Who we are ...
 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 grew up in England and Rhodesia, Africa, which as he often says, are
perfectly opposed environments where one can understand how to get nothing done
with lots of resources or everything done with
minimal resources. He holds an MBA with
specialization in marketing from URHO, BS in Engineering Management and an AA in
Cognitive Psychology from UNDSA. Peter’s first business, formed in 1967, was an
independent subsidiary of the Ajax Group, a Rhodesia-based commercial and
military construction conglomerate. His consulting firm was the chief
troubleshooter 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. After the collapse of Rhodesia,
Peter did freelance consulting throughout Europe, primarily Germany and Holland,
while he looked around for a new homeland.
In 1980, he was recruited by Fluor Engineering and so induced to settle in the
US. 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. Later he was responsible for
creating and marketing new, advanced products and services for Fortune 500
companies in the maintenance, construction and operation of utility, civil
engineering, aerospace and defense industry facilities for US and worldwide export
markets for a new Fluor subsidiary that, under his direction, went from $0 to
$232M annual sales in three years. In 1986, Peter founded his own manufacturing,
design and service firm, Monkradle, to develop and market advanced support
systems (including the patented floating maintenance platforms) for utility, petrochemical,
aerospace, civil engineering, defense and other industries. This was the first
step in a life long 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 all of the industrial design and maintenance
industry, Peter sold his company and took an extended sabbatical to learn
digital technology from the ground up. He spent time at University of California
San Diego, Northwestern University, 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.”
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% 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
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 systems including process mapping procedure documentation
and being on both sides 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 protocols, including Lean Management. In addition to
having developed or supported quality systems compliant with ISO 9000:2000 and
NQA-1 standards in both large and small businesses, Lilli has participated in
quality audits and trained for qualification as an
auditor.
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.
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