Intro to my ARCHITECT! Blog Series (1 of 15)

The ARCHITECT! Blog Series.

The story.

This series is the story of my personal journey in the asset-intensive world.  It’s a story that required fierce warrior-ship, determination, and a belief that I was doing something meaningful that would enable me to make a positive contribution to our planet as I pursued my passion.

What attracted me to the industrial world?  It’s a macho world filled with engineers and powerful men, not necessarily a world where a woman would thrive.

As an only child, my mother and I would holiday with her brother, my uncle, on his prairie farm.  Autumn was a community experience where neighbouring farmers gathered together and collaborated to create a plan to cut hay and harvest grain from the fields quickly and efficiently while the weather permitted.  An extra hand was always welcome.  Every helping hand was enrolled!

As a young girl, my uncle showed me how to drive a small Ford tractor and rake freshly cut hay in the fields!  This was far more interesting to me rather than staying in the house with the women who cooked and cleaned all day, making bread, baking pies, preparing large roasts, gathering and cooking fresh vegetables from the garden, serving a massive lunch to the hungry crew, cleaning up, then doing it all over again for dinner.  In what little time they had, the women fed the chickens and pigs, milked the cows, watered the horses, hauled water from the well, and cooked on a wood stove.  It was all hard work, permeated with high spirits and hearty laughter.

I’m not an engineer; I’m a mathematician.  How I got here is a story for another time, but I have no regrets.  I studied the most theoretical math I could, and loved every minute.  Mathematics taught me to love rigour, solve problems, visualize solutions, and figure out how to bridge the gap from where an organization is today to the future.

Please stay with me as I tell my story and recommend to decision makers in asset-intensive organizations that they ARCHITECT.