Case study
Systems thinking
early evidence
The two stories below are early-career evidence of the same instinct that shows up later in Voyager's 10→3 compression and CIMMYT's hybrid front-room economics: read across the design × engineering seam, find where the friction lives, and route around it.
West Publishing Corporation (now part of Thomson Reuters), via Sage Technologies
For West Publishing Corporation in ’95 — now with Thomson Reuters — Charles built batch-processing routines that saved 40% of budgeted time on two prepress and internet projects. Charles also built an automatic cataloging process for the Legal Marketing and Internet Departments that gave department-wide access to digital resources over a network and saved $10,000 in planned hardware spend by replacing the purchase outright.
What I noticed at the time, and what I've kept: graphic design had introduced me to Photoshop, but coding skills were what let me write the custom filters and automations that did the actual work. Design was the entry point; engineering was the lever. The 40% time reduction came from refusing to treat the two as separate disciplines.
Kavouras, Inc.
Same instinct, scaled up: at Kavouras in ’98 — a weather information services company. When the European Space Agency changed the output format of a key satellite imagery product, the existing pipeline broke overnight. The ESA's proposed fix: $30,000 per month for a custom format. Engineering brought the problem to Charles.
In 24 hours, Charles built a transformation layer using automated Photoshop batch routines and a scripts, running on a standalone machine bought at Best Buy that morning. New format in, legacy format out. The $30k monthly cost disappeared.
The mechanism was identical to the WestLaw work: read the bottleneck the way an engineer would, design the fix the way a designer would, and write the code.
Why this matters
Systems thinking — the instinct to read across the design × engineering seam, find where friction lives, and route around it — has been the through-line of Charles' work since before any of these disciplines had their current labels. The Voyager 10-to-3-year compression is the same instinct, scaled to a senior leadership context inside a regulated bank. The CIMMYT hybrid front-room display is the same instinct, applied to museum infrastructure that had to outlive its launch budget.
It's a way of thinking and a habit, not a pitch.