Before I went to college, I was very interested in how people functioned in different cultures, and that interest persists to this day. It has transformed from primarily an interest in differences between people from different countries to one in how people from diverse backgrounds interact electronically to achieve goals. In particular, I have tried to understand how the different participants come to perceive things in new ways as a result of their interactions.

This passion has translated into designing systems to better connect people and improve learning from experience. It has also translated into interventions to improve information product and market development.

From high school to college

My first experience living in a foreign culture occurred my senior year in high school when I was an exchange student just outside of Paris. I had been on a school trip to Paris a year and a half before. What I saw of French life on that trip contrasted rather dramatically with what I had experienced growing up in Northern Alabama. I was smitten and decided the only way to figure out what was going on was to actually go live in Paris. Ultimately, I wound up with two offers to be an exchange student, one in Belgium and one in a Paris suburb. The choice had been a no-brainer.

In the end, I earned two high school degrees: one in France by virtue of passing the national high school exam with honors (Baccalaureat, mention bien); and the other in the U.S. by virtue of having done acceptably in my French school, a sort of double dip. The French credential also earned me college credit at Georgetown (a triple dip) where I obtained a B.S. in French and Linguistics. I took enough courses in Arabic to minor but didn't bother because I had the double major. I also took courses in computer science, learning rudimentary program design and the PL-I programming language.

I was interested in information technology and wondered what you could do with it in everyday life. The notion seems quaint today, but at the time, dumb terminals were the state of the art.

After Georgetown, I was frankly at a loss. I could have gone to work for the NSA, an intelligence agency, by virtue of my Arabic, but otherwise was unsure. I decided to spend a year in Egypt on a US government funded fellowship to attain high proficiency in Arabic. I had already spent a summer in Egypt on a shorter version of the same fellowship and felt this was my last chance to really learn another culture. I was both right and wrong. It's easier to learn completely new cultures when you are young because people are forgiving of your mistakes. However, I've found in life that I am constantly having to learn new cultures.

When I returned from Egypt, I found myself back at Georgetown, in a graduate program in the School of Foreign Service. I never completed the degree.

I decided to stop treading water

In the middle of my stint back at Georgetown, I got myself hired as a project manager for Catholic Relief Services (CRS) in Morocco. There, I put together a small business outreach program in Casablanca. We housed the program in a business school (ISCAE) and hired recent graduates to be consultants. The consultants first had to go out and recruit their clients by cold calling in person (poor telecommunications infrastructure but effective technique), then diagnose the client's most pressing business issue, come up with a solution, and finally implement. I participated in all phases of these projects. I also negotiated funding by the U.S. government and participation in-kind by the Moroccan government.

My business career was launched.

I returned from Morocco and completed an MBA at Wharton. At Wharton, I took as many information systems courses as I could and also majored in marketing. I had bought the Moroccan office's first PC and was interested in how this new form factor was spreading computing power in places you would have never expected it. I spent all of my spare time learning about technology and business applications. For my summer internship, I implemented a database management system and forecasting facilities for a major client of the consulting firm Arthur D. Little.

I worked for Arthur D. Little for a year and a half and then at Deloitte & Touche for another two and a half years. At both firms, I did general business consulting, sometimes with an information systems component. The client list included name-brand Fortune 500 firms as well as other companies in North America, Europe, Asia, and Africa. The work was interesting, but I was frustrated at the small amount of information systems work I was doing.

Diving further into information systems

It was at that point that I decided to get a Ph.D. in information systems at Carnegie Mellon University. I thought the academic hiatus would give me an opportunity to get at the cutting edge of upcoming application. In pure consulting work, one is tied to short term client exigencies. I figured academia would give me the time to be more creative. If I worked in a business school, I could keep it applied.

At Carnegie Mellon, I became very interested in learning and how information systems could be used to facilitate that process. It was a marriage between my cultural immersion experiences and my information technology efforts. For my dissertation, I developed a theory of how people learn in fast-paced environments and instantiated the theory in a neural network model. The model provided predictions for how to improve people's learning in jobs involving process control and fairly regular sequences of interaction.

The work was not purely theoretical. I obtained over $110,000 from Citicorp to apply the approach I was developing to understanding credit collector performance as part of a customer service initiative.

Michigan

Michigan Business School recruited me into their information systems department Fall, 1997. At Michigan Business School, I have continued getting research grants from companies like IBM and Dell as well as the National Science Foundation. The work has focused on how to influence the outcome of electronic interactions and improve organizational players' ability to learn from them, a topic that has only become more and more relevant each year since the dawn of the commercial Internet.

I also consult to information businesses, businesses that make their money off of bits and bytes. My work with these companies invariably involves product and market development. What is the value proposition behind their information assets? What products can they create that will showcase this value? What would it take to convert people to using these products? Is the potential market size worth the effort?

As part of this focus, I developed a business technology incubator at Michigan Business School and have been heavily involved in entrepreneurial action learning there. For me, entrepreneurship is that exciting frontier where ideas struggle to find their measure in the market place. Entrepreneurial action learning in a business school is a chance to expose students to that interface and systematically explore what allows people to succeed in it.

Michigan's entrepreneurial action projects are intensive 8 week engagements where students consult to start-up firms. Faculty manage 8 and sometimes as many as 16 of these projects simultaneously. My experience leading action learning projects and attempting to stay abreast of their developments informs my efforts with the BIT320 Distributed Learning Blogosphere reported about here.

Looking to the future, I welcome further opportunities to develop programs, products, and markets that interface between technology innovation and business processes.

Bud last updated his bio, May 6, 2007. Email Bud with your thoughts about his bio. He’s eager to hear them.