Prologue

Because this is a systems engineering book, I thought it prudent to provide a short historic roadmap first to give you an understanding of my background in relation to the subject matter. So here is a little bit about how this journey all began.

My higher education life began with premedical studies. That was actually the name of the degree, but it looked like a biology course. I graduated with my Bachelor of Science degree in that field, and I found my way to Cornell through a somewhat unusual path.

In 2010, I was accepted to Cornell for the first time to attend their graduate school program in the field of regional planning. I was actually put on a waiting list for the program, and I had applied to the regional planning program because my minor for my bachelor's degree was in political science.

I had really great political science teachers, all of my friends were in political science, and I just emotionally connected with the political side subject matter much more than the science subject matter, which was very memorization oriented and was very much preparing you for medical school.

I decided not to go to medical school, and I decided to apply to this program in regional planning. I did not apply to many. I applied to a couple of schools in New York City, and I applied to Cornell. I visited the program in person during the open house and was able to secure a spot.

My first year at Cornell was actually matriculated as a master's student in the regional planning program, which is not engineering, and the AAP (architecture, art, and planning program), was very public policy focused.

I rapidly realized that this subject matter was not for me. The whole thing seemed too focused on Marxism.

Instead, I was able to use some of the skills I had in mathematics and science that I developed through my undergraduate degree, and I applied to join the program in systems engineering because I genuinely saw a very big overlap between the systems engineering program and my education in biology and premed studies as well as my year of regional planning at the Ivy League university.

So, I matriculated into systems engineering, and I started that program. They only admitted me based on the contingency that I passed some advanced math courses, which I was able to do, and I achieved the grades necessary to matriculate into the systems program.

I then spent a year and a half taking systems engineering courses, so my educational background in the area of systems engineering is quite broad. Most systems engineers received their bachelor's degree in some kind of engineering program, such as electrical engineering. Systems engineering is a very popular follow-up to electrical engineering. Mechanical engineering, physics, and aerospace engineering are all very common precursors to the master's in systems engineering program at Cornell, but I came in through premed, a bunch of Cornell math classes, and a year of Marxist training under the school of architecture art and planning for the regional planning program.

For most of the students who study systems engineering, it is their first exposure to a less mathematical or less technical body of knowledge compared to their undergrad course, but for me, it was the opposite. I came in with a very broad, very nonmathematical background that then got pushed into this funnel of systems engineering to then start applying quantitative or technical metrics to this very qualitative material I had learned. Regional planning is, of course, super qualitative but even biology is fairly qualitative; even though you are studying nature, you are mostly memorizing the effects that nature has on biology, but it is a very macro view of the world.

When I showed up to the engineering program, I was really passionate and really impressed with how I could take these relatively simple tools - which we will get into throughout this book - and then apply them to the more macro frameworks that I understood.

Common tools within systems engineering include devices such as decision trees, which are taught at MBA programs all across the country, or any kind of management science program. But the systems engineering program takes decision trees to a new level.

There is also a failure mode effect analysis, which is essentially used to identify how an assembly line may fail and then to identify probabilities that each of these different failure scenarios may occur and then start to create solutions for them.

As a very qualitative and macro thinker, I was very excited to get exposed to these tools. It made me a very effective student. I ended up graduating with my master's degree, so my educational qualifications include a master's in engineering and systems engineering, and I was able to use this material to develop even more credibility, which is why Cornell ultimately invited me back to its faculty and my current title at Cornell is visiting lecturer.

After leaving Cornell, I went to Deloitte, where I did technology consulting. There you can see a very professionalized version of systems engineering with big healthcare systems or any kind of big technology-system implementation.

After Deloitte, I entered the world of corporate finance and investment banking. I then opened my own consulting firm in the field of investment banking where we rely heavily on systems engineering tools both to run the business and to provide highly qualified advice to our clients. I knew I had found my niche, as we made millions of dollars in revenue in our first year and systems engineering has been a core part of that success and everything that we do.

I now teach several courses at Cornell, which are all very practically focused. The first one is a project where I lead students on how to use systems engineering to perform corporate valuations. The second course I teach is an introduction to systems engineering course that is available to seniors in the undergraduate program and master students in the graduate program.

Jahani and Associates came from the premise that we could provide better growth advisory services to clients than that available on the market at the time. We are a management consulting firm that has an investment banking capacity, but our clients leverage us for growth, so everything we do has to do with expanding a company one way or another. We broadly define the categories for expansion as investment banking advisory services, which include capital placement mergers and acquisitions (M&A), which ties heavily into corporate valuations and corporate expansion, with the second category of growth services we discuss called market expansion.

Everything we do at Jahani is cross-border in one way or another. We will work with a Canadian firm, and we will help that firm expand to Dubai. We will work with a Dubai-based firm, and we will help that company expand to Jakarta. We will work with a Brazilian-based company, and we will help it expand to Saudi Arabia, and we will work with the Saudi Arabian company, and help it do business in Florida or in California. Those are all examples of different transactions and clients that we have actually worked with. The expansion can include investment banking, as I said, but it is bigger than that. It can include something as simple as opening up an office. Jahani and Associates does a lot of joint venture work, and we are the bridge that facilitates those joint ventures for our client companies.

When you are applying these growth services to these very different markets that have very different cultural, financial, business systems, and so on, you have to mesh them together so that they can grow. In every instance, there is a heavy focus on optimization of how the two systems that you are working within a cross-border capacity must integrate.

You do not have that concern if you are only doing domestic deals, which is what most of our competitors and most of the companies in this space do. If a company from Connecticut is buying a company in Pennsylvania, the cultural, financial, and logistics systems are already integrated. All of those basic business processes overlap very nicely. But when you do it in a cross-border capacity, particularly in the regions that we are talking about, they do not interface, so we have to find a way for them to interface. We have to develop a map from one platform to another. In software terms, this would be called an Application Programming Interface (API). Essentially, mapping one system's protocols to another enables the two platforms to "speak" with one another. Beyond software, there may be services we need to introduce to facilitate or amend one system or the other (or both) so that they communicate. There is always a way.

We use systems engineering tools and frameworks to facilitate that, and we use these tools to help communicate the benefits of the intangible assets that a company may have so that they can achieve an accurate valuation.

To provide a real-world example, I will use a simple case-study scenario to demonstrate the various action items, strategic moves, and workflows of providing a solution to a client.

One of our US-based client companies purchased out of bankruptcy a software platform in Spain that the Spanish government had funded via grants. The first step was to gain an understanding of which triggers for growth could use and gain advantage.

The first step is to examine exposure. The company has this software technology that now exists in the United States and has ties to Spain. We would begin with regulatory compliance as it...