Jonathan Sturtevant Fletcher

Jonathan Fletcher was born in Wilmington, Delaware nine months after his father was discharged from the Army Air Corps in 1946. He grew up in Aiken, South Carolina and graduated from Aiken High School in 1964.

Jonathan earned a BA in Chemistry from the University of the South in 1968 and an MS in Geology from the University of South Carolina in 1972. He spent over two years in a Ph.D. program in geochemistry at the Pennsylvania State University before moving into Mineral Economics, in which he earned a Ph.D. in 1981. He specialized in the financial valuation of mineral properties and the analysis of world mineral commodity markets.

From 1977 to 1979 Jonathan worked for the Union Carbide Exploration Corporation, first as Assistant to the Vice President and then as Manager of Project Evaluation. From 1980 to 1981 he taught courses in the Mineral Economics Department of the Pennsylvania State University on mineral property valuation and mineral industry management.

While in Denver from 1982 to 1985, Jonathan did consulting work in the petroleum industry in the area of oil and gas project evaluation and exploration program assessment.

After returning to his home state of South Carolina, Jonathan taught geology, environmental geosciences, physics and world civilization at Benedict College for two years after which he founded Integrated Management Systems, Inc., in 1987 as a planning resource to businesses, government agencies and professional organizations. The development and implementation of Integrated Planning Models and Integrated Management Systems were the cornerstones of this effort. In 1998, to emphasize this focus on quantification, Integrated Management Systems, Inc. changed its name to IMS Quantum Corporation. IMS Quantum developed Integrated Planning Models for the manufacturing supply industry, software development area, healthcare sector, the apparel industry, forestry, energy and mineral products industries, academic institutions, a state port authority, and the U. S. Navy.

From 2012 through 2020, Jonathan wrote a number of books that addressed issues that he encountered over his career that challenged his own understanding. The first was The Quiz: On the Nature of the Incarnation of Jesus Christ. The nature of the Christ event has been a challenge to all observers, including Jews, Christians, and Moslems, from its very inception 2000 years ago. This book arose simply as an attempt to get a range of answers to a few questions he saw as addressing the basics. The book was an attempt to sort out the best answers he found to those questions that led to a logically sound result.

The second book, in what evolved as The Christian Transformation Series, was entitled The Eleventh Commandment: On the Nature of the Christian Community of Faith. Here the effort was to see the relationship between the way we attend church and how it reflects our journey into the life of Christ. It was asserted that this life was best reflected in Christ’s admonition to “A new commandment I give to you that you love one another as I have loved you.”

The third book in the series, Into the Perfect Likeness: Scratching the Surface of Christian Transformation, tries systematically to develop the whole concept of radical transformation into the likeness of Jesus Christ is not, as C. S. Lewis, asserted is not a part of Christianity but the whole of Christianity. While the book attempts at least to take one to the gateway of the process of such transformation, it is seen as a modest pointer to an area of spiritual growth that surpasses the abilities of the author.

Two additional books were added to the series—The Fence and the Wall: The Interplay of Doctrine, Speculation, and Heresy in the Development of the Early Christian Creeds and The Mind and Heart of the Carpenter: A Guide to Our Lives in Christ. The first is an attempt to get a handle on the early controversies that occupied the early Church. The second used the live of a modern carpenter as a metaphor for our understanding of how we are called to act like Jesus Christ, who was himself a carpenter.

Two other books arose out of Jonathan’s technical career as a management consultant. The first was SCRAM: Avoiding Catastrophic Failure that applied the fundamentals of systems theory to the development of an approach to risk management designed to broaden one’s tools beyond those most commonly applied to risk management, including the nature of insurance. This is done by the development of a “meta language” for both the recognition of risks and the development of risk strategies. In addition, the book is a resource of a wide array of stories that stimulate the discussion of catastrophic failures that resulted directly from one’s inability to recognize risks and to implement basic strategies to avoid or mitigate those risks. The fundamental assumption is that all of us encounter risks in a wide variety of aspects of our lives. In business, this is known as the risk return tradeoff. In history, it is known as the avoidance of past mistakes.

The second is entitled Models, The Art of Understanding. This book is a direct compilation of the work that Jonathan did as a management consultant through which he tried to organize quantitative values related to an enterprise’s activity and results in order to see how they become drivers of both. If understanding is the most basic aspect of management, the most basic assertion is that understanding arises from the recognition of the parts of a puzzle and the way in which those parts fit together. The process of building quantitative models from scratch is even more relevant in the world of AI, where understanding us buried in extremely powerful computational systems that, by definition, obscure the complexity of the system in order to make it rapidly functional. In other words, both AI and model building are both essential to proper management of complex systems.

Now retired, Jonathan jumps up and down trying to get someone to be interested in these basic attempts to understand.