For a long time, I thought a consultant was supposed to be the expert in the room. That was my model of the job for years. I can remember wondering how somebody relatively young could know enough to walk into an experienced organization and tell it what it should be doing differently.

I have spent much of my career working with people from different countries. Before starting our company in 2009, I lived and worked in Japan for 13 years. Since then, I have worked with customers, suppliers, engineers, and business leaders throughout Asia, North America, and Europe. Those experiences have taught me that no country has all the answers. Every manufacturing culture has strengths, weaknesses, and habits that can be improved.

Dr. Stanton Rak spent the better part of this past year taking readers inside the electronic systems that enable electrification through his “Road to Reliability” series, to find out what it takes to make them reliable. Now that the series has concluded, he explains his motives for writing it, his holistic approach to covering EV reliability, and how it can become an important technology driver for high reliability electronics more broadly.