Professional Philosophy
I'm a strong believer in building business through world class customer service. By customer service I mean more than Nordstrom's famous customer service that is so part of the culture of that company. More, in that while your end customers are the reason your job exists, your customers often are internal to your enterprise. In the world of business and technology your customer may be the department down the way or perhaps the new hire who is a bit lost and needs a pointer. Everything you can do to help the external customer as well as the overall cause of the enterprise should be foremost in your mind.
Out of this mindset comes the notion of servant leadership. Nordstrom calls it the inverted pyramid and it is embraced by everyone. It is most clearly expressed when you discuss your teams or staff. When someone says they support ABC team it means they are the manager and they really do support that team. They work hard to advance their team members' careers and they work hard as advocates for their team. It is the mindset of "what can I do to help the team meet our goals, and you meet your personal career goals?".
Leadership Style
I'm a technology professional with a strong background in engineering and project/program management. I have a history of building winning teams that know their mission and are highly productive. See blog dated July 20, 2016. I pride myself in being a coach and a mentor. Engineers know they can talk to me and discuss technical details and options and project managers know I will openly discuss their projects and give them guidance.
My technical and PM background is broad based across many stacks. I have worked in Omni-channel, CRM, payments, international, POS, RESTful services, SOAP services, and J2EE. I was a C++ developer in embedded systems. This array of experiences allows me to interact with engineers when I need to but to also step back and work with the business on setting direction and building a product roadmap. Previous to my engineering experiences I was an Operations Manager in several industry leading corporations. For this reason I have a strong business acumen. I am an expert at forecasting and budgeting.
My greatest strength is leading large enterprise wide initiatives across many teams and technologies. While at Nordstrom the largest initiatives were often under my direction.
Chronology
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Early Life
I grew up in the greater Seattle area in what is now incorporated as the city of Sammamish on a 10.7 acre farm with an older brother and sister and younger brother. We certainly spent a lot of time outdoors. I attended Redmond schools (Lake Washington School District) from kindergarten through high school. I did the usual summer jobs and played soccer for many years. My team the Redmond Dragsters was one of the first to tour Europe when I was 12, a trip I still remember well.
My family was into the outdoors things like camping and skiing and hiking. We got initiated into hiking early. My first trip up Mt Si was when I was 3. I remember a 4 day hike over Dutch Miller Gap when I was about 4. The cool things we did included summiting Glacier Peak and Mount St Helens in back to back weekends and then skipping a weekend before climbing Rainier. Not bad for a high school junior.
After high school I attended the University of Washington and was an obnoxious frat guy. But hey, those are still some of my closest friends. A group of us still have Husky Football season tickets together. Go Dawgs!
In school I eventually ended up with a Business Administration degree and dreamt of working in a high rise in Seattle. Instead I ended up in the dusty basement of a 1920's era warehouse in Portland, Oregon. Oh well!
Early Career
The Portland position was at the distribution center of Meier & Frank department stores. I found myself on the swing shift of this Teamsters affiliated warehouse. Back then managers all wore suits, boy did that create an unnecessary dichotomy. The best learning from that job came on the first day when VP Mark Zertanna explained an issue, and followed up immediately that it was my problem now. I don't recall the issue, but understanding of immediate accountability is not forgotten.
After nearly four years I switched jobs, still in Portland, to Frito-Lay. The Regional Northwest Headquarters were there. I was brought in to train and eventually move to an open position in the Seattle area as a Facilities Operations Manager. The first six weeks were tough. All employees were initiated by running routes - you know, those Frito-Lay step vans. Well the first thing I learned was how early those guys got going, and the next thing I learned was that boxes of chips were surprisingly heavy. I have total respect for what they do. Also, they are salespersons first and delivery drivers second. If you went to an interview and wanted to be a driver you were out. But if you said you wanted to be a salesperson, you were in.
After training I went to Seattle and took over the Everett DC facility and drop locations in places like Bellingham, Mount Vernon, and Wenatchee and eventually was given the Seattle area flagship Redmond DC facility as well. Later I was also given the Auburn DC so now I had all of Western Washington operations. It was a big job for a twenty something dude but I loved it. At this point I had fleet operations for 143 route trucks, full P & L operations and staffing for all warehousing, and promotional product ordering for large events like Superbowl. Travel became a bit over the top though. Frito-Lay had a McKinsey study and laid off 1,800 people including me. I found a job at Pacific Linen, an expanding domestics retailer with stores that had a small footprint.
Pacific Linen had transitioned from a discounter to a full price retailer. But the transition was a flop because customers knew them as a deep discounter so the move to full price was not well received. Also expansion was too aggressive into Canada and into the SW United States. My position was as Distribution Center Manager. Over the 3+ years I was there my boss was fired and I took on his role. About that time we were rolling out to a new Third Party Logistics Company (3PL) in Toronto called Dylex. I had a couple trips there to make sure the operations and in particular returns were handled well. Also for some weird reason the leadership thought we should open a pick and pack warehouse in Tukwila. So, I embarked on setting up the warehouse pretty much by myself. I learned about inline sprinkler systems the hard way. I hired a manager for the facility and eventually had to fire him and hired another guy who turned out great. Bottom line: Pacific Linen folded.
I went to work for Griffin Envelope which was an envelope manufacturing and printing company in Seattle. This was a small but very well run company. Eventually they sold out to a large national company called Mailwell. I learned a lot and got myself started down the IT path there. I made the big mistake of moving from Griffin Envelope to McKesson General Medical, a very poorly run company. They were always under funded and the warehouses were without reasonable technology and staffing was at a level that made basic sanitation impossible. I worked many evenings after hours physically packing orders to clear the day's backlog - the all time low point in my career. My salvation was school and family.
Family
I met my wife Suzanne in 1990 and we were married in October of 1991. My son John was born in 1994 about a year before I left Pacific Linen. He has big blue eyes and a blonde head. He was razor intelligent even as a toddler. My second son Jackson was born in 1996 while I was at Griffin Envelope. He has darker hair and brown eyes and a built in diligence. Both kids have since grown into fine young men. John has graduated college with an Electrical Engineering degree with computer science and was married in August of 2016. He and his wife Kara both have their first career jobs and are workng locally in Seattle's eastside subburbs. See blog dated August 23, 2016. John is working as an analyst at a cool company called TecPlot in Bellevue. Jackson is attending classes at Central Washington University and has been accepted into the Law and Criminal Justice program. My family helped me get through the dark days that were McKesson. We used to hold the kids and dance around and sing to REM's "Shining Happy People" and do all those things you do with your kids. We enjoyed hanging out with cousins and trips to Cannon Beach in the summer.
Back to School
So in 1998 while at McKesson I started taking certification classes for C Programming at the UW Extension. These were night classes and they were my great escape. I loved being back in school with educated people. It took a year to convince the admissions folks at UW Bothell to let me into the Computing and Software Systems (CSS) program. In late 1999 I left McKesson, having already completed my C Certificate and already full time at Bothell. That was a hell of a commute at rush hour from McKesson in Tukwila to school in Bothell. Being back in college was great and I fell in love with C++ programming. I also enjoyed our HW and Operating Systems class where our team project was to program a disassembler in Assembly. I finished classes in Fall 2000 and finished my internship at Applied Microsystems in the Spring of 2001.
Rejuvinated Career
Applied Microsystems was an interesting and fortunate place for me to intern. I was given a project to write a Unix version of an existing Windows registry browser. The browser could display the contents of a chipset and show which register values were flipped and what the values were. I created the UX using Motif which has plentiful memory leaks. Which is sort of funny because one of the core tools created by Applied Microsystems was to detect/resolve memory and handle leaks. I was introduced to several patterns such as visitor, observer, singleton, and facade for the first time. Anyway I made this thing work, and I think I surprised a few people. They hired me full time and put me on a cool project called SoftLogic which would emulate a specification for a chip that did not yet exist. Our primary customer was Lucent Technologies. Interestingly Applied Microsystems and Lucent both took a dive later that year so I moved on to Siemens Ultrasound.
Siemens turned out to be a perfect fit, I joined in November 2001. Both companies used Rational Clearcase, both companies were doing a mix of Windows and Unix work. I moved seamlessly from my Solaris machine at Applied Microsystems to a Solaris machine at Siemens. I was able to quickly get my development environment up with Emacs and Bash shell. Those were the days. I loved working on the Elegra system. It turned out in the end I was the last developer still working on the system before moving over to the Windows based Antares platform. With Antares we built a set of proprietary menu widgets. After some help on the first one I was able to create my own and eventually took over as the key guy on the menu navigation UI creating an amazing factory pattern. Ultrasound has various modes each having a completely different set of controls and thresholds. There are four main modes and 3D all of which have very different menus and navigation. It was a major development to create these UI systems. In later years I worked on the cardiology platform. I was developing a push and pull client system for marshaling data from the imaging process to the front end application process.
After five and a half years at Siemens it seemed it was time to move on to try combining my engineering and management backgrounds. Our friend Karen helped get my resume to folks at Nordstrom. I joined there as a Project Lead in June of 2007. I was still close to the engineering but I was able to leverage my management background. I learned a lot at Nordstrom and loved the culture at least until 2015 when things went decidedly south for the company and particularly the culture. While at Nordstrom I was promoted from Project Lead to Project Manager, then to Sr Project Manager, then to Senior Manager. My specialty turned out to be the biggest projects running across multiple teams. As my career at Nordstrom progressed I went from close to the code to close to the process. I concentrated on continuous improvement and Lean principles and mentoring. I spent nearly nine years at Nordstrom until a layoff in 2016.
After Nordstrom I have spent a lot of time back in the great outdoors and traveling. I have explored a lot of new technologies and brushed up on my C++, Ruby, and Python just for fun. I have delved into AWS and Node.js and Angular as those are more emergent technologies. I also gained a whole new set of skills as I replaced a deck and did a lot of trim work and painting around the houses. But mostly I have been happiest running, gardening, and traveling. I call it my interlude!
I married my wife Karen in September 2017 with each of our fathers as best men/witnesses. We both have adult children from a previous marriage and we are both struggling to find the kid's acceptance of our new lives together. My life went through quite a shift in the mid 2010's as I went through a divorce and a new marriage, the job hunt, and selling and buying houses. I feel like I've settled into a life that fits me better. I'm mostly content yet always hungry to move forward in technologies and work. This drive and need for newness keeps me fresh and young at heart.
We bought a house in Lake Forest Park in October 2017 and worked furiously to make it habitable for our moving day of November 11. The house is an old rambler built in 1953. But is has a great lot with the primary drawback being closeness to Bothell Way. I hate that road. It has a pool which is both a positive and a negative. We have decided to vastly remodel the house since it doesn't have a master suite nor a dedicated laundry room. When finished in late 2018 we will have two master suites and a dedicated laundry room. We will also have updated electrical and air conditioning and a tankless on demand water heater.
So, now I'm working as a contractor as a Technical Program Manager, perhaps having drifted too far from the engineering that I love. But I still love my kids and family and I am still in a good place as far as my positioning for my career. We'll see what comes next!