6th Annual Conference - Lean 3.0: The Next Frontier

Click here for the tentative agenda.

Thank you to our Sponsors: 

Keynote Speakers:  

Teresa Hay McMahon is the Executive Director of the Iowa Lean Consortium (ILC), a non-profit consortium of businesses, government, education and healthcare working to drive competitive performance improvements in Iowa organizations by expanding Lean culture and sharing lessons learned. She was the Founder and first President of the ILC while she served in Iowa state government for 25 years, including as Deputy Director of the Iowa Department of Economic Development and as Performance Results Director of the Iowa Department of Management.  She was responsible for performance management in the executive branch of Iowa state government, including implementing Lean, enterprise strategic planning, performance audits and organizational development.  She was co-lead for the State of Iowa for implementation of the American Recovery & Reinvestment Act.  She began implementing Lean throughout the executive branch of state government in 2004 and established the Office of Lean Enterprise. For eight years she served as Special Assistant to the Director of the Iowa Department of Natural Resources in the area of Policy and Organizational Performance.  She also taught Environmental Policy in a graduate college at the University of Iowa.

Teresa served ten years as Administrator of the Waste Management Assistance Division of the IDNR, leading Iowa's first state-wide recycling, composting, and environmental education activities.  During that tenure she represented Iowa on the Midwest Interstate Low-Level Radioactive Waste Compact and numerous working groups with the National Governors' Association and federal agencies.  She worked previously on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. and also lobbied for two trade associations in Washington.  She is an attorney.

Betty Gratopp is the lead production manager at Zingerman’s Mail Order, an online gourmet food shop located in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Zingerman’s Mail Order has annual sales of $18 million and offers about 1,000 different products ranging from fresh bread to aged cheese to estate-bottled olive oils. Orders are shipped five days per week via courier all across America. Daily order volumes are highly variable, ranging from 100 to 15,000 boxes and there is extreme seasonal variability as well, with over 50% of the year’s revenue happening in the last six weeks of the year. Betty oversees a crew of 50 and a part-time seasonal crew of 400. Betty has been the lead implementer and developer of Zingerman’s Mail Order’s lean transformation, now in its 11th year. She runs several kata storyboards, creates and steers all long term planning, and teaches regular classes to her crew and outside organizations.

Karen Ruedinger

During much of Karen’s career, she has had the good fortune of being allowed to spend time thinking about market trends and where they might lead. While at Steelcase, she was part of a team of researchers, marketers and designers who were charged with redefining the company’s storage product offering. This led her to work with some of the best minds in investigative research, ideation and design from IDEO to Doblin Group. She then went on to work in R&D for the office furniture leader where she developed business models for new products and services. One of her great pleasures was attending the annual Ten Year Forecast visioning events put on by the Institute for the Future where Steelcase was a member.

While at Northwestern Michigan College, Karen has continued her work at the intersection of research, analysis and planning in order to help frame decisions such as how best to grow or make more sustainable, existing programs and services. She has had the pleasure of developing and leading the environmental scanning process at the College where a team of faculty and staff survey the external environment and seek to identify key trends that inform NMC’s strategic planning assumptions.

Karen earned a BA in business and art from Alma College and her MBA from the University of Michigan. While she’s not sure she’s a futurist yet, she understands that it is increasingly critical that we all develop the skills of envisioning our desired future.