The Partners
Peter Baston
pete@ideapete.com
A seasoned professional with more than 20 years experience in business technology innovation and product development, Peter, the founder of IDEAS, works with a broad spectrum of companies, transitioning and implementing new business development, taming the technology beast and making it cost-effective. He spent many years as a turnaround specialist for major VC and financial companies that needed rapid understanding of complex technology issues and related problems. Known as the Logic Man, Peter brings perfect clarity to complex systems. His experience includes advanced management information technology, software, hardware, networks and how they interrelate to business core practices. He also holds patents on the biggest floating platforms ever designed for electrical power production boilers, supporting advanced maintenance concepts for the 21st century.
Peter 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, and its project base 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 Peter 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 Peter, Quality Assurance is the anchor for everything that a company does, and 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, primarily Germany and Holland, Peter 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, developing and implementing 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, Peter 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. This was the first step in a continuing crusade to promote turning large industrial structures into self-maintaining systems.
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, pursuing an independent and eclectic course of studies that eventually led to a list of technical certifications as long as his arm. He is a frequent speaker and lecturer on his favorite subject, “How complex technology can be made to IMPROVE the quality of life.” In 1996, on a visit to Los Alamos National Labs and the Santa Fe Institute, he decided to settle in New Mexico. Since then, he has taken on a number of large technical concept development, Quality Assurance and problem-solving projects with government agencies and private companies.
Peter avidly champions the philosophies of Richard Feynman, W. Edwards Deming, Don Norman, Allan Cooper and Oliver Sacks, and believes no university, technical or business graduate should be released into the real world until they have mastered Terry Prachett’s Discworld series. People have commented: “That guy taught me more about business and technology integration in 20 minutes than I learned in 20 years.” “He has opened my eyes to how technology and business really works.” “He is incredible; he found and showed us how to fix all the technology problems in our business in one week. We had struggled with it for years!” “If you want to reduce your MIS/IT costs by 60 percent and double efficiency, he's your man.” “He has devastated me. I am a techno-boorish idiot, and used it as a weapon against my business partners. I am going back to my company to beg forgiveness from everyone whom I have humiliated.” “He is right, technology is a business tool and it is all about improving the quality of life: if it isn’t and it doesn’t, who needs it?” “Honestly, you need to get this guy to totally redo your business technology integration; he sees things so logically, like we never could.” “For once, an honest man who gave our executives the right tools to understand and manage technology cost-effectively instead of cowering from it. If you need REAL logic in your technology business understanding, he is your man.”
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 including process mapping,
procedure documentation and being on either side of quality audits. 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 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 Peter 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.