Jeff Simmons '73
Computer infrastructure innovatorIF FREE-MARKET CAPITALISM is the framework for globalization, travel and technology are the engines that drive it. Appropriately, they are the same engines that propelled an unwitting Jeff Simmons '73 into the world of global finance.Simmons, an English major, had little interest in international business or technology when he graduated. In fact, he had little interest in getting a job at all. Succumbing to pressure from his dad, he interviewed with an insurance company and, he says, was hired on the spot. Over the next 15 years he moved "zombie-like" up the insurance industry's ladder. After two nearly random job changes, a friend hired him to work at Sanchez Computer Associates, a small startup software company. As a project manager for the implementation of online real-time banking software, Simmons was thrown into the world of 80-hour workweeks and constant travel. At first he worked on projects in Pennsylvania and Colorado. Later he began commuting to Trinidad and Bermuda, and, finally, to Krakow, Poland, where he led a team installing the first successful large-scale on-line banking system in that country.
"The third world is leap-frogging technology still much in use in the West and moving directly to leading-edge technologies." Jeff Simmons '73
Computer infrastructure innovator
By the time Simmons began working in Poland, he was a full-fledged "flexecutive," flying across multiple time zones for one-hour meetings and maintaining semi-permanent residence in hotels in London, Warsaw, and Krakow. When he and his team first arrived in Krakow, simple banking transactions like cashing a check involved several steps and could take an hour. When they finished, more than two million Poles were on their real-time banking system. Besides revolutionizing the daily banking process, their online system served to improve Poland's overall infrastructure and fostered the technology transfer needed for sustainable economic growth in the new market. Throughout the mid-1990s, Simmons witnessed great changes in Poland. When he first arrived, for example, new private phones were hard to acquire because the infrastructure wasn't capable of expansion. By the time he left, the italicized squawks of cell phones could be heard throughout the streets, leaving the landline business in the dust. "This is indicative of what is happening in parts of the third world," he says. "They are leap-frogging the 1960-1990 technology still in use by much of the West-because it still works and new technology improvements are hard to cost-justify-and moving directly to leading-edge hardware, procedures, and technologies. Trade competition from the developing nations is going to increase rapidly as their technological infrastructure matures and is leveraged by their highly educated and comparatively inexpensive labor force."  | | JEFF SIMMONS '73 Computer infrastructure innovator |
Some of Simmons' most striking observations, however, have more to do with personal and social dimensions than with economics. "Most of my Polish friends were amazed at my collection of worldly goods in the US," he says, "but I was impressed by their wonderful family lives and sense of community." The experience has made him particularly concerned about the ability of developing countries to maintain their cultural heritage while adopting helpful Western technology, which, as he says, is accompanied by a vacuous pop culture. After Simmons directed the completion of the project, he became a vice president with Sanchez and reestablished his roots in American soil just in time to participate in the company's IPO. Last year Simmons left Sanchez to pursue an early retirement with his wife Katherine in Wayne, Pennsylvania.
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