Acknowledgments

I want to thank my wife, Helen Stella, for love, support, patience, advice, and encouragement during the process of writing this book. You’re there when I’m winning, and you’re there while there are still challenges I have yet to conquer. Helen, I am lucky to have you in my life!

I’d also like to thank Dr. Jeffrey Luftig, from whom I learned that the key to business success is bringing together business competence and strong technical proficiency in scientific methods you’re using. His work and teaching had a profound impact on my thinking (for example, his book with Steve Ouellette [1], his paper “TOTAL Asset Utilization” [2], and his course content [3]). Jeff taught me how to align business and technology, and I learned from him how to apply Peter Drucker’s dictum that it’s more important to be effective (do the right things) than to be efficient (to do things right) [4].^[1]

¹ Peter Drucker, from “Managing for Business Effectiveness” [4]: “It is fundamentally the confusion between effectiveness and efficiency that stands between doing the right things and doing things right. There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all.”