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Hal Macomber has been making his career improving the effectiveness of business and the lives of the people in the business from his first job coming out of college. He studied economics and operations research at Lowell Tech, the UMass Engineering School. He went on to get an MBA from Boston University in operations management. At the time of his formal education science was revered. The US had just landed a man on the moon, nuclear power was bringing cheap electricity to the world, the personal computer became available, and new drugs were continuously introduced. There seemed to be nothing that science and mathematics couldn’t solve or create. Yet Taylor’s work on efficiency, linear programming, and mathematical simulations failed to produce lasting change in companies. Hal saw this in his work and began a 15-year investigation and pursuit of alternatives.
Hal studied the prevailing approaches starting with the behavioral sciences. He found few companies saw lasting changes. He moved on to study philosophy, first J.G. Bennett and Georges Gurdjieff, eventually Austin, Searle, Maturana, and Heidegger. This landed him on the doorstep of one of today’s renaissance men, Fernando Flores. Flores became his teacher, consultant, and finally his employer. Flores taught Hal about linguistics, management, leadership, and being human. Throughout those studies he continued to invest in the leading thinking of the day: enterprise resource planning systems, self-managing workgroups, learning organizations, time-based management, reengineering, total quality, and lean thinking. His preoccupation with operations effectiveness finally paid off when he learned about workflow, Flores’ linguistic-action reinterpretation of work. |
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