Sherman was my fencing coach at Boston University in the early 80s. He was a national caliber saber man while I, mediocre on my best day, gravitated to the Epee - the only real weapon in the fencing arsenal.
That was a pivotal period for me. Behind me were degrees in psychology and philosophy, work on loading docks and in factories in New Jersey, barn building in Pennsylvania, and a good deal of drifting around Europe, North and South America. Understanding the world meant understanding computers. I wrote my first program in high school in 1968 (in Fortran on an IBM 360) and was now determined to master technical development and operations management. I leveraged my experience, amplified by unwarranted self-confidence, to get a job with an analytical processing firm in Cambridge. Boston University offered a wider arena for application development so I hacked code, designed increasingly complex systems, built teams, and made my clients happy – not always my supervisors.
I learned my management and consulting trade at Arthur D. Little Inc and spent most of the next 17 years re-engineering that firm’s information systems on an international scale. When ADL went bankrupt in 2002, I was asked to use the systems I built to support litigation. That launched my consultancy practice. My business plan was simple: find interesting people who are doing interesting things and help them do it. I was busy. My clients came from the legal, healthcare, pharma, financial, and education sectors. Companies like Biogen, GE, Partners Health, and Boston University, as well as smaller firms gave me their trust, and I left them better off than when I found them. What my clients have in common is a desire, and very often strategic and existential need, to build quality products and high-performance operations. Knowing how to do that in a technical world that cares about its humanity turns out to be a fairly good career path.
I spend much of my personal time playing tennis, in scholarly and frivolous reading (not always distinguishable), some writing, and, by force of habit, drifting around world. I teach entrepreneurship and product development courses at Hult International Business School in Cambridge and am helping create the school’s incubator. I am a certified SBA mentor and work with the national Score program to counsel entrepreneurs as they establish and grow their businesses. Score clients contribute $67 into the economy to each $1 investment in the program – not a bad ROI. We are now beginning to expanding our outreach to entrepreneurs, in Boston and abroad, who wish to grow through international trade.
I have had the pleasure to see the launch of quite a few innovative products, organizations and practices. Some are small life-style businesses, some change markets and industries on a global scale; all improve lives. My clients teach me more than I teach them, not least about the power of imagination, fearlessness and the tenacity required to create a sustainable and valuable reality.
Actually, “unwarranted self-confidence,” turned Rafi into a fun, durable and dependable epeeist, and Boston University won its fair share of bouts and competitions (picture) Worth noting, our women’s Varsity which I also coached outshone the men.
Rafi has been a valued friend and advisor over the years. It was Rafi who introduced me to Jeff Aresty, and the surely led to some of the most innovative outcomes for the Institute.
Rafi and I bonded over politics and literature, with many conversations that happily continue, he perhaps more grizzled, skeptical, and wiser. Much of the talk centered on the Shoah, Jewish resistance to the Nazis, rescuers, and Israeli history, politics and society. Rafi helped me research and translate Hebrew sources, especially when I centered my research over civil -military relations in Israel and the Israeli Lebanon invasions. People I met in Israel in the height of the fighting, who I subsequently befriended, were the anti-war dissidents and activists of Yesh G’Vul, in particular Dov Yermiya, whose life and controversial opinions impacted me greatly.
His journal was eventually translated and speaks volumes to my own attitudes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dov_Yermiya
https://www.972mag.com/saying-goodbye-to-israels-oldest-dissident-zionist/
https://www.palestine-studies.org/en/node/232311
When I was considering what to do in my Emeritus years, Rafi was one of the very first people I consulted. He was patient and thoughtful, (especially with my irritability, stuck in a cast with a catastrophic ankle injury – think Gordon Hayword – one of his therapists was mine.) I decided against a for profit entity, but I’m certain that if I had gone a different Rafi route, I would be wealthier. No regrets whatsoever. And so happy Convisero allows us to interact and embolden our community.