the US. My dissertation was on one of Kochen’s passions, the Semantic Network, which has recently been promoted by Tim Berners-Lee as Web 3.0: the evolution of hypertext. During my years in Ann Arbor, I met my wife Randa (pictured below c. 1985) who was studying computer design at Eastern Michigan University. My daughters Sumar and Dina where born in Ann Arbor, and shortly thereafter, we moved to Southern California, where our son Brendon was born.

At the time I graduated, information systems was the realm of crusty old curmudgeons who wrote COBOL, took seven or eight years to finish a project, and didn’t have much use for statistics or technical studies. Information systems academics tended to do a lot of hand waving to impress these curmudgeons, but otherwise in the 1980s contributed little of lasting importance. From the mid-1990s on, the field steadily embraced statistics, data analytics and machine learning as databases, communications and computer power evolved. My choice of an academic career has been wonderful for myself and family. My first job, where I received tenure, was at the University of Southern California. I worked with Barry Boehm’s software labs, and met quite a number of influential leaders in aerospace. I moved to Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in 1995, where my friend Yuk-shee Chan had taken the deanship of the business school. This is when I started writing business books. I did a good deal of executive education and public speaking arranged by my friend Sam Moon, who also handled Asian tours for Bill Clinton, Colin Powell and Mahathir Mohamad. My children grew up in Hong Kong, and we travelled widely during our 12 years in Hong Kong. During China’s economic rise I had the opportunity to work with many Chinese universities, and had a ringside seat at one of the most remarkable and successful periods in history. Randa and I have since moved back to the US where we can be closer to our three children and three grandchildren.