"Assistance at A Distance"
Fred Nickols
My Work
My work centers on improving performance. Generally speaking, I focus on three broad categories of performance: organizational, operational (i.e., process) and individual. For the most part, solutions to problems in these areas are "engineered," that is, brought about as the result of skillful, artful contrivance, not as the result of employing by-the-book approaches.
I was employed as an Executive Director at Educational Testing Service in Princeton, New Jersey from July of 1990 until mid-December of 2001. I left so as to be able to devote more time to reading, writing and consulting. For much of my time at ETS I was head of Strategic Planning and Management Services. Other assignments at ETS included working as a consultant on staff in the Operations division, running a multi-million dollar operating division, serving as Chief of Staff to the Vice President of Operations, redesigning the company's business planning and management process as part of the ETS president's organizational renewal effort, carrying out organizational design work in the Research division, and helping launch a new product and line of business. My last 16 months with ETS were spent in the Information Systems & Technology (IS&T) division. I was brought into IS&T initially to develop a competitive technology intelligence function. A new VP changed all that. My last year with ETS was about equally divided between heading up the Office of Project Management, where my charge was to "weave the discipline of project management into the fabric of the organization," and serving as a member of the governance team, charged with negotiating and then managing a 10-year, $300 million IT outsourcing arrangement. Before joining ETS, I was Senior Vice President for Systems & Operations at a financial services firm in New York City. Before that, I was an independent consultant as well as a member of three small consulting firms.
My main intellectual interests include performance, productivity, systems, work and working, management, organizations and, above all else, learning and problem solving. I've spent more years than I care to count developing and refining a problem-solving approach called "Solution Engineering." One problem with which I've been wrestling for more than 30 years now is the shift to knowledge work and its implications for management, productivity and performance. This problem surfaced most recently in the context of knowledge management and communities of practice.
About Me
I was born in Fort Madison, Iowa in 1937. My childhood years were spent mostly in Fort Madison and up river in Burlington, Iowa. I graduated from high school in 1955 and, three days later, joined the United States Navy. I spent 19 years and three months in the Navy, retiring in 1974 with the rank of Chief Petty Officer (E-7). My rating or occupational specialty was that of FT or fire control technician (gun fire, that is). I was responsible for operating, maintaining and repairing complex, shipboard weapons systems. Early in my Navy career, I was trained in electronics, servomechanisms, optics, hydraulics, gyroscopes, radar, electro-mechanical analog computers and ballistics. Later, in advanced technical training, I learned about mathematics, ranging from simple arithmetic through algebra, plane geometry, trigonometry and calculus (differential and integral). Still later, I learned about missiles and digital computers. Most important, I learned about the fire control problem - which is essentially a problem in changing rates of change, all having to do with how to hit a moving target (a handy skill, even in the civilian world). Beyond these technical skills, I was also trained as a classroom instructor, a programmed instruction writer, an instructional systems developer and an internal organization development (OD) consultant. In the early 1970s, I ran the programmed instruction writer's course at the Navy's Instructor Training School in San Diego and, while there, I developed the Navy's first instructional systems development training course. Since retiring from the Navy in 1974, I've worked roughly 15 years as an independent management consultant and another 15 years as an employed executive. All told, it has been and still is a pretty good life.
I like reading, writing, talking, solving problems, driving around the country, looking through old book stores and antiquing. I especially like the Midwest.
I dislike rude people, drivers who use the excuse of being polite to release their suppressed desire to direct traffic and the cultural bigots who criticize Frederick Winslow Taylor for failing to display in the 1890s what they pronounce as the values of the 1990s.
My interests combine to make me a big fan of such disparate characters as Karen Brethower, Tom Davenport, Peter Drucker, Roger Kaufman, Susan Markle, Allan H. Mogensen, Ludvig von Mises, William Powers, Geary Rummler, Herbert Simon, B. F. Skinner, Frederick Winslow Taylor and Karl Weick to name just a few.
This page was last updated on July 14, 2008
