Speaker Bios

Rich Gildersleeve is Chief Technology Officer at DJO, Inc., a company specializing in rehabilitation, repair, and regeneration products for the orthopedic, spine, and vascular markets. Throughout his career, Rich has been involved in developing new products and product development processes. His team at DJO earned the Product Development and Management Association’s (PDMA) 2005 Outstanding Corporate Innovator (OCI) award by demonstrating sustained excellence in the development and profitable commercialization of new products and services.

Rich received a BS in Applied Mechanics at the University of California at San Diego and a MS in Mechanical Engineering and a MBA at San Diego State University. He is a registered professional engineer in the state of California and possesses 16 issued US patents. His book, Winning Business, How to Use Financial Analysis and Benchmarks to Outscore Your Competition, details many business metrics used to improve
company performance

Michael N. Kennedy had a 30 year career at Texas Instruments Inc., where he was the lead engineer on many development projects including missile system products and manufacturing systems. During his last years at TI, he was a leader in reengineering the core engineering and manufacturing processes, including adopting concurrent engineering, solid modeling CAD systems, CAD/CAM integration, and leading quality initiatives.

For the past ten years, Mr. Kennedy has researched and is applying the principles of Toyota’s outstanding product development system to dramatically improve companies’ productivity metrics. His first book “Product Development for the Lean Enterprise” has raised awareness and presented the underlying philosophy behind Toyota’s success. He is the co-founder and CEO of Targeted Convergence Corporation with the mission of developing models, training, and tools for implementing the book principles into manufacturing industries. He is currently assisting many companies to implement the principles introduced in his book.

Jim Luckman is a partner at Lean Transformations Group, LLC. He is the Past President and CEO of iPower Technologies, a company serving the distributed generation market of electrical power. He is also the President of Luckman Consulting, which provides coaching for companies interested in profound transformations. Luckman has worked in the auto industry for 34 years working at Delphi Automotive (formerly part of General Motors). He has had significant experience in Strategic Planning, Engineering and Manufacturing.

In his most recent position, he was Site Manager at the Technical Center of Rochester and Chief Engineer for Fuel Systems. He led a transformation at the Engineering Center by adopting lean manufacturing principles and developing lean principles in Engineering. He took a systems approach to making change and integrated this across all functions that support the development process. As the executive champion and change agent for Lean Engineering, he spent most of his time coaching and leading workshops for all Delphi Engineering organizations. He also held benchmarking workshops with many companies.

Jim has an Electrical Engineering Bachelor's degree from Tri State University and a Masters degree from Case Western University in Computer Engineering.

Katherine Radeka has a rare combination of business acumen, scientific depth and ability to work with people. In the past six years, her consulting firm, Whittier Consulting Group, Inc. has engaged with clients such as Intel, Hewlett-Packard, Buckeye Technologies, The Toro Company, Alticor and over fifty other leading organizations .In 2005, she logged over 11,000 miles driving around the country to research how the best companies got more ROI from product development. In 2007, she founded the Lean Product & Process Development Exchange, a nonprofit organization to promote the use of lean thinking to improve ROI from product development. In 2009, she launched the Lean Product Development Resource Center, a Web-based Knowledge Supermarket for capturing and sharing best practices in lean product development. In 2010,

She is a regular speaker for the Product Development Management Association and the Association for Manufacturing Excellence. Her articles regularly appear in PDMA’s magazine, Visions, where she is the most frequently featured cover author in the last three years. She was recently inducted into the Million Dollar Consultant® Hall of Fame, one of only twenty consultants worldwide recognized for her client results, integrity, business growth and personal development. Katherine has climbed seven of the ten tallest peaks in the Cascades and spent ten days alone on the Pacific Crest Trail until an encounter with a bear convinced her that she needed a change in strategic direction.

Durward K. Sobek II is an Associate Professor of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering at Montana State University. He holds Ph.D. and M.S. degrees in Industrial and Operations Engineering from the University of Michigan, and an A.B. degree in Engineering Sciences from Dartmouth College. Dr. Sobek has been researching lean product development for over a decade, focusing on how organizations can increase their performance capacity through the application of lean principles. He is a frequent presenter, and has published numerous articles in publications such as Harvard Business Review, Sloan Management Review, and IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management. He is co-author of the prologue to Allen Ward's seminal book, Lean Product and Process Development, and is co-author of the book Understanding A3 Thinking: A Critical Component of Toyota's PDCA Management System.