Jack Harich

The lead systems engineer and sustainologist at Thwink.org.

Nationality: United States. Raised on a farm in Maryland.

Qualifications: 20 years of small business and dot.com startup consulting, 6 years small business management, BS in Industrial & Systems Engineering; proficient in process design and improvement, problem analysis, software engineering and architecture, system dynamics, outdoor digital photography, the bamboo flute, art furniture and woodworking, and ultralite hiking.

Role: Jack's role is to initiate the concepts and strategies necessary to help those working on the sustainability problem approach the problem from a much more effective angle of attack, one hopefully an order of magnitude more productive.

Comment: "I believe that once environmentalists start using the same problem solving tools that others have long been using, they will be able to make strides so great they will astonish themselves. The absence of these tools can be explained by one simple fact: a very different type of person, on the average, is attracted to altruistic causes. As a result, they tend to be long on motivation and optimism, and short on the powerful productivity techniques known to business, science, engineering, and academia. It is these techniques and the strategies behind them that will make the difference in solving the sustainability problem."

Jack's personal web page is here.

Jack's Story - Jack is a bit of a thinker, a tinker and a better candlestick maker. In 1970 he dropped out of Georgia Tech to run two businesses for six years. The first was a startup bust, and the second a big turnaround success. Then he moved into consulting and finished up at Georgia Tech in Industrial Systems Engineering. Many years consulting with small businesses, cooperatives, distributors, and retailers were followed by a few years as a furniture artist. Shown is a shellback rocker.

On the side, he's been building The Tower since 1975. Here's what the tower looks like today. At the top of this page is what Jack looks like today, while below was long ago in the third grade. As both pictures show, he is forever young.

Sometimes Jack likes to play around with the younger crowd. Here he is, tied up by indians.

The life of an artist was followed by a return to consulting, this time in the information technology industry during the heady days of the dot com bubble. As they had been before, Jack's specialties were a systematic analysis of a business's or an industry's problems, formal process, and the crucial role of information, communication, and collaboration in achieving difficult objectives. Clients during this period included Delta Airlines, the Center for Disease Control of Atlanta, and Realm Technologies.

After finishing up with Realm Technologies (a high flying dot com startup), he looked around for the next challenging problem to solve, and decided that instead of solving more of the business world's problems, there was an infinitely more important problem that needed attention: the global environmental sustainability problem. If the problem is not solved then nothing else matters, so in mid 2001 he switched to working on it full time, and made it his life's work.

He immediately set up a six year plan. The first two years were for becoming familar with the problem in general. The next two were for analysis and making an original contribution that might make the difference. The last two years were for starting to work elbow to elbow with others to help solve the problem, while continuing his original work. There were two top strategies: One was to deliberately work alone for the first four years, so as to not fall into the same ruts and groupthink of others, since 30 years of solution failure showed that conventional wisdom was not working. The other strategy was to create and follow a formal problem solving process that fit the problem. The first version of this was created in a few months and became the System Improvement Process. Amazingly enough, the project plan is on schedule.

So far it has been a very difficult project, but the results of the first iteration of the analysis, and the reactions of those who have taken the time to read and understand it, are looking very promising.