While I was in Austin last week, I had the good fortune of meeting Sylvia Acevedo, a three-time entrepreneur and former sales and marketing executive in high-tech (Apple, Autodesk, Dell, IBM). She has a master’s degree in engineering from Stanford and started her career at Jet Propulsion Labs. Not too shabby.

Her current company, CommuniCard, develops strategies and materials for communicating with Hispanic workers in a number of industries–healthcare, law enforcement, construction, housekeeping, lawncare.

I loved learning about Sylvia’s approach to problems, because she exemplifies whole brain thinking at its best. She also shows the power of being a boundary crosser in terms of impact.

In starting her current company, she found that managers of Hispanic workers viewed problems from the lens of language barriers. This led to solutions focused on translating from English to Spanish.

Like any good engineer, Sylvia thought about whether the problem had been defined correctly. She re-defined problems for her clients as communication process problems. It freed her up to use pictures as part of the solution. In fact, her products are a series of pictures that appeal to both the manager of workers (typically someone born in the U.S. and socialized in the American culture) and the workers themselves (typically someone socialized in a Latino culture who has Spanish as the primary language and may or may not have English as a second language.) This is no small feat. As a result, Communicard’s reputation for being effective has grown. She was recently approached by the Mexican consulate to develop materials for them.

Sylvia and I talked about effectiveness vs. "slickness," which is what typical marketing firms provide. The visuals in her products have a simplicity that belie the amount of design intelligence behind them. Less is more. Pick colors that emphasize what you want the viewer to focus on (black and white for the meat of the picture, offset by a solid background). Provide a communications medium that people are comfortable with (e.g., fold-out "maps," playing cards).

Not that she’s oblivious to new mediums that are emerging.  In fact, one of the principles that Sylvia lives by is this: "Focus on What Is, Not What Was."  She explains that what you grew up with is not what the world is like today. She’s looking at distributing her products using iTunes and cell phones. Sylvia sees the impact of globalization, outsourcing, and the Internet on business.

Sylvia does well by doing good. I like that. The problems that she tackles are ones that have high impact, with a strategic population.

One project involved helping taxi cab drivers in low-income areas understand alternatives for customers going to emergency rooms in hospitals. Lower cost, efficient, stand-alone medical clinics were available but the people who could benefit from them didn’t know about them. A communication process problem, not a language problem.

In another project, she looked at how to increase the Hispanic parental support for teenage daughters applying to the Ann Richards School for Young Women Leaders. She found that the  number one benefit that appealed to this group was that their daughters would be less likely to get pregnant. Number two was going to college. Number three was finishing high school. Once she figured this out, she was able to provide the right messaging. 123 Hispanic girls were accepted and the school had to turn away hundreds more. In other work with public education in Austin, Sylvia partnered with local radio stations to increase the number of Hispanic parents attending Back-to-School nights by four-fold.

This woman gets results. She operates in many worlds and cross-pollinates.

And she has big dreams. Her larger agenda is to affect the middle-class, to grow the numbers by improving the education pipeline. Sylvia reminds me to dream big. Thanks, Sylvia.