Nuts on Top: From Climbing the Tower to Building the Drone That Doesn't Have To

Before tech sales, I was a broadcast engineer, and part of that job was climbing towers. Not just any towers. Our main transmitting tower, and the big microwave tower everyone else in the city aimed their dishes at.

The danger was simple: falling. You strapped in every time, no exceptions. And before you touched a rung, you looked the structure over for rust and for bolts that weren't sitting right, because a compromised connection hundreds of feet up isn't a repair problem anymore, it's a fall waiting to happen.

That's why every bolt on that tower ran in backwards, nut on top instead of underneath. A loose nut on a normal bolt still looks fine from the ground, even through binoculars. You don't find out it's compromised until you're already up there, hands on it, weight on it. Flip it around, and a missing nut leaves a gap you can spot from the ground before you ever clip in. You catch it with binoculars, bring the right tool up with you, and fix it on the way instead of finding out at height, with a fall on the line.

Here's the part that still bothers every tower climber, cell tower crews included, because they deal with this exact same problem today. Climbing is the expensive, dangerous part. Do as much of your inspection as you possibly can from the ground first. Nothing is worse than climbing all the way up alone, exposed, only to find out you don't have the right tool, or something else entirely is broken that you didn't plan for. Now you're climbing back down for a tool, or a part, having burned the risk for nothing.

Years later, at IBM, I ended up on the other side of that exact problem. I led a partnership between IBM and Samsung to actually build the fix. Samsung had a 360 degree camera. We paired it with IBM's AI video analytics and mounted the whole thing on a drone, so a crew could inspect a tower's condition from the ground before anyone clipped into a harness. I demoed it at Mobile World Congress. People liked it, and a handful of customers bought the solution.

It took me years, and a couple of graduate degrees, to find the language for why that bolt trick and that drone were the same idea. I'm finishing a PhD in Organizational Leadership now, with a Master's in Management and Organizational Leadership focused on HR and new technology behind that, and a Bachelor's in Communication Design and Media Arts before both. There's real research behind this: organizations that avoid disaster aren't the ones hoping nothing breaks, they're the ones that design small failures to be visible from a distance, long before someone is standing on top of them finding out the hard way. A drone with a camera and AI behind it is just the modern version of turning a bolt around.

That's not just a tower story or a product story. It's a leadership design choice. Does a small crack in your team or your systems show up early enough to fix from the ground? Or does everything look fine right up until someone is already exposed, holding onto it, with no tool in hand?

That habit stuck with me a lot longer than the climbing did. I've worn a lot of hats since, and stayed willing to get dirty and figure things out, because startups and new ventures don't carry a specialist standing by for every job. You inspect the situation honestly, strap in, and climb anyway. And every so often, if you pay attention, you get the chance to go build the thing that means nobody has to climb blind again.

That instinct, and that IBM demo, are a big part of why I help people and companies communicate using AI, Cloud, and Video today. I'm a lifelong learner, willing to take a real risk on a new skill before I'm any good at it yet. Worst case, I'm a little rough at something for a while. But having actually strapped in and climbed the tower myself, as a leader I know the difference between someone doing the real work and someone just telling me the bolts are fine.