Biography

Early Life - England and India

I was born Ashit Patel in Forest Gate, East London in 1969 and grew up in the borough of Edmonton in North London (in spite of growing up in Tottenham Hotspur's catchment, I 've been an Arsenal fan for as long as I can remember - I have this unusual attraction to discomfort and risk and it began early (you try growing up 'Arsenal' in the shadow of White Hart Lane). Frankly, In the England of my youth, football was not just a matter of life and death - it was much more important than that. My parents hailed from Kenya - both born there (my mother in Kisumu and my father in Eldoret) and I spent several summers in East Africa. 

I learned entrepreneurship early - maybe 6 or 7 - working in my dad's shop, below the two-storey apartment we lived in atop it; it was news agent and confectionist (newspapers, magazines, sweets, cigarettes were the mainstay). I helped my dad during my pre-teens running the NCR cash register during rush hours, counting the 'take' and mopping at the end of the day, restocking inventory, delivering papers along the Cambridge and North Circular Roads. I learned the meaning of terms such as 'goodwill' and 'freehold. and appreciated the dead weight of 'dead-stock' - and anguish of throwing things away long past their due date even when they weren't perishable. I also developed a keen sense of brand and as the U2 song goes I 'used to lip-sync to the adverts' - especially my favourite - 'Hilltop' - whose idealistic vision still motivates my sense of values. It was 'Business School' but in the German sense of apprenticeship. After that early training I geared myself to learn the inter-dependent context within which we all live (political economy), administration (project management) and scaling application (information technology).

As a child I was obsessed with America  (the United States) and once mesmerized by two polite smartly dressed Mormon missionaries who visited into our shop - they reminded me of 'Brains' from the marionette series 'Thunderbirds'. My other obsession was popular music - particularly our modern English music. Star Trek seemed weird, dated, slow and campy (and not happy campy like Adam West's Batman). On the other hand, the rough and tumble anarchy and rebellion Star Wars enthralled me . The first Star Wars film was probably the first one I properly watched in a cinema (in 1977). I was eight and Harrison Ford's Solo was immediately the 'prototype' for self-modelling. Huxley has written that we're bad copies of our favourite characters from fiction and I can relate to this.  Indiana Jones made being smart cool ; strange as it may sound, that film somehow coaxed me into taking my studies seriously. I would study History and then spread into the various disciplines of the Social Sciences taking the obligatory mathematics and science courses as I made my way to graduating High School. As a boy a copy of Purnell's Illustrated History of the World  gifted me by my Father who had picked up from the 'Cash & Carry' where he purchased the shop's inventory became a constant companion - I perused it endlessly in those days when we only had three channels to watch on telly - and before the Atari arrived.

I went to Oakthorpe Primary and Winchmore Schools before leaving for India in 1982 and spent a year (Standard 8) in Baroda (now Vadodara), Gujarat, India attending Vidyakunj High School. It was a fun time getting reacquainted with my heritage taking long siestas during the regular afternoon 'load shedding' and playing cricket (badly by any standards never mind the local ones) on the then quiet streets of a pretty provincial town. We returned to London in 1983 where I attended Fairlop High School for a semester (now King Solomon High School) while my mother prepared us to join my Father now settling in Canada.

Canada, Education and Japan

Emigrating to Canada in 1983 with my parents we landed in Richmond Hill where I attended the local high (RHHS) before going on Western in 1987 to complete a Hons. BA in History and Political Science. On campus I co-founded the University's chapter of Amnesty International and a member of the University's Liberal Party - serving as the club's Vice-President of Communications. I had planned on moving onto Law upon graduating in 1991 but burned out, I decided instead to travel and find work abroad.

Selected for the Monbusho's JET program, I headed to Southern Honshu to spend two years teaching English in Wakayama City - the capital of Wakayama Prefecture south of Osaka - falling in love with a country I'd return to again twice. While there I travelled extensively - Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand and South Korea.

Upon returning to Canada I attended Carleton's Norman Paterson School of International Affairs, majoring in International Political Economy where my studies were focused on the Macro/Micro Economics, Theory of Multinationals, and the role science and technology plays in International Affairs. While there I returned to Japan for a 4-month term at the International University of Japan in Niigata to study Japanese Politics and Business. I wrote my MA Thesis on the Socio-Economic Impediments to Foreign Direct Investment in Japan (Focused on the role of networks of inter-staked firms that centred around the anchor of their 'secure nodes' - the Trading Houses Mitsui, Sumitomo, Mitsubishi and like).

Winning a Monbusho Scholarship (Japan's equivalent of Rhodes or Fulbright), took me to Tokyo and Hitotsubashi University where, while diligent in attending my classes and already having completed my thesis, I bummed around Japan, Tokyo with the odd trip back to snowboard Whistler. 

A Career in Information Technology

Returning to Toronto I initial planned on a career in Management Consulting or in Capital Markets. However, with dot.com boom in full swing, I decided to get bootstrapped on technology - learning the full stack - hardware, network topologies, ODBC, business rule development and UX development for the emergent web working in team-based business cases (case study based hackathons) at the Information Technology Institute.

I embarked on 25 year career spending my formative years at IBM Global Services in Project Delivery. I left the company in 2010 to contract independently with an intervening spell as Agile Program Manager at Thomson Reuters - a dispiriting and disenchanting experience but one that was rife with opportunities to learn given the company's efforts to affect fundamental change (from a holding to an operating enterprise). That ended in 2022; The dominant thread throughout my career has been making content digital, enabling user engagement, identity authentication and mobile payments. 

I haven't done much traveling - focused instead on pursuing my career and raising a family - though I have indulged a life-long fascination with the United States by visiting its venerated places (or rather those I most revere) - Gettysburg, Walden Pond (a Mecca of sorts for me), Sedona, Old Boston, Cape Canaveral (among other things to watch SpaceX launch a satellite), Wall Street, and of course Disneyworld with my family; San Francisco, Yosemite and the John Muir trail and (Edward Abbey's) Moab remain outstanding. Beyond that a drive across Costa Rica with my wife on our honeymoon the most memorable moment of which was stopping at one point in Monteverde and seeing at once both the Caribbean and Pacific - and thinking how profoundly moving that would have been for the first old world colonialists.

I've spent the past two years largely, taking a step back to introspect after a personal examination of how and where I was working and for whom.  I've done much thinking focused on how we prepare for emergent technologies that will decisively decentralize power online and how I personally will re-engage with communities and enterprises fundamentally driven by values; as well, by reaching back into my academic background in the social sciences to find ways of explaining at a theoretical, philosophical level their implications and potential to people outside engineering in plain terms. You can find this material at https://transition-insight.com