I was much shaped by my education. One of my prep (junior) schools was Fyling Hall on the North Yorkshire coast – beautiful view, set in farmland and woods.
I went on to ‘public school’ at Bootham in York and, after my Naval service, to Balliol in Oxford.
I read engineering at Oxford – not exactly a mistake but it took me 11 years of varied employment to realize it was not my métier.
Next stop was the Manchester Business School.
This transformed my life, not only opening up a career as an academic but a new identity. I was unbelievably fortunate to have mentors to usher me into being an academic, to give me a post at what was then the City University Business School (CUBS, now Cass). I left there for York University (Toronto), UCLA, Glasgow, and Rutgers where I am now a Visiting Scholar. This period included a spell of entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley – a couple of computer security startups.
After sabbatical work at NIST I moved into Deaning at NYIT and eventually wound up my full-time career as Dean of what became the Jay and Patty Baker School of Business and Technology at the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) in New York.