Matters of Life and Data: The Remarkable Journey of a Big Data Visionary Whose Work Impacted Millions (Including You)

by Charles D. Morgan

Overview

“I didn’t set out to become a collector of your and your neighbors’ information. When I was growing up, nobody but egghead scientists talked about ‘data.’ It was the mechanical age, and I was a gadget geek, taking apart my cousin’s toys and trying to put them back together again. I was especially crazy about cars and engines, and had it not been for a fateful encounter during college recruiting season, I might’ve lived my life as a race car mechanic instead of learning about computers at IBM. As it turned out, pursuing Big Data allowed me the resources to become a professional race car driver on the side, competing against the likes of Paul Newman, who makes appearances in these pages as well.

“Such are the wonders of this journey we’re all on. Mine has taken me from the frontier of western Arkansas, where my ancestors owned a hardware store selling iron tools to westbound travelers, to the frontier of the digital age, where room-size computers have become eclipsed by the power of smart phones. And in a sense, the story you’re about to read isn’t so different from those of the colorful adventurers who stocked up their wagons at my family’s hardware emporium and headed west to make their fortunes. Data mining is the new gold rush, and we were there at first strike, dragging with us all our human frailties and foibles. In this book’s cast of characters you’ll find ambition, arrogance, jealousy, pride, fear, recklessness, anger, lust, viciousness, greed, revenge, betrayal, and then some."

“It is a messy story. In the big picture, this could be called a narrative of America since World War II. But in the micro telling, think of it this way: The man who opened your lives to Big Data finally bares his own.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781630474676
Publisher:	Morgan James Publishing
Publication date:	02/24/2015
Pages:	400
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Charles D. Morgan is the visionary former Chairman and CEO of Acxiom Corporation, world leader in data gathering and its accompanying technology, with 1,500 separate pieces of information on some half a billion people around the globe. A gadget geek from childhood, Morgan has raced motorcycles, flown jets, and built and driven his own race cars in a professional career that includes victories at both the 12 Hours of Sebring and the 24 Hours of Daytona, along with 17 other wins. Now CEO of his latest tech venture, PrivacyStar, he lives in Little Rock, Arkansas, with his wife, Susie.

Read an Excerpt

THE FIRST I heard about our Middle East problem was in a telex that Alex sent to Charles Ward and me. He and Mary had become serious, he said, and Ghaith Pharaon was upset about it—so upset that he’d decreed that they stop seeing each other. As I came to understand the sequence of events, Alex and Mary had hidden their relationship from Ghaith, but they felt guilty about it so they finally decided to go to Ghaith and spill the beans; the beans apparently included the fact that Alex had asked Mary to marry him.

The meeting with Ghaith had not gone well. All that nervous energy he’d displayed here in Conway? It was like his nerve endings were lit fuses connecting to a cache of explosives deep inside him. Now it went off big time. Alex was stunned; Mary probably wasn’t. Because Mary wasn’t just Pharaon’s executive assistant; she was also his mistress—something I wouldn’t learn until much later. Another crucial element to this saga is that Mary apparently had, at some point, told Ghaith that she didn’t want to be a mistress forever and had demanded that he marry her. That was impossible, Ghaith had said—if he married an expat, he’d be banished from the presence of the King.

These events happened just prior to Ghaith’s annual Mediterranean cruise for his clients and customers. As majority owner of Ward School Bus Company and Demographics, Charles Ward was invited on the cruise, along with his wife. So were Alex and Mary, though not together. Charles told me that he and Alex were extremely nervous about what might happen on the cruise—would Alex find himself thrown overboard in the middle of the night? They pretty much held their breath as they boarded the ship.

But early in the cruise, perhaps at the opening ceremony, Ghaith started speaking in the big ballroom and proceeded to announce that Mary and Alex were getting married. Everybody gave them a big hand. And Ghaith, Charles said, was all smiles. "Oh, I'm so glad,” he gushed. “I’m so happy for you."

So it appeared that he’d changed his mind. But after they docked in Saudi Arabia, Ghaith called Alex and Mary in. “You will not even speak to each other unless it's purely about business," he said. “What I am saying is, you cannot even talk to each other. Is that clear, is that understood?” Fast forward to the inevitable. When Alex refused to terminate the relationship, Ghaith revoked his Saudi sponsorship and forced both Alex and Mary to leave the country. They quickly packed bags and fled in the dead of night, bound for her father’s home in Athens, Greece.

That was on a weekend. On Monday morning Arkansas time, Alex phoned Charles Ward and told him that he and Mary had been thrown out of Saudi Arabia. At which point Charles began frantically searching for me.

My family and I were on vacation at Hilton Head Resort in South Carolina. We went there every year with extended family, and Jane loved it. She seemed to relax there among familiar faces. The only battles she and I had at Hilton Head were across a tennis net. She was a very good, very competitive tennis player.

But on the day Charles was trying to reach me, I’d left my vacation for a couple of days to fly to Washington for a meeting with COPE’s John Perkins. I remember walking into John’s office and he said, “Charles Ward is desperately trying to reach you.” So I ducked into another office and called Charles back. He was beside himself—breathlessly spilling out this crazy story about Alex, who was now exiled in Athens. The bottom line here is that we had some $100,000 invested in this Saudi deal, which was suddenly looking very shaky. To complicate matters, Charles and Ghaith were working on another school bus deal for Egypt, so there was a lot at stake. Charles wanted me to fly straight home from Washington—leaving, for the moment, my unsuspecting family lolling on the beach at Hilton Head.

Soon after my plane touched down in Little Rock, I met Charles at his apartment there and we managed to get Alex on the line. He explained the situation, and we hatched a plan: This was Monday evening—I would fly Tuesday morning to Athens, where I would debrief Alex and find out the extent of the damage; from Athens, I would try to go to Jeddah—I had no visa—to inspect the operation there; meanwhile, Charles Ward would urge Ghaith to meet us both in London the following weekend. So I had five days to get from Little Rock to Athens and do my business there, then to Jeddah to do more business, and finally to London for what might be a shoot-out with Ghaith.

“I thought he was going to get killed,” Jane says today, reflecting on how she felt after I phoned her in Hilton Head and told her what the rest of my week looked like.

Table of Contents

Prologue: The Bad Guys Database

PART ONE: HARDWARE

1. Drive, He Said

2. The Boy Who Might Be Forgotten

3. The Mathematics of Change

PART TWO: SOFTWARE

4. Men in Black

5. Red Sea Change

6. Do or Die

7. Finding the Zone

8. A Theory of Time

PART THREE: BIG DATA

9. Like a Weed

10. Green Fields

11. Marriage on My Mind

12. Turning Points

13. Theater of War

14. Dawn of the Lost Decade

15. The Long Goodbye

Epilogue: Full Circle