May 2013
A Sixties Train Ride to Value

What was the search engine in the sixties? Readers Digest! In this communiqué Dr. Axel Peter Ried of Germany tells his fascinating story about his chance encounter with a Readers Digest in 1964 on a train to a University in Switzerland that led him on his journey to becoming a world famous Value Management specialist.   The story has a Canadian connection as Dr. Ried told of his journey to value at the 2011 CSVA annual conference in Toronto.

 

Peter explained his introduction to Value Engineering originated back to his reading of the Readers Digest  article on a train ride to school while completing one of his Master’s degrees in engineering and psychology in Switzerland. After reading this article he received permission from his school to make a long distance call to the USA to ask Reader’s Digest if he could receive contact information for Larry Miles. In that day and age he managed to receive the contact information and proceeded to make a second call to General Electric and talked with Larry. He was so enthusiastic Larry offered to let him participate on a live VE study they were about to start in England the next week. The outcome was General Electric provided a plane ticket for him to get to England and participate in the study. In fact he stayed a month participating on other studies! What a great story. This ripple effect has led to Peter’s career in VE which has included training approximately 450,000 managers in VM/VA/VE, and coordinated more than 30.000 project teams.

 

If you want to learn more great stories about Value Analysis, mark November 25-26, 2013 on your calendar and join us in Montreal as we celebrate 20 years of VA in Canada