“My new book, Capitalism is Past Its Sell-By Date - From Incredible Success to Enabling Environmental and Resource Unsustainability”
I have spent my professional life as Chief Executive Officer, President or Chief Financial Officer of privately- and publicly-held companies. I have a Master of Electrical Engineering degree from Rice University and am a Certified Public Accountant. This unlikely combination summarizes my broad interests, including a deep love of history and of the theater, and a fascination with religion and with humanity’s relationships with reality.
I enjoy teaching and have occasionally been a lecturer at the University of Texas at Austin, including teaching courses on finance and on information technology management in its MBA school, and on entrepreneurship and on corporate change in its undergraduate business school. I was part of a team that implemented a science experiment that went to the moon with Apollo astronauts.
I have a deep love of travel, and my wife and I have travelled extensively. Our travel has heightened my appreciation for various cultures around the world.
I have worked for firms from startups to having over $300 million in revenue. I have managed up to 300 software engineers in various disciplines, including cybersecurity.
I have led or been instrumental in teams which negotiated tens of mergers and acquisitions between companies, including one in Australia. I have raised millions of dollars from venture capitalists and from strategic investors.
However, in my spare time, I have spent a lifetime pursuing the goal of attempting to understand. I began by learning about the physical universe, based on my masters of electrical engineering degree. I then turned my attention to humans – to history, philosophy, religion and psychology - to attempt to understand human behavior. I have read hundreds of books on these subjects over the decades and have attempted to integrate the knowledge I gained into a conceptual framework about the way humans, in the aggregate, have created cultures, institutions, nations and empires.
My studies and decades of work life gave me some success in my understanding of the physical world. However, I despair of ever understanding the incredible complexity and variety of human behavior. I did, however, begin to gather some broad generalizations that describe human behavior at a high level. These thoughts can best be considered as a framework within which to contemplate human behavior and therefore the evolution of human institutions.
