🚀 Uncertainty To Opportunity: Market Expansion Fuels Resilience

Beth received a BA and MBA from Michigan State University (GO GREEN!) in Supply Chain Management. After graduation, it was a bit of a shock to Beth when she realized that most companies were not interested in JIT, which seemed to be a common sense way to run a business: identify reasons for high inventories, fix them and decrease lead time.  Repeat.   Decades later, Beth knows that human beings naturally resist change, and resistance to new ideas is not necessarily about the new idea.  At this point, Beth has experienced just about every type of resistance to change, and she's learned how to effectively turn that resistance into sustainable performance improvement. 

 Beth Crowley | LinkedIn  

Beth has seen significant changes in the attitude toward Continuous Improvement since those early days. Working for AlliedSignal (AS) in the 1990s, the organization was pushed to hit "breakthrough goals" by new CEO Larry Bossidy.  With the mandate to continuously lower costs, finding a better way was not a choice - it was a matter of survival.  Many AS people and businesses did not survive the Bossidy era.  Beth was hired into the Automotive Sector's Total Quality Department with a team tasked to start their Lean effort. While Beth was with AS she earned her Six Sigma Green Belt and moved south from Detroit and a Corporate role to an Operations Leader role in an Aerospace manufacturing facility in the southeastern US.  That position is still the favorite of her career.  It made Beth even more passionate about making sure that what she leaves behind is sustainable and creates a better organization and life for the people who work there.  

Beth has held full-time Continuous Improvement positions with AlliedSignal, UNISYS and Maytag, and her consulting clients include ArvinMeritor Automotive, Becton Dickinson, Owens Corning and Milacron.

Beth is a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt, a Part-Time Faculty Member at the Oakland University School of Business, a regular contributor to www.theleanmag.com, a podcast guest and Conference Speaker.