Professional Journey

Hard Work, Valuable Lessons

At the age of 13, I worked at $3 an hour as a sheetrocker. By 14, I had shifted over to commercial lawn maintenance having landed a contract with a real estate company. By 16, when I could drive, I expanded my lawn maintenance business with six employees, a pickup truck, trailer, and 16 lawnmowers (because they broke down so much). By 19, I had $11,000 in savings, so I gambled and started a board game manufacturing company called Starling Games.

Starling Games was the darling of local media for a short period. I was lucky enough to be interviewed for the 6:00 pm news and several papers because I was young. Bitzi's Inc. in the Dallas World Trade Center sold my games to retailers across 14 states. It looked like I just might be able to bypass an expensive formal education!

Was I ever wrong. I never figured out how to bring costs down so I made only about 25 cents on each game sold. To make matters worse, a record heat wave hit and about 2,000 games kept in a storage facility with no air conditioning had the packaging bubble up making the games unsaleable. Starling Games came to an abrupt end with me at the age of 21.

Sometimes failure is the best teacher, What I gained was an appreciation for education and a love for making products. During my teen years I also enjoyed working with computers. I was fortunate to have computers growing up since my father was a professor. The love for making products and computers would later shift my academic career.

Chemical Engineering

As an undergraduate, I started as a Chemical Engineering student at the University of Oklahoma. I went into Chemical Engineering because my father, Dr. Kenneth Starling, was a Chemical Engineering professor and I was always awed by his accomplishments.

Because I was the child of Dr. Starling, I landed research internships with faculty like Jan Schouten from the Netherlands. Dr. Schouten's research was superb and groundbreaking. None of which had my name on it of course, but the knowledge I gained would bode well for my future learning.

Soon though it felt too privileged being the child of a great researcher at OU, I decided I needed to create my own path and change schools to Arizona State University.

Industry or Academia?

At Arizona State University I first started in Chemical Engineering, but it became apparent my father's shadow extended there too. In my first class, the professor announced to the entire Momentum, Heat, and Mass Transfer 3 class that I had better do well on a section of the course in the syllabus since we were covering my father's work. Despite being only twelve credits from a degree in Chemical Engineering, I changed to Operations Management. I had never forgotten my fondness for computing and making products and Operations Management combined both.

A business degree was a breeze after nearly graduating with my Chemical Engineering degree. In the ASU program I had some great interactions and mentors. I also had an hour with Barry Goldwater, former Presidential Candidate, where we discussed Quality Management and his passion for watering cacti. ASU instilled a passion in me for Quality Management, and I had chances to interact with Motorola with a new program they were calling Six Sigma. Later my PhD dissertation would be focused on Quality Management and I would become known as a Master Blackbelt in Six SIgma helping to train hundreds of managers in Aerospace.

Soon I found myself about to graduate and in need of a job. A Silicon Valley company called 3Com showed interest in me and set up an interview. But while I was sitting in the Career Services waiting for the interview, a man sitting across from me started asking me questions about my degree and what I hoped to do in the future. He eventually introduced himself as Dr. Gary Tallman, Director of the Northern Arizona University MBA Program. He said he was at ASU interviewing for admission to his program. Without seeing my GPA or resume, he offered me a teaching, research and Computer Lab Director position that would effectively pay for the MBA. I thanked him, we exchanged contact information, and I went into the interview with 3Com. I had reached a fork in the road. Should I pursue academic further of start my work career in Silicon Valley?

Hooked on Academia

After a visit to Silicon Valley to meet 3Com management, I declined 3Com and took the offer at NAU of a full ride scholarship that included teaching and research work. Due to my father, the idea of teaching and doing research held familiar appeal.

At Northern Arizona I had my first experience teaching and although I was terrified at times, teaching fulfilled my need to share knowledge, discuss best practices, and help others. I also worked on a large research project and ran a computer lab, loving it all!

The research was with Dr. Fairlee Winfield who was a leading author on family and relationships. I led a national survey that had a interesting discovery about marriages where the spouses must live in different cities so they can work. Our hypothesis was wrong that their marriage would suffer. Our results showed that the distance did not strongly affect their relationship status. That was good news and I was happy the study was published in Dr. Winfield's next book.

In addition to the research I was asked to teach Computer Information Systems classes in undergraduate business programs and to make some money on the side the Director of the MBA program let me run the MBA Computer Lab.

I was hooked on academia. I did however note several years later that secretaries were retiring as millionaires from 3Com as their stock skyrocketed in value. Regardless, I am grateful Dr. Tallman saw something in me and let me start the MBA without a Graduate Admissions Test (GMAT). I had to retroactively take the GMAT to received my degree later. My score was high and allowed me to pick and choose between PhD programs with offers of full ride scholarships.

The University of Pittsburgh offered a unique program no other could with joint enrollment at Carnegie-Mellon University which was literally across the street from Pitt. By accepting a teaching and research full ride scholarship offer from Pitt, I could take courses and learn from Engineering and Business faculty at Pitt for my major in Operations Management while taking courses for my minor at Carnegie-Mellon in a growing field called Artificial Intelligence.

Manufacturing and Computers

As previously mentioned, I developed interests in manufacturing and computers that influenced my decisions on college education majors. Pitt and CMU were great universities for both. My jaw literally dropped in awe the first time I drove past the massive factories and facilities that line the three rivers encapsulating Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh was the heart of the Industrial Revolution providing steel to the world. The city had been through two separate renaissances where they reoriented and redirected their efforts.

I read everything I could get my hands on about how to help make a manufacturing process achieve world-class. I marveled at the stories of people like Kaoru Ishikawa, Genichi Taguchi, Shigeo Shingo, Joseph Juran, W. Edwards Deming and Philip Crosby ... gurus of quality management who could walk through a factory and point out ways to improve that managers working the lines for decades could not see. I wanted to be like them in my knowledge.

At the same time I was developing my knowledge of manufacturing systems, computers had fueled the tech boom and I made sure I remained on the cutting edge of that seismic shift.

Guidance of Giants

While all faculty I worked with during my PhD student years were amazing, two stood out as giants in their respective fields. At Pitt I had the good fortune to work under Dr. Thomas Saaty, who many people referred to as “Father of Operations Research.” Dr. Saaty wrote the first book on Operations Research and he developed several proprietary Decision Analysis models still used today. At Carnegie-Mellon, I had even better fortune to work with Dr. Herb Simon, Nobel Prize winner for his work in Artificial Intelligence (AI). Dr. Simon was a kind and wonderful human being to learn from as a student, if you could get into his gated classes.

A fond memory of Dr. Simon was the first day I met him. It was a PhD class and all of us immediately pulled out paper and pen to write down all pearls of wisdom and knowledge we could. He immediately said "Put down your pens and pencils. If you want to take notes in my class, you have to write me a note explaining why you feel you need to do so!" We were all dumbfounded. He then went on to give us our first lesson about how humans think serially and not in parallel so if we took notes then we were not listening as we wrote. He backed off the position a bit by discussing "switching" which humans are also very good at, but his point was made. We of course later applied the ideas of serial and parallel processing to our Artificial Intelligence programs mimicking human thinking and vision.

While working with these “giants” I had opportunities most PhD students rarely get. While at Pitt, I was the first PhD student to teach in their top 30 MBA and EMBA programs. At CMU, I had the opportunity to develop AI based manufacturing systems that were far ahead of their time, such as an AI feature-based design program for Caterpillar’s flexible manufacturing system (FMS).

An interesting side note is I was asked by a international CMU faculty member to proofread a paper for him and I obliged. I gave it back to him with red ink everywhere. He appreciated it after some initial shock. After that I had many international CMU professors ask me to review their papers such that I eventually was earning $25 an hour on the side to reduce the requests (that was a lot to ask for as a student). I needed the extra money to buy a proposal ring for my girlfriend. It all worked out.

I must have made an impression, because towards the end of my time at Pitt I was the first PhD student to be asked to teach an MBA course. The course was Decision Technologies and it led to a publication on scheduling operating rooms with several doctors in my class. Additionally, I was the first PhD student to be offered a teaching position in the Semester at Sea program, but I had to decline since I was getting married during the time of the cruise.

Earning my PhD in Pittsburgh was a wonderful time in my life.

(Note: Courses I took during my college years are listed here on my website.)

Silicon Valley Allure

My interests after earning my PhD led me to California State University – Hayward which was renamed later as CSU - East Bay (CSUEB). CSUEB was appealing since it was on the edge of Silicon Valley. An irony is I was not interviewing for a position when the faculty position at CSUEB was offered to me but it was in the region I wanted work. Like with Dr. Gary Tallman above, I ran into Dr. William Gotcher of CSUEB and had a casual conversation with him at a Decision Sciences Institute conference in Boston. From our interaction he invited me to the San Francisco Area to take over the Supply Management program from him since he was about to retire.

I am an applied academic and find my joy in working with managers to utilize best practices in ways that make their companies more competitive, but that also respect people and the environment. Silicon Valley companies were the fastest moving companies in the world, they treasured intelligence and knowledge, and they had a liberal quirkiness to them that made each day exciting. I worked with Silicon Valley companies and their suppliers in Asia through being a professor. It was a thrilling time to be a professor focused on manufacturing.

At CSUEB I co-built the 2nd largest (enrollments) Supply Chain Management academic program in the United States. I had the honor to build the program with Dr. Gotcher as well as Dr. Zinovy Radovilsky and Dr. Joy Bhadury who I helped recruit. Technically there was no Supply Chain Program when I arrived, just 12 student in a purchasing program. We put a undergraduate program in place as well as a SCM Option in the MBA. Coupling the new programs with a active student organization I built and the program had 240 students by 2000.

Four International Masters Programs

In addition to building the SCM Program, Dean Jay Tontz asked me to help establish four international Masters programs as follows: Transnational Executive MBA, MBA – Hong Kong, EMBA – Beijing, and EMBA – Singapore. All of the programs were quite different.

The Transnational Executive MBA (TEMBA) was actually local, but with a focus on international business knowledge. Dr. Shyam Kamath and I made TEMBA successful in part by putting candidates through a grueling interview process I have yet to see in any other program. The process ensured we had cohorts with some of the Bay Area's brightest executives. This was my first program built around bottom line projects the students would do that would more than recover the cost of the program to their company.

The MBA - Hong Kong was one of the easiest to establish because we had more students apply than in any other program. We also had a very good management team working for us in Hong Kong. The students we accepted were the hardest working students I have ever had the honor to teach. 16 hour workdays were common for our two week courses. Class would be over after 8 contact hours, then I would meet with the students for their projects with the intent of being done by 9:00 pm. But they loved what they were doing and I enjoyed working with them so it was usually midnight before I would leave to sleep for the next day of class at 8:00 am. The first time I taught in this program I lost my voice by the end from the long days of constantly lecturing. After some reflection, I changed how I taught so students would review topics more in class and I could preserve my voice. Learning improved by this shift from my always being the Sage-On-The-Stage to letting students take greater leadership.

In the EMBA - Singapore students came from the best companies compared to the other programs in Asia. The students however were more like mid-level managers and not really executive level. We had a superb management team at the Hartford Centre and I held office hours in the famous colonial era Raffles Hotel.

In the EMBA - Beijing I taught the first class in the program and had to do some major unplanned resets. The first reset was to deal with mass cheating on the exam given at the beginning of face to face lectures. We gave them an exam right before the first class to ensure they had read specific materials to ensure a rapid start during the concentrated two week class. This was not the student's fault. Our experiences in former colonies of Hong Kong and Singapore had students already familiar with Western values. I had the ombudsman for the class help me explain to them Western approaches to learning and cheating. Then I gave them a rewritten exam the next day. The second reset was I had to fire the local management team for taping my lecture via a see through mirror. I was able to work with Dean Tontz and Dr. Nancy Mangold to replace the management team with minimal damage to our program.

Developing World-Class Students

At CSUEB, I also established a student organization called OMS for Operations Management and Supply Chain Management students that I have yet to find an equal to in terms of the interactions with industry.

OMS held about 70 events per year, mainly visiting factories and hosting speakers. I had great joy in getting the chance to walk through the most advanced manufacturing systems in the world with my students. No other program in the world could off real-world views like we offered. The strong interactions with industry coupled with international knowledge I could convey to them from our overseas programs made my students sought after by Silicon Valley firms, despite having what we called “the bookends” of Stanford and UC Berkeley. We knew we could never compete with Stanford or Berkeley in academic standing, so we instead focused on our international MBA programs and engaging heavily with Silicon Valley companies focusing on their real-world needs.

My professional dream of being able to walk through a factory and help managers see ways to improve much in the same way Deming and Shingo could do had not only become realized, but I was able to mentor hundreds of Deming and Shingo type managers through my student organizations. While other universities were teaching only from textbooks, my students were also walking through factories and debriefing managers at the end of each tour on what they could do to improve. You could see the growth in a new student versus a student that had participated in ten or so plant tours. Experienced students would ask questions and offer ideas while on the walk around tours, in the interactions with speakers on campus, and at the professional societies.

Many of my students went on to great careers. For example, Stacy Nakamura to Toyota, along with 36 other graduates of mine that I tracked. Dima Ghawi, who went to IBM directly into their Leadership Development Program is another example. Both Stacy and Dima were Presidents of the student groups I formed. Dima actually wrote about her experiences in her book Breaking Vases and mentioned her experience with my programs in her in a Ted Talk (click on the link) where she speaks about me at minute 8.

(For testimonials from students, many are on this website. Take a look if interested?)

South to San Diego

The growth of my programs at CSUEB was noted by the University of San Diego (USD) because their graduates were not getting as many jobs in Silicon Valley due to my programs serving as providers of students the managers already met through OMS interactions. As a result, the University of San Diego recruited me in 2000 to develop their Supply Chain Management programs as an Associate Professor in the SCM Area.

The recruitment process was almost identical to how I came to CSUEB. I was walking through a hallway at the Western Decision Sciences Institute annual conference in Hawaii after serving as Chair of the Supply Chain Management Research Track. Dr. David Burt, Director of the Supply Chain Management Institute at the University of San Diego came up to me and introduced himself. He went on to ask me to come to San Diego to take over his institute so he could know it would be in good hands and he could retire.

The timing for a move to San Diego was good since one year later 9/11 happened and Silicon Valley had its first major bust. To adapt to the changing business environment, I shifted my focus from Silicon Valley type companies to the Defense and Health care industries since they would continue to thrive in the post 9/11 world. We also had the caveat that international students were restricted in obtaining Visas to enter our resident programs. It was time to shift to online learning.

Online Learning Pioneer

In 2001 at USD, I co-developed the first online MS-SCM program in the world with Dr. David Burt and Dr. Carlo Smith. Unlike at CSUEB where Dean Tontz funded new Masters programs, at USD Dean Curtis Cook was not in as strong of a position and we needed seed money for the new program before bringing it to the faculty for a vote. Since I was familiar with Silicon Valley I took the lead on contacting companies in the San Francisco Bay Area. Eventually Agilent committed $100,000 to the program that would be effectively repaid to them through tuition credits for managers they would sponsor. With David Burt and Carlo Smith, we then landed Raytheon with another $100,000 seed money. We took the proposal to the USD faculty, another lengthy hurdle that we did not have under Dean Tontz at CSUEB. The USD faculty were surprisingly resistant but the program was accepted since we had the seed money.

The online USD MS - SCM was a cohort based hybrid program with two to three resident sessions each year over the two years it took to complete the program. The first residence session was to introduce the faculty, build rapport between the students, go over syllabi with instructors, and to cover some of the material that is best in a face-to-face session. Follow on sessions were to go over class projects, present the projects with sponsors in attendance, go over subsequent courses, and meet new faculty in the second year. The final resident session was at the end of the second year and it was to present the final projects and conduct a graduation with executives from the sponsoring companies.

Online teaching was done in mainly an asynchronous manner with telephone and Skype video sessions as needed and available. In 2001 technology had not advanced enough to ensure synchronous video sessions would work without issues. In addition since the program was largely filled with companies in the Aerospace and Defense Industry, we had to plan for some students to be deployed due to the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars. Agilent which initally sent a team, did not sponsor any more teams. Raytheon on the other hand sent as many students as we could handle and keep class size below 40 students.

The MS-SCM was so successful it eclipsed the MBA program in enrollments in its first year. Today the MS-SCM is still the flagship degree of the SCM program at USD. However, it has fallen from the default of being the #1 online Supply Chain Program since it was the first one (there were no rankings in 2001) to #23 according to College Consensus.

Unparalleled Industry Interactions

Part of why I was recruited to the University of San Diego was to grow the programs. Starting the new online MS in SCM was an important first step, but simultaneously we needed to build the resident student body up and get more active with Southern California companies. Achieving the two latter goals needed a strong student organization that mimicked what I created at California State University - East Bay. The name we came up with was Supply Chain Management Association or SCMA which rolled off the tongue well being pronounced as "schema." The definition of schema is a plan or a model.

We definitely had a plan based on what I already achieved in Silicon Valley: annual events, speakers, tours, trips, and professional organizations. The trips were a feature that drew many students into the undergraduate and MBA option in SCM.

For example, consider the trips. I put together a Silicon Valley Tech Tour, City of Angels Tour, and Viva Mexico Tour. About 40 students went on each trip via bus or plane.

The Silicon Valley Tech Tour consisted of chartering seats on a Southwest Airlines plane to San Jose, then taking the students in several vans to six Fortune 500 size manufacturing facilities such as IBM, Silicon Graphics, Solectron, Cisco Systems, NUMMI (Toyota), and Agilent. The Silicon Valley Tech Tour took two days so we would have to spend the night and to do so we chose amazing hotels over the years in the San Francisco area which built strong professional relationships.

The City of Angels Tour was a bus tour to Los Angeles and usually focused on Aerospace companies like Boeing and Raytheon. We would usually have a wonderful dinner in the evening in the LA area as a group before heading back to San Diego.

The Viva Mexico Tour took our students via bus into Mexico to visit world-class manufacturing facilities such as SONY and Panasonic while having a fun diversion to a great Mexican food restaurant. At many of the facilities, high level managers would meet with the students, such as Rey Heurta - President of SONY Mexico. Rey was actually a friend. Alhtough he was President of SONY Mexico, he lived in San Diego. We enjoyed meeting for breakfast at Perry's, a restaurant where the owner had changed his management approaches to reflect the teachings of W. Edwards Deming.

Between the trips, new MS in SCM, and other programs, the SCM Area graduates became the highest earning hires from the USD School of Business, some landing six figure positions in Leadership Development Programs directly out of university wth Fortune 500 companies.

Best Selling Book

While at the University of San Diego, I co-authored the book World-Class Supply Management with Dr. David Burt and Dr. Donald Dobler. The book became a best selling book across the globe for use in academia and industry for the Supply/Procurement Management field. In the first 3 years the book generated over $3.7 million in revenue for McGraw-Hill Irwin. The book became the defacto source for materials used in Institute of Supply Management (ISM) programs as well as the backbone of the MS-SCM and resident SCM programs.

A funny side note is when I was writing questions for the test bank for the book, I grew bored and included my name in one of the test questions asking "Who is not considered one of the Gurus of Quality Management. My name was the wrong answer. I had planned to remove it and create a fictional name, but I forgot. Years later a former student showed me a question on his ISM exam and it was lifted from that exact erroneous question I left in the test bank!

Because of my publications and high interactions with companies , the local and national press started contacting me for interviews when Supply Chain issues affected California businesses. Among the interviews were CBS News (TV), NPR (Radio), LA Times (Print), but mostly the San Diego Union-Tribune. I ended up doing 32 press interviews while at The University of San Diego on topics such as the Port Lockout as well as my student organization visiting companies such as Raytheon.

Step Charts Changed Everything

Part of why the World Class Supply Management book was successful is on page 8 I had developed a rudimentary step chart showing the progression to world-class best practices in Supply Management. I had not realized how valuable the chart was until the book had been published and feedback starting flowing in from friends in industry. The step chart could be used by a manager to quickly assess where their organization was against best practices, aka world-class. The gaps could then be documented and they could focus their learning on closing those gaps to bring the greatest benefit to their company in the shortest time and at the lowest costs. The next 680 pages of the book explained how to close the gaps.

Once I understood the value of the chart, I proceeded to update the World-Class Supply Management Step Chart as World-Class Supplier Management shown here and I developed three new charts for other core competencies of Cost, Quality, eCommerce, and Supplier Development. These four step charts were then used in very successful MS - SCM courses.

Gap Method Success

Part of the reason the University of San Diego online MS-SCM had enrollments by managers from across the globe was because we had a strong focus on starting many courses with students assessing their organization’s management capability gaps between current state and world-class best practices. Managers could then develop projects to close the gaps and show their company the savings expected from what they learned. Gap measurement was done using my World-Class Management Step Charts.

In 2004, Rusty Patterson an Executive Vice-President for Raytheon Company sat in on project presentations by Raytheon students in the MS-SCM program. He noted in almost every presentation the managers showed a step chart to help explain why they chose their projects that would significantly impact Raytheon’s bottom line. He asked who developed the step charts, then found me, and later that day a handshake deal was made with Raytheon to develop an Aerospace Industry Segment Model with ten step charts representing the ten most important core competencies to the industry.

Aerospace Industry Focus

Only three years had passed since the Silicon Valley bubble popped and I shifted my focus to Aerospace and Defense. I never dreamed that in that short of a time I would have a model sponsored by one of the world's largest high technology companies (Raytheon) that would catapult me into meeting rooms across the United States and even into Australia to improve not only the sponsoring company but also their key customers and suppliers. I was also asked by Raytheon to join a Thinktank in Washington DC called NACFAM. The model leveraged ten World-Class Management Step Charts focused on the following core competencies: Cost, Customer, Demand, Design, eCommerce Leadership, Lean, Program, Quality, and Supplier.

From 2003 - 2008, I participated, led, or received results for 194 step chart assessments by Aerospace Industry companies. More companies did assessments, but I was unable to get their results. In most cases the results were from only one or a few charts per company. Very few did assessments using all ten step charts. The data provided a way to compile statistics for a incomplete, but still compelling summary of some of the largest companies, their supply chains and the industry overall. Rolling the data up provided a preliminary view of indices for the chains, regions and the industry. I called the rolled up indices BCI or Business Capability Indices.

Starling Associates Inc.

Another development occurred in 2004. I was asked by my father, Dr. Kenneth E. Starling to become President of his Energy Measurement software company call Starling Associates, Inc. Starling Associates software was already the most accurate software in the world for measuring natural gas flow. I said yes with the knowledge that SAI would not require much of my time until my father needed me more. What this change caused though was for me to become more cognizant of what was going on the Energy Industry as well as attend conferences such as the American Gas Association, Gas Processors Association, and the International School of Hydrocarbon Measurement. In 2004, SAI only had two software programs . When I started engaging more we increased the software offerings to six programs. Customers included Chevron, Marathon Oil, Exxon, Shell, Enable, Honeywell, GE, and others.

Rise of Roadmaps Institute

The allure of private industry for university faculty is always present if you are doing applied research that industry leaders want for their companies. This was the case with my research and teaching methods in 2005. I had reached a point where I could not sustain my university schedule and work with private industry for seismic changes I hoped to achieve. I decided to leave USD to focus exclusively on private industry.

An important side note to my departure for private industry is the fact I taught 20 different courses during my 17 years in academia. Most (13) were Masters courses since I co-developed 7 Masters programs. Courses I have taught are listed on this website.

In 2005, I started the Roadmaps Institute with the backing of Raytheon Company. At the time, Raytheon had six huge divisions with facilities in North America, Australia and Europe. Raytheon sponsored managers into their Raytheon Learning Institute which utilized Roadmaps Institute materials I developed. Raytheon also brought in the United States Air Force as its key customer and several key alliance suppliers.

DR²IVE Methodology

The plan was for the Roadmaps Institute to develop a research/teaching/application juggernaut that would constantly update applicable best practices in standardized World-Class Management Step Charts. The charts would be used by companies to assess themselves, enabling them to measure progress towards best practices at multiple levels of: department / core competency, company, division, enterprise, alliance value chain, supply chain, industry, city, region, state, country and even global.

RI would publish the research (but withholding enough to keep companies engaged), provide workshops and learning programs to help companies use the knowledge to measure their gaps, develop project-based roadmaps, and ultimately achieve unprecedented competitive advantage. The plan included a book called DR²IVE, which is the acronym "Developing Robust Roadmaps Integrating Value Enterprises," as well as a book for every step chart ... over 20 books in total! The books could then be used in academic programs around the globe just as had occurred with the first book World-Class Supply Management.

The methods worked well. The Roadmaps Institute was enthusiastically received. Several hundred companies had used our step charts by 2008. Hundreds of companies in the Aerospace and Defense Industries - mainly Raytheon suppliers - were considering using our methods. I had invested heavily in developing an online learning system that actually had traffic stoplight icons to highlight posts in terms of importance, developed software for measuring using the charts, invested in offices, hired employees to help meet needs, and more.

But , I did not plan for the 2008 Recession. And that was a mistake given my investment.

Recession Suspends Institute

The 2008 Recession was a particularly hard hit for Aerospace / Defense Industry companies that formed 95% of the Roadmaps Institute’s revenue streams. I was thrilled Obama was elected but part of the platform Obama ran on was to reduce military spending. My clients took note and looked for areas to cut to maintain their current revenues and workforce. Work with the Roadmaps Institute was strategic and education oriented, so RI was chosen for cuts.

Raytheon was first to retract. Visionaries within Raytheon advocating the Roadmaps Institute were replaced on a Tuesday and by Thursday of the same week Raytheon’s programs with the Roadmaps Institute were cancelled by the VP of Supply Chain Management. Cuts in Defense budgets with the new Obama Administration coupled with the recession were reasons cited. The domino effect was rapid with Raytheon’s suppliers. All of them cancelled plans to work with RI. Some work with Boeing and a few other companies kept RI afloat for a while, but the weight of investment, workers, infrastructure, led to the decision to suspend marketing and full time work for RI in the Summer of 2009.

In the Fall of 2009 in Norman Oklahoma, I met with Dean Kenneth Evans of the Price College of Business to discuss options of: 1. bringing the Roadmaps Institute within The University of Oklahoma, 2. have me teach in existing SCM type classes, and/or 3. build new programs such as a new Executive MBA program. I thought all was going well until Dean Evans articulated the timeline to make it all happen. It was going to be too drawn out and with too many approval hurdles and faculty roadblocks for me to be able to financially survive. I had to walk away from the prospect.

Energy Industry Focus

The same morning I discovered I would not be able to work with OU, I received a phone call to go to lunch with Dr. Larry Lilly, President of the John M. Campbell (JMC) Company. JMC at the time was the #1 Oil and Gas Industry training company in the world for facilities (above ground). Larry heard I was in town and looking for employment to move back. Upon learning I would not be working with OU, he offered to create a job for me at JMC. He even came up with a base figure that was higher than I could possibly hope to get at a university during a recession.

At JMC, I served in two roles. First, as their Course Manager so I would learn about the company and interact with the instructors. I managed 62 courses held across the globe in Africa, Europe, South America, Asia, Middle East and of course North America.

In 2011, I became the Corporate Projects Lead, which was basically second in command of the operations of the company under Steve Staggs, the Chief Operating Officer. As the Corporate Projects Lead I had the run of the company in terms of finding ways to improve. Some of the Corporate Projects were: Adobe Implementation & Migration (AIM), Document Management System (DMS) Project, Intellectual Property (IP) Project, and Process Optimization and Development (POD) Project. For POD we applied some of my World-Class Management Step Charts to the company. The one that had the greatest impact was World-Class Process Management, which upper management asked me to use in documenting nearly 200 processes at JMC. Upon completion of the POD Project, the documentation was used to help sell the company to Petroskills in December of 2012.

Online Leadership Course

In the Summer of 2012, I took an Adjunct Faculty position at The University of Tulsa teaching in their Online Master of Energy Business program. Tim Coburn, the Program Director, met me after at a Gas Processors Association conference in Oklahoma City. After some discussion of my background teaching online for the University of San Diego and then the Roadmaps Institute, he offered me the change to teach in his program.

The course I taught was titled “Leading and Managing Energy Organizations.” Several of my step charts were used in the course, including World-Class Leadership Management. Unfortunately, the University of Tulsa enrolled 62 Masters students in my class which is far too many students for any graduate course. I went ahead and taught the course, but informed the University of Tulsa I would not teach it again.

Software and Consulting

In 2013 after JMC and teaching for the Univerity of Tulsa, I served full time as President of Starling Associates Inc. (SAI). I had actually taken the position in 2004 as stated previously, but that was so I could attend conferences and help sell SAI software and consulting with some level of authority.

My father started SAI in 1978 while he was a Professor of Chemical Engineering at The University of Oklahoma. He had developed the most accurate methodology in the world for measuring natural gas flows and subsequently coded the methodology into a spreadsheet based software package for the Oil and Gas Industry.

Dad was brilliant. I studied under a Nobel Prize winner and worked with many incredibly intelligent people. My father, Dr. Kenneth E. Starling, was one of the greatest minds I have ever met. It was an honor to have 5 years working with my father from 2013 to 2017 on several consulting initiatives, co-development of five software programs, marketing and contract development initiatives., and even four co-authored papers we presented at conferences. You can see these papers listed as well as my total of over 60 publications on another webpage here.

In 2017 my father was diagnosed with terminal cancer. In November of 2019 he died. I recorded his Life Lessons with him before he passed. His Life Lessons are available here.

In late February of 2020, I resigned as President of Starling Associates, Inc. so my brother, a former Exxon executive, could run the family business. The timing of my career shift was not good as the pandemic hit in March of 2020.

Roadmaps Institute and Pandemic

The timing of restarting The Roadmaps Institute could not have been worse with the pandemic of 2020 that is still affecting business. RI was never irrelevant. The methodologies are solid. The best practices were up to date except for the pandemic modifications companies had made. I will always believe RI can truly help make the world a better place by helping businesses do better in a humanistic and collaborative way ... and along that journey RI will always propose sustainability, diversity, and kindness as part of being best in the world.

The pandemic made conducting workshops in person impossible since no company in the Fortune 500 category was willing to take such risks. Regretfully, in February of 2022, I made the decision to mothball RI workshops and focus on just consulting using the materials. RI continues through the consulting and I may restart it once the world is ready for workshops again.

Consulting in EV Industry

The fastest growing industry in the United States is clearly the Electrical Vehicle Industry. In 2022 I shifted my consulting to focus on the EV Industry. After discussions with many companies, I decided to contract 100% of my time with Ample, a startup.

Ample has three production areas:

1. Standardized and Interchangeable Electric Vehicle Batteries,

2. Swapping Bays for Batteries they call Ant Farms, and

3. Plates and Trays for retrofitting into EVs from just about every car manufacturer except Tesla.

How do the three separate areas fit together? There is no standard for batteries in the EV Industry, so what Ample does is removes the OEM batteries from vehicles and replaces them with a insert tray that can accept Ample's standardized battery. One battery standard can therefore power any EV with this insert. That leads to how do we get these interchangeable batteries into the inserts? That is where the Ant Farms come into play, which are bays that a EV can pull into, be raised off the ground, and then bay's robotics remove and replace the standardized batteries. Super cool! But it requires a lot of standardized batteries and that is where the 3rd production effort is focused. Ample created a mass production battery manufacturing facility in Brisbane, California.

For what I did at Ample, you will have to ask for my resume. I like to protect my work for clients, but let's just say I got a chance to get into the trenches of EV industry global supply chains and helped Ample develop over 100 project proposals to take the company's SCM capabilities to the next level of competitiveness. It is now up to Ample's management as to whether they want to be world-class or not in Supply Chain Management. They have the strategic plan.