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Clear Direction, Inc. President Robert Smith '73 received a patent in January for technology that enables computer software to effectively diagnose human thinking orientations, identify problems in those orientations, and prescribe training and development exercises and lessons that address the problems at their sources. According to Smith, it is the first patent ever granted for an application in formal axiology, the branch of philosophy dealing with the nature and types of value.
“The principal reason that business leaders are skeptical about the usefulness of training programs is that training has not been effective,” he says. “Prior to this technology, no practical methods have existed that diagnose the sources of the problems and prescribe personalized remedies. Training historically has focused on manifestations of the problems, not the problems themselves.”
Some clients of the Dallas-based training and development company were participants in the product's design and use the technology. They include Club Corp, The Pinehurst Company, Crescent Real Estate Equities, The Archon Group, EDS, Hinckley Allen & Snyder Law Firm, KPMG, and Sara Lee Corporation. Smith has a second patent pending. He also owns Kinsel Advisory Services, a management consulting and executive advisory company.
Since 1989, Smith has been a presenter at the Hartman Institute and in 1992 was the keynote lecturer at the annual meeting of the Swedish Institute of Axiology in Stockholm. In 1980, Dr. Smith was named a Case-Study Fellow of Harvard's Graduate School of Business and Fuller Theological Seminary. He also had two of his cases published by Harvard University Press in 1980 and a book, Balanced Thinking, published by M.M. New Life in 1996.
A religious studies major at Lafayette, Smith earned a Ph.D., summa cum laude, in human development and conflict management and an M.Div., magna cum laude, from Fuller Theological Seminary; and a Master Automotive Technician's degree, magna cum laude. He also conducted postgraduate honors studies under game theory Nobel laureate Dr. John Harsani at University of California-Berkeley Graduate School of Business, as well as postdoctoral studies in axiology through the Hartman Institute at University of Tennessee.
Although he graduated in three years, Smith took courses in a wide variety of liberal arts departments at Lafayette. His education significantly improved his writing, he says, which helped in graduate school and in his current work, which typically demands producing 60 pages weekly. “My Lafayette education was formative in starting to think from a perspective other than mathematically and analytically,” he notes.
Robert Smith '73