ANDREW: Welcome

Andrew Goldbaum here... I currently live in Washington DC, where I work with USAID’s Bureau for Global Health in the Office of Infectious Disease.

As an Information Systems Advisor, I work to ensure experts on the front lines fighting infectious disease have the tools to effectively monitor and accelerate progress towards control and elimination.

Before moving to Washington DC, I spent a decade in the private sector, working in finance, supply chain and operations strategy.

My decision to study Public Health and pivot to public service was based on a belief that a career protecting human health provides a lifetime of opportunity to advance the causes I care most deeply about.

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Protecting and improving human health is a moral and economic imperative.

I chose to study public health because the systems and contexts influencing health are complex. Understanding them is critical to assess and solve problems in an effective, responsible way.

Project areas of focus include:

How financing mechanisms influence program design and outcomes
mHealth design, development and testing
Frameworks to measure, evaluate, and improve program quality
Process, outcome, and impact evaluation

After completing my business school course work, I had a unique opportunity to work with the U.S. President's Malaria Initiative (PMI), a joint CDC and USAID initiative to eradicate malaria.

I headed a project focused on strengthening partnerships with businesses and community organizations on malaria control efforts.

Some outcomes from the project:

Developed a toolkit for organizations to coordinate with PMI on malaria efforts
Prototyped a tool for country teams to evaluate potential partnerships using indicators
Invited back to share the tool and use-cases at an interagency CDC/USAID workshop.

Business school provided current insights about an economy transformed by technology and an opportunity to strengthen my leadership skills.

The program reinforced my belief that there is a business case for strengthening systems and processes that promote health equity.

My electives focused on learning more about health and technology. Some accomplishments include:

Awarded "Best of the Best" by the City of Boston for a proposed process for evaluating smart-city technology
Developed a mobile app for a nonprofit in India to beter manage their volunteers

Six Sigma is a data-driven methodologyto process improvement and waste reduction. It is an approach I encountered frequently in my work with operations.

Certification through the UofM College of Engineering required 60 hours of coursework, a written exam and capstone project.

The course covered a lot of material, particularly useful topics were:

Linking metrics to customer and business needs
Qualitative and quantitative process analysis
Developing recommendations and control plans to improve processes

After implementing Workday, a cloud-based HR management system, Intel hired me to lead post-release testing of the new platform.

The project required developing a lean and effective process while addressing stakeholder concerns related to the impact of the system on Intel employees.

Some achievements during the project:

Earned stakeholder buy-in through honest and thoughtful communication
Reduced testing time by 1/3 by automating and standardizing workflows
Developed a database for users to report issues quickly and easily

A desire for a career with a mission that I felt more deeply connected to culminated in a decision to leave my career and embrace an uncertain future.

My yearlong adventure brought me from Ceylon to the Mekong, Diyarbakir to Daegu. It was a life changing experience that left me feeling more connected and aware of the world around me, and instilled a belief that proximity to difference is the basis for human understanding.

We needed an updated Asia strategy and I was asked by Steelcase to partner with McKinsey to develop one.

During the three month project, I contributed as a full-time member of the engagement team while representing the client by validating assumptions and ensuring activities stayed in scope of the objectives.

Key outcomes of the project included:

Specific actions to increase short-run competitiveness in South Asia
A detailed five-year operations plan
Presentation to the CEO of Steelcase and other executive leadership in Hong Kong
Informed strategic decision-making related to the Asia Pacific business

Crisis presents an opportunity.Heavy turnover among management was impacting Steelcase’s business in Asia Pacific. I was sent to the main office in Kuala Lumpur to support the team.

I was told the assignment would be a challenge: The problems were unclear and numerous, my manager would be 5,000 miles away.

Over the following year, I successfully:

Led a multi-national team in KL and coached staff in China, India and Malaysia
Decomposed business problems and implemented improved best practices modified for local conditions
Boosted inventory accuracy at a strategically critical facility by 15%

The end of the recession provided an opportunity to rebuild the supply chain with greater agility and resilience.

I spent three years supporting an initiative to do exactly that. I worked closely with logistics experts, to optimize distribution center layouts and locations, reconfigure fleets, revisit 3rd party logistics contracts and more.

A few accomplishments with logistics include:

Modeled and evaluated hundreds of potential improvement scenarios
Identified opportunities to increase trailer utilization by 30% over two years
Directed rate negotiations to focus on lanes with greatest impact, saving $2.5 million over three years

As the lead business partner to the supply-chain organization, I brought finance expertise that ensured suppliers remained solvent, financial assumptions were valid and savings materialized.

Specific contributions while partnering with supply-chain include:

Expanded the use of commodity indices to better inform pricing decisions
Identified suppliers with exposure to financial risk, helped them obtain credit
Secured investments that support data-driven decision making

On Steelcase's Operations Finance team, I was responsible for developing improved metrics that help local management teams correlate their activities to business performance and run their operation more efficiently.

The role provided a valuable introduction to how a large global manufacturer runs its operation.

Some achievements include:

An improved process for predicting inventory obsolescence (still in use today!)
Eliminated or consolidated reports with low value/utilization
Supported implementation of standards-based performance monitoring

As one of the top performers in my internship cohort, I was extended a full-time job offer with the Private Client Services (PCS) team at PwC in Detroit.

It was a great opportunity and valuable learning experience. However, after a year I decided the public accounting track wasn't right for me.

Founded in 1835, Albion College is one of the oldest liberal arts colleges in the Midwest, and was one of the first to introduce coeducation.

While my major was in economics, some of my favorite classes were in anthropology and computer science.

A characteristic commonly associated with liberal arts is exposure to a variety of subjects.

While that is true, a liberal arts education also encourages curiosity and forming interdisciplinary connections as a means for developing novel ideas and innovative solutions.

Hello, I'm Andrew...

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