Return to the Table of Contents  Jim Cook

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Jim Cook, 2001

In the United States, Jim was a management of technology consultant to World Class organizations including Bell Laboratories (now Lucent), Du Pont, Motorola, and American Express. His consulting projects generally ran 6 to 18 months, involved 1 to 4 consultants, and were overseen by a Senior Vice President. His focus was the development of managerial processes to guide the implementation of technologically enabled Step Change (instances where performance is expected to jump 200%) and Game Change (where a product line or distribution/service means was "re-invented"). His practice was documented in the Harvard Business Case, Step Change at Dupont's Camden Plant, which is now taught to MBA candidates. Jim has a Bachelor's in mathematics degree from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and was accepted by and studied in MIT's graduate program in mathematics.

Jim is not an academic, rather, all his working life, before becoming a consultant, Jim was an engineer, engineering manager, or entrepreneur. Jim worked as a research engineer for the Aeronautics and the Astronautics Department of MIT on the Apollo Project (landing a man on the moon) and on the Deep Submergence Rescue Project (a system for rescuing distressed submarines like Russia's Kursk). Afterwards, he worked on some national security applications. Jim was Vice President of Engineering for a mobile robotics company (whose product may have inspired the movie, Robo Cop). His top job, though, was Vice President of Technology for the largest CAD/CAM (Engineering Design and Manufacturing Software) company in the world (and a Fortune 500 Company). Their software helped design buildings, automobiles, airplanes, ships, submarines, industrial goods, home appliances, sporting goods, etc., and was the choice of the Chinese Academy of Sciences for China. As an entrepreneur, Jim got Exxon to finance his first venture which did automatic speech recognition. Later, Jim got private people to finance his software company which, in four years, went "public" on the NASDAQ and became valued at $30 million.

Jim speaks frequently. In the 1990s, he gave over 40 lectures to graduate students in USA and Australia. He also made about 250 presentations to clients, not only in USA, but also Canada, England, and Italy. These talks have always been about technology and/or business. For example, at MIT he spoke on Engineering of the Future, at Harvard on Entrepreneuring and on Step Change, elsewhere, he spoke on the Economic Analysis of Manufacturing (a series), Consumer Activated Assembly, Manufacturing Automation, and Learning Organizations. He writes seldom. One paper, though, discusses the different management styles for small high-tech businesses versus large businesses. John Sculley, then President of Apple Computer, recognized these ideas in his book, Odyssey. And, Jim has appeared on television eight times. Six times on FNN (before CNN acquired it) for high-tech investing ideas. He was on Australian Television for a serious national discussion of the possibility of World War III. And once on CCTV in 1985 for bringing CAD/CAM to China and being welcomed by Jiang ZeMin at the Great Hall of the People.


 

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