Interview with Professor Michael Mainelli

Professor Michael Raymond Mainelli was born in December 1958 in Seattle in the USA.  His father was originally a mechanical engineer, so too were his grandfather and great-grandfather on both sides of the family. Michael says of his father: “He was mechanical and he had spent most of his time in aerospace; his claim to fame, was being a project manager for the Apollo capsule, working for Boeing in Florida.” His father’s work was very peripatetic and the family regularly moved to accommodate it.  Michael adds: “Aerospace was very peripatetic in those days, Dad would go to Italy to work on radar contracts, to Maine to work on shipping contracts, to Seattle where Boeing was located, and Florida where Martin Marietta was located.  We just kept circling around.”

Despite frequent changes of school, Michael enjoyed it and did well. He says: “I was actually pretty good across the board.  When I was in high school I took awards in social sciences, English studies, mathematics, sciences.  I just enjoyed learning, and still do.”

He attended Bishop Moore High School in Orlando, Florida between 1973 and 1977 and it was here at the age of around 15 that he encountered his first computer thanks to a local computer enthusiast Bill Joseph who lived near the school.  Michael explains: “Bill wanted to buy a PDP-8, which in those days was the price of about a VW and took up an entire room, and a bit more.  Bill made a deal with the school that they would house the computer and pay for the electricity if he would run a computer science course. Bill’s course was intriguing, because he was also a qualified physicist in engineering.” To get on to the course, students were given a soldering iron and shown a telex terminal, plus manual, and had to connect it to the PDP-8.   Michael says: “That’s a hell of a challenge, it’s also a heck of a challenge because you’re converting telex machines on a 5-bit Baudot code, and of course the PDP is running on an ASCII 7/8.  So you had to figure out how to crosswire everything; you had to read the manual.  And Bill frankly wasn’t going to help you, because if you couldn’t do that, there was no point in putting you on the course.”

Michael Mainelli talks about learning about computing:

Between 1976 and 1978, Michael spent his summer holidays working as a programmer for Martin Martietta (Lockheed Martin) where his course with Bill stood him in good stead. He adds: “It wouldn’t have happened if Bill hadn’t forced us to go through this very rigorous course. When I got to university, I thought most of the university courses were nothing compared to what Bill had taught a bunch of teenage kids.” From the first lessons with Bill right through his career, Michael has learned a wide variety of programming languages from FORTRAN, FOCAL, DIBOL (DEC COBOL), BASIC, APL, PL/1, Lisp, C, Python to many, many more.

In 1977 Michael was accepted into Harvard. Harvard’s educational system allowed him to spread his course subjects across humanities, the social studies and sciences.  He says: “I loved it and of course I took this to extremes.  My list of courses was pretty strange.  It involved postgraduate Latin, combined with postgraduate physics, anthropology, linguistics, Russian literature, chemistry, advanced mathematics, applied mathematics.  It was anything I felt like taking.” His degree was awarded finally in Government which included economics and statistics.

Michael paid his own way through university with a variety of roles including consultant with FSF Consulting, researcher for the laboratory for computer graphics and spatial analysis, Harvard School of Design, and as Geodat Project Director for Petroconsultants Ltd. He says: “I was on what was called the ‘7-year program’.  Unlike most students, I was paying my way. … I was lucky enough that Martin Marietta, where I worked as a programmer, paid for a quarter of that.  It’s also one of the reasons I started the mapping project (Geodat) in Switzerland in 1979, because it paid the bills.”

In 1981, Michael spent a year at Trinity College Dublin as part of his work with Martin Marietta which had a base in Dublin. At Trinity, Michael joined the fourth year of the mathematics, computer science and engineering course.

While at university Michael took a role as Geodat Director with Petroconsultants limited which would see him move to Cambridge to set up an establishment to deliver a major project called Geodat and a subsidiary project called MundoCart which he had sold to the oil industry.

He explains: “Geodat was to try and map the world at a scale of about one to 100,000, which was an enormous project.  MundoCart was a smaller, although still gargantuan project, to map the world at 1 to a million.  This is Google Earth 1979. We set up a centre in Cambridge with 30 people doing laser line-following and other hand digitisation of maps from around the world.  It was an enormous processing centre for five years.”

Michael stayed with Swiss based Petroconsultants progressed from Geodat Director to General Manager in Cambridge.  He left the company in 1985.

After leaving Petroconsultants in 1985, Michael established himself as an independent consultant for a year before joining Arthur Andersen Management Consultants in 1986 as a senior manager. Arthur Andersen was acquired by Binder Hamlyn in 1994.

He describes his career as divided into “ten years of science from 1976 to 1986, and then I came into the City in 1984 as the mapping project was coming to a close and I picked up a couple of clients who were all interested in putting computers into finance which intrigued me.”

Realising that he did not really understand finance, Michael decided to gain a better understanding, he continues: “I thought I’d better get over and learn what that was doing. I moved over, initially into Arthur Andersen, and then later became a partner at Binder Hamlyn, and began effectively Binder Hamlyn’s IT consulting.  I later did strategy consulting, and created some other consulting arms.  As I did that, I thought, well, it would be kind of smart to qualify as an accountant, and I decided I’d get those qualifications as well as science qualifications.”

Michael would go onto be become a partner and board member where he oversaw many significant projects ranging from returning London Ambulance Service response centre to operation after 1992 disaster, co-creating the UK Clinical Negligence Scheme for NHS Trusts. Modernising the Czech retail banking and building Bulgarian central bank with EBRD, to establishing £55M satellite television service and payment call centre for BskyB, among many other achievements.

In 1995, after the merger of Arthur Andersen and Binder Hamlyn, Michael was invited to join the Ministry of Defence. He was appointed Corporate Development Director and Main Board Member (grade 3 civil service, 2-star military equivalent major-general/rear-admiral) at the Defence Evaluation & Research Agency (DERA), a role he would hold until 1997. He says of the invite: “I thought, oh why not?  This, this sounds interesting.  It was really playing into my finance and science combination, so I loved that.”

His time at the Ministry of Defence coincided with an interest in defence technology commercialisation, he says: “We were looking at how could we make this stuff more useful to the nation. … DERA was an enormous entity.  It had pulled together everything bar the nuclear.  It had the chemical and biological research, materials sciences and all that, electronics; the Centre for Human Studies; and it even had some of the deeper strategic think tank stuff where war games went on inside computers.  It was a really fascinating thing.  14,000 people, about 9,000 were qualified engineers or scientists, and huge facilities.”

1995 also saw Michael join several of his ex-team members from Arthur Andersen to co-found a new consultancy – Z/Yen. Michael became Chair of the newly formed company; a role he accepted provided that it would only take half a day a week while he was working at the Ministry of Defence.

Z/Yen is a commercial think-tank and venture firm that asks, solves and acts. It has been recognised as the City of London’s most innovative research, policy, and problem-solving firm. Having grown to 25 FTE staff and 300 associates, its clients are in financial services, business-to-business, technology, and government sectors.

On the subject of why IT projects in the public sector are problematic, Michael says: “There is this notion that these top-down government projects, particularly in IT, do tend to fail.  In my opinion, they tend to fail in comparison with the private sector which also has its failures, because government manages it too much.

Michael continues: “One of the things I frequently say is that I’ve never seen an IT system work where more than three people are involved in the core.  … Britain’s the home of method, Jackson and SSADM etc, but we try and pretend, even today, that it’s about engineering.  When you talk to people, for example at a very successful firm such as Google, you’ll find that their management methods are not all what the British Government likes to get from either Accenture or Deloitte, KPMG, PwC, IBM, Capita, which is this guaranteed programme of direction. Google for example sets up very, very, strict series of gates to get something into the general population of the system, but it’s done by an extremely small group of people.  Nobody is trying to manufacture an overarching Google system, so it’s a much more competitive workplace and environment and that’s what leads to that kind of innovation.”

On the subject of Y2K Michael believes that the underlying issue was one of a lack of maintenance on systems that were only designed to be around for a few years. He says: “It was about lack of maintenance, this was the catch-up of fifteen years’ worth of maintenance that was finally, ‘let’s get it onto the right sort of system’.”

He continues: “Did it avoid things?  Definitely. At the time, around 2000, 2001, if you had talked to CIOs, most of them would say, ‘we avoided a few issues, and we’ve got a better system.’ But I have a kind of a mixed view of it.  Definitely some money was wasted, but was there a crisis?  Yes, there was a looming crisis and some money was wasted delivering it.  I find it interesting to compare it with the quantum computing issue today, which is will quantum computing break current encryption methods?  That’s a rich debate, but it has some resemblance to the Y2K, but without quite the fixed date.”

In 1997 after meetings with Charles Ross, one of the leading lights in the Real Time Club, David Deutsch and a few others to discuss quantum computing, Michael  convinced the Bank of England to conduct a trial of quantum encryption. He explains: “Quantum encryption and quantum computing are actually only sort of tangentially related.  Quantum encryption is basically the use of quantum effects to encrypt in such a way that you can’t intercept messages.  Quantum computing is a means of calculating effectively large-scale probabilities all at once.”

In 1998, the group set up the European Institute for Quantum Computing. Michael continues: “It only lasted for a few years. I believe quantum computing is worth looking at.  I believe it will come.  There are certain scientists who argue that it’s  theoretically impossible to actually have a quantum computer.  You might come close but you’ll never quite get there. Yet we are beginning to see the effects of it coming out.” Michael points to the US and Canada where several of his acquaintances in finance are successfully using quantum computing as a third way of balancing portfolios.

He goes on to say: “Will it ever do anything amazing?  Well I think there are a few problems with people’s views of it coming.  The first is, the history of computing as exemplified by Moore’s law, is, smaller, cheaper, faster, and quantum computing is oddly not about smaller, cheaper and faster.  It’s about solving classes of problems we’ve never been able to solve before.  It could make an enormous difference for example in linguistics, where better usage of the existing logistics framework, because you can solve this problem in real time or close to real time, means that you’re routing all the Amazon vans intelligently with five, ten, 25 per cent difference in efficiency.  It could be very, very, useful there, but I don’t think general public is likely to see it.  That said, I’ll probably, wind up like IBM or DEC, when it turns out that actually there’s a quantum computer on every desk in ten years from now but I believe it’s meant to be an algorithmic advantage to everyone, not an on-the-desk advantage to everyone and most people will probably not see it.”

Michael has interesting views on Bitcoin, he says: “I have a .00001 of a bitcoin, because I thought it was important to have gone through the process and know how it worked.”

He goes on to recall work he was doing with Professor Mike Smith in 1995/6 to try to build a system for three charities to share very sensitive information and used what would be called blockchain today to build it. He says: “We called it stacking and sleeving. I first saw blockchain in ’78 at Harvard, we were talking about how we have an internet of connectivity, TCP/IP, how do we have an internet of record?  How could I prove to you that I had sent you a message?” The solution was to “just hash it.”  Michael continues: “We called that checksum then, a long checksum can be a hash.  If we took the checksum, stored it somewhere then we’d have evidence that the transaction occurred.  The problem though is, if you think about hashes, they’re about 256 bytes, so sixteen hashes used up all my memory in those days.  So, we knew what the problem was, but we couldn’t do it and that wasn’t surprising at that time.  It’s the same thing with AI. Most AI techniques date back to the mid-Seventies.  Why has it taken off now?  Because we couldn’t do it, we didn’t have the scale of data handling, and we didn’t have the processing power to do it in anything like a useful period of time.”

Michael says that he sees Bitcoin as “a bit of a failed experiment”  He adds: “Firstly, bitcoin as it’s currently constituted uses far too much energy, it’s far too slow, 350,000 transactions a day.  You’d bring the entire global network down if it was using bitcoin just running a single football match; by the time people bought beers and their hotdogs the whole thing would collapse. I don’t see that as sensible, personally.  Then you move into the economics of it, and people who study this seem to think that trading numbers in the dark with each other is a useful thing to do and forget what real money is.  Real money, fiat money, currency, is really about tax credits.  We should have tax credits with each other.  So do I believe in bitcoin?  Well, we have gold bugs; we’ll continue to have crypto cockroaches.  Every time that the dollar drops down somebody will say, ‘Well what about bitcoin?’ I don’t think it will play a role analogous to gold per se.

“But when it comes to digital currencies, they are clearly one way to go, and the central banks are very strongly looking at it, so-called CBDC, Central Bank Digital Currencies.  The Chinese are deep into a widespread experiment on it already.  So, those will emerge over time, but they’re not actually bitcoin, it is a completely different approach.  The only commonality to them is that they might use a blockchain, and a blockchain frankly is just a data structure.”

Michael was appointed the Sheriff of the City of London in 2019 and is an alderman. He says: “My tenure has been extended by another year, I’m one of just two sheriffs to be extended since 1228 I believe.  We’re there to provide continuity.  I am a booster for London.  I run the Global Financial Centres Index, we do it impartially, but I will boost London. I think London is fantastic.  I’ve made it my home because I love it, I love the people, I love the culture, the whole thing.”

Talking about the threat Covid 19 has brought to future of the City, Michael says: “We do face change, that’s without question.” He points to the enormous reliance and growth of video conferencing and the impact it has especially on technology and finance sectors both of which are central to the City. He adds: “We have taken a heck of a hit.  I was quoted in September saying something along the lines of, the geographic city of London has had a torrid COVID-19 year.  The south-east of England financial services cluster has had a boom year. We’ve seen this enormous change to the way that we work. …. I think we can really renovate in new ways.  I’d like to see more of a business campus approach, a lot more flexibility in space usage. I’m actually quite excited about the future.  I think London could emerge from this as better, a global coffee house for the world.”

Asked if he feels there are persistent reasons for the UK’s failure to create billion dollar companies Michael says: “I think there are several persistent reasons for it.  Some of them are arguably cultural.  One is the persistence across Europe of high levels of GPD taken by the State means that there’s just less to go around in terms of entrepreneurship.  Innovation is a hugely wasteful process. …. So, this is the problem in Britain when you hear on the radio every time somebody tries something that doesn’t work, ‘Oh you’ve wasted money.’  Well, I never said it was a guaranteed thing, and this probabilistic view of the world that frankly investors have to take, is exactly contrary to what most European countries are like, which is a determined direction and road paths. I say that as somebody who’s spent six years in the MoD working on innovation.  It’s very difficult to get people to understand that innovation, most of the time, doesn’t work.  This is a fact.

 Michael points out that many times there is a nationalist element to innovation that is often missed. He says: “We’re clearly going through a nationalistic period, we have the debates on Huawei, ARM, TMSC.  What I’ve always said is people do not want the best British technology and when I came to Britain, that was a refrain I heard constantly.  You want to use this.  Why?  It’s not very good.  Yes, but it’s the best British technology.  My clients don’t want the best British technology; they want the best technology and the same thing applies to people.  I don’t want British people working on my projects; I don’t not want British people working on my projects, I want the best people for the project. That’s one of the biggest changes over the last 40 years I’ve seen and I think it’s very unremarked by many of the commentators who put a nationalistic label on it.  ARM is not a British company.  ARM is a company that was incorporated in Britain; that’s a very different thing.  Many of the skills, most of the need for it, was actually driven from abroad. No company is an island, no man is an island, certainly not in commerce.”

Having been aware of the Government’s 1984 push to education young people in IT skills, Michael believes that we lost focus on teaching children the basics. He explains: “That’s why I was so pleased to see Raspberry Pi.  Raspberry Pi is much more my way of thinking.  Give the kids a machine; let them understand the machine from the ground up.  They don’t need to be good programmers.  This is not what it’s about.  They need to understand what a major discipline in life, i.e. computer programming means, how does it work.”

He goes to explain that Z/Yen, the company he co-founded, asks employees who do not have a programming background to undertake a free six week course originally based on a Harvard applied mathematics course to help them understand how programmers think. He adds: “I tell them ‘you don’t need to learn to programme, you need to learn how programmers think.  You need to understand this in the same way that I’d ask you to learn how to do addition and subtraction.  I’m not asking you to be a arithmetician or a mathematician, but you need to understand the basics of it.’  I would encourage all children, all young people, to do that for a few months and if you don’t like it, that’s fine, nobody said you had to like it or be good at it, but now you go away with an appreciation of how the world, or a major portion of the world, works.”

Speaking about his biggest mistake Michael says: “My biggest thing is never to have had a plan for most of my personal life. I’ve always done things sort of backwards.  I got my doctorate very late in life; I should have gotten it earlier.  I married very late in life.  … I think the biggest thing is that there is a tendency to have a bit of a ‘plandemic’.  People planning and planning and planning and I don’t see that as very good but I do wish I had laid down perhaps a stronger roadmap for myself. “

He advises others to ‘just do it’, adding,  “Whatever it is, get started doing something right away.  Just do it now.  If you can’t do it now, figure out a way to take a baby step towards it. I have been very bad at that.  It’s a form of procrastination probably.  I like to excuse myself by saying, I’m so busy I don’t have time for it but I think the biggest thing is, try and do things today; don’t put off till tomorrow, what you can do today.”

Member, Order of St John 2019

Honorary Fellow CISI 2018 in recognition of Michael’s significant contribution to the financial services profession

Honorary Life Fellow awarded by Gresham College 2017

Consigliere del Senato Accademico of L’Accademia Tiberina, Italy, 2015

Independent Publisher Book Awards ‘Finance, Investment & Economics’ Gold Prize for The Price of Fish: A New Approach To Wicked Economics & Better Decisions, USA, 2012

Gentiluomo, “Don Mainelli”, Associazione Cavalieri di San Silvestro, Italy, 2011

British Computer Society Individual Excellence Awards, Director of the Year, UK, 2005

Two “Highly Commended” Emerald Literati awards for journal articles, USA, 2003, 2012

Interviewed by: Richard Sharpe by Zoom on the 25th January 2021

Transcribed by: Susan Hutton

Abstracted by: Lynda Feeley