Career-wise I’ve worked as a civil and structural engineer for the first three or four years on the job. I was very fortunate to work for a good small company where I did a lot of large-scale structural design. The primary scope of that business was concrete. We designed and built slip-form concrete storage silos. You see them at a railroad terminals and marine terminals. I was involved in the design of the structures as well as all of the mechanical machinery that drove them. This included the conveyors on and off the ships, as well as off-loading points. It was great experience.

In about 1954 or 1955 I left the concrete company and went to work for International business machines. IBM Was involved in building an expanding and I was a construction engineer. I was hired in Kingston, New York and I worked on the main plant there.

And some of the people in the corporate building department spotted me. They supervised the construction throughout the country. I joined them and became a project engineer. I worked in Armonk, New York, Yorktown, New York, San Jose, California, and others. I represented IBM to the architects, engineers, and contractors. I wore a hard-hat most of the time.

I left IBM in 1960 and got out of business school in 1962. When I was graduating from Harvard, the commencement speaker was Thomas J. Watson, Jr.

IBM was nice enough to let me work at the Boston regional office during my years of business school. I worked as an environmental engineer. We put in mainframe computers which needed a lot of air conditioning and power.

In August of that summer there was a major heat wave in New York City and part of the electrical into went down. So Mr. Watson was there, and he knew that I was there. When I first went to work in Kingston I met Mr. Watson’s father. His father came in when we were getting the place cleaned up for the dedication. Lilly Pons, a famous opera singer of the time going to sing.

I was in the cafeteria. Mr. Watson looked over and asked: “young man, do you work for IBM?”

He told me to make sure the place was clean. I told him that I would take care of it.

Then I was introduced to Mr. Watson’s son. He knew all about my business school and my five children. He asked if I planned to come back to work in IBM after graduate school. I told him that I would be starting with the components division, a brand-new division.

So I went back to IBM and I worked in East Fishkill. At that time east Fishkill was just a great big old field when we started to work with the architects and engineers to design the clean rooms for the first solid-state components. We would pull crystals that were one-and-an-eighth-inch. Now they are twelve or 13in.

We took solid state electronics out of the lab. The first few were practically prototype work. The yields were lousy. It took them a couple of years to get it sorted out but it worked out pretty well.

I ended up running thirteen industrial engineering departments while I was in east Fishkill.

I left IBM in 1968 and came to Saratoga, California. I joined the science management corporation, an international consulting firm. I spent three years with them. I was the vice president of manufacturing services. I had an airplane seat strapped to my butt for a half-million miles a year.

I left them and did my own consulting work for a little while. I had my own little company. It was called Management Concepts and Practices.

From 1976 through 1980 I was with Acurex. I was associate general manager. Please to put sensors in various devices and have receivers to collect it and categorize it. We use these things to monitor for example the nitrous oxide that came out of the PG& E smokestacks. Or we would use them to monitor the temperature of a sterilizer.

The other big one was that I worked for FMC in San Jose. I was the senior project engineer on several projects and I was also the senior group manager. When proposals came and I in my team would separate them out to the mechanical engineering electrical engineering and other departments. Then we would gather all the information back, sit down with the technical writers and illustrators, and put together our proposal. We got a telephone book from them; they would get a telephone book back from us. These were multi-million dollar proposals. We were winning one out of six proposals that we submitted, which was good results. FMC is a good company.

Here is one of the things I was involved with at FMC. It was the GEMS program, which stood for ground emplacement mine scattering system. It was a vicious little thing that throughout the land mines. Some of them had explosives then went off if you stepped on them. There were some people who refuse to work on projects such as this and I can say that I blame them. My job was to get the operational maintenance manuals put together so that a third-grade student could do it. There were a lot of illustrations.

Then I ended up back in my own consulting business for a period of time.

Then in 1988, pinging and I left to go to the University of Georgia. I was given the opportunity to be the director of the Institute for Business. I ran the technology development and transfer program. I ran the small business development center which had fifteen offices throughout Georgia. Iran corporate indication and minority business programs and a few other things like that.

I worked there for a few years until they decided they could use me in something called the Institute of Community and Area Development. There I work with teams of people who were doing community development work. We used to say that Georgia was our campus. We held town meetings to help the Department of Transportation explain to people why a six-lane road had to go through their town. Or the placement of a new landfill facility, for example.

Our job was to facilitate these meetings. And we had teams of people who could do this fairly well.

I also had a very close association with Columbus, Georgia where I worked with the city manager and the assistant Mayor. I taught of 60 department heads how to manage projects.

When the first George bush became president he had six major education initiatives. They were things such as increasing the graduation rate, getting drugs out of school, and the like. Columbus, Georgia wanted to put on a program like this. I worked with volunteers and put together that system for them. I did the reporting for them for months. We ended up with a very successful system. Lots of stuff and lots of fun.

Throughout all this time I was writing dozens and dozens of papers. I’ve got more than 60 technical articles that I’ve written. Some are refereed and some are not.

From 1984 or so I’ve been primarily working as an industrial engineer. I’m a licensed as an industrial engineer here in California. I was also licensed as an engineer in the state of New York, which I’m very proud of. Without license you can do anything, and put stamp on it. I got that certification on the first time around. Some people take it forever; it’s like the bar exam.