About

Bonnie started life in Bethlehem, PA. Her writing career began in grade school, when she belonged to the Creative Writing Club at Moravian Preparatory School (now Moravian Academy). She can still recall the club’s major project, when environmental awareness was just starting – SAVE: Scott and Amy Value the Earth. Speaking of the environment, why doesn’t she recycle these brain cells? She was also pretty astute in the math department.

After a bit more than four years of college (due to a complete inability to choose a major), she graduated from MIT with a Bachelor of Science in Art and Design and a seemingly endless list of math and engineering classes for an architecture major. Back then, PCs were nonexistent and MIT was proud to have the IBM 360 with serial number 1. She wasn’t much of a programmer.

She progressed from Social Committee chairman to president of her dorm. At the tender age of 18, her campaign slogan was “Hysterectomy now!” Politics were not, nor are, her forte. She regrets her less than extraordinary performance in dormitory politics.

Graduation past, she discovered reality: jobs in architecture were hard to find. This was fortunate, as her 18-month tenure as a waitperson at Ken’s Pub Cambridge taught her a lot of very important things about life and people. Furthermore, the complete lack of job benefits prepared her for life as a freelancer.

Eventually, she opted to attend Columbia University for a Master’s degree in Structural Engineering. She remembers fondly her father, a concrete contractor, complaining about those ?/#%$ architects who design those crazy buildings, and the ?/#%$ engineers who design reinforcing steel so close that you can’t pour the concrete. She worked as a structural engineer for several years and helped design several pre-stressed concrete cable-stay bridges.

Her engineering job led her to Computer-Aided Design (CAD), which entertained her for a number of years. Following the Graphic Data System (GDS) software through a number of owners, she worked for McDonnell Douglas, EDS, Graphic Data System, Inc., and finally Convergent Group. She performed many aspects of her projects: technical sales, gathering requirements, designing interfaces and systems, programming (!), writing documentation, training, managing systems, and managing projects. Learning about clients’ businesses and making software do what clients needed was fun. But, corporate politics were not, nor are, her forte. Usually at odds with management, her corporate life was a never-ending struggle to find a good match to her personal work philosophy.

When Convergent Group squelched the GDS software, she grabbed her chance to bail on the corporate rat race. A good friend opined, “Your boss is an asshole, but now you know what to do about it.” For more than 15 years, her boss cracked the whip. The result: 30+ published books, hundreds of articles and magazine columns, dozens of training courses, numerous projects to her credit, and finally, a relatively stable income stream. For some reason, Bonnie is much better with corporate politics when she isn’t an employee. She’s also learned to rein in her boss’s overly exuberant expectations of Bonnie’s productivity.

In her free time she enjoys life in Colorado: watching the weather, wildlife, and wildfires out her office window, hiking in the mountains, cycling, and wondering whether bad driving habits are due to Californian imports or oxygen deprivation.

If you are in dire need of even more information about Bonnie, click here.