The Partners
Pete Baston
pete@ideapete.com
Pete, the founder of IDEAS, is a Senior Executive Consultant with over 25 years of Quality Assurance experience at the highest level of operations. This experience encompasses:
- Immersion in best practices and workflow deployment using advanced digital technology systems for business development, business turnaround and risk management
- Implementation of many aspects of advanced security systems in various industries
- Project development and best practices implementation in multiple industries including fossil fuel, nuclear, and alternative source power; engineering and construction; higher education and government; petrochemical; information technology and telecommunications.
Pete was born in England and raised from the age of four in Rhodesia, Africa. He served intermittently as a conscript in a logistics and transport division of the Rhodesian citizen army from 1965 to 1979. During that time, he acquired four college degrees and formed his first business, an independent subsidiary of the Ajax Group, a Rhodesia-based commercial and military construction conglomerate. His consulting firm was the chief troubleshooter and quality assurance auditor for the conglomerate, resolving engineering, project management and materials acquisition problems. In 1975, Peter Baston Consulting established a subsidiary in South Africa, which expanded its client base to include a number of South African and international clients, including Fluor, Soros, Maurabeni, Hyundai, Asea Brown Boveri, Bechtel and others. At the same time, its project base expanded to include design and construction of petrochemical and power plants as well as large commercial structures.
His experience in Africa, where a shortage of resources absolutely required that engineering projects be done right the first time because there were no additional funds available to correct mistakes, gave Pete an enduring passion for “doing it right in the real world” and a reputation for accomplishing the seemingly impossible with minimal resources. Shuttling between England and Africa, he often says, meant learning to operate in perfectly opposed environments: how to get nothing done with lots of resources, or how to get everything done with minimal resources. This has translated into a life-long commitment to Quality Assurance as applied engineering. For Pete, Quality Assurance is the anchor for everything that a company does, and the key to consistent and enduring profitability. Deming’s 14 points are the manifesto that has accompanied him all over the world, and which he has integrated into field implementation and operations on every project he’s managed.
In 1979, with Rhodesia fast descending into political, military and economic chaos, Peter left Rhodesia with what he was allowed to carry out: $1,000 in cash and two suitcases. After a year and a half doing free-lance consulting throughout Europe, Pete was recruited to the US by the California division of Fluor Engineering to provide Quality Assurance oversight and expertise on assignment to a variety of teams. For a number of years he served as a troubleshooter and market development consultant for the Fluor Power Services Division and its research arm, Buildings of the Future, as well as for Nation’s Bank. In this capacity, he was certified as a quality auditor and performed due diligence reviews and construction project audits on billion dollar construction projects. After the oil market crash, his assignment expanded from servicing petrochemical and power plants to creating and marketing new, advanced products and services for Fortune 500 companies in a broad variety of industries. He developed and implemented the US marketing, design and deployment strategy for newly-formed subsidiary J.M. Group, incorporating rigorous Quality Assurance practices to protect profitability and taking the subsidiary from $0 to $232M annual sales in three years. In 1986, Pete founded his own manufacturing, design and service firm, Monkradle, to develop, manufacture and market advanced support equipment and systems to promote best practices and Quality Assurance in the utility, petrochemical, aerospace, civil engineering, defense and other industries.
In the early 1990s, as it became apparent that computers and information technology would eventually drive Quality Assurance and all of the industrial design and maintenance industry, he sold his company and took an extended sabbatical to learn digital technology from the ground up at the University of California San Diego, Northwestern University, the University of British Columbia and MIT. Pete pursued an independent and eclectic course of studies that eventually led to a list of technical certifications as long as his arm. In 1996, on a visit to Los Alamos National Labs and the Santa Fe Institute, he decided to settle in New Mexico. Over the following decade, Pete took on on a number of large technical concept development, Quality Assurance and problem-solving projects with government agencies and private companies.
In 2010, IDEAS moved its base of operations to Boulder, Colorado, a center for development of the most advanced parametric technology in the world. Pete believes parametric technology will be the cornerstone for future development of advanced best practices using digital workflow. IDEAS is already developing this type of technology as part of its integrated intelligent QA management systems (iQA™).
Pete is a frequent speaker and lecturer on Quality Assurance and the integration of technology into QA and business systems.
Lilli Segre
lilli@ideapete.com
Lilli
brings twenty-five years of experience in corporate operations, project management
and technical communications in both public and private sectors to the IDEAS
team. She has a strong background in policy development, performance management
systems and reporting, and quality assurance systems. Her experience includes
operations management in software development and manufacturing environments,
as well as the design and deployment of organizational training and re-training
programs to support process implementation.
While at Honeywell, Lilli earned her Six Sigma Green Belt. She has been trained in several quality assurance protocols, including Lean Management. Lilli has participated in quality audits both as auditor and auditee, and trained for qualification as an auditor. She has developed or supported quality assurance systems compliant with ISO 9000:2000 and NQA-1 standards in both large and small businesses.
For ten years, she worked exclusively in Information Technology, overseeing marketing, proposal and bid efforts and later managing project teams for value-added-resellers in complex systems and network deployment. Briefly recruited as Director of Communications for the Human Services Department of the State of New Mexico, Lilli oversaw communications policy for one of the largest departments in the State. Just before joining Pete in forming the IDEAS partnership, Lilli managed operations for two small start-ups formed to market technologies derived from research performed at Los Alamos National Laboratories.
Prior to embarking on a business career, she taught language, literature and linguistics at the University of Toronto, Erindale Campus. Lilli attended Vassar College, Brown University and the University of Pavia, Italy, and holds a B.A. and M.A.