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.