Bill (right) with Jon Bergstrom (left) and George Sereno (center)

Biography: Bill is an Associate Technical Fellow in the Enterprise Thinking Network at United Technologies’ Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne business unit in Canoga Park.  Bill is known within Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne and his previous employer, The Boeing Company, and for his efforts to provide insights to the advantages of thinking together, learning together, and working together. Audiences for his classes have also reached after-school program in elementary schools, graduate students at Northwestern University, public workshops at the University of Richmond in Virginia and California Polytechnic State University in California, as well as, corporate, university, and public classes across the United Kingdom. 

Away from work, Bill serves as a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Leeds in England, and as a board member of the W. Edwards Deming Institute, the Volunteers of America – Los Angeles chapter, and the American Youth Soccer Organization – Valencia, California section.  He is also a founding board member and current President of the In2:InThinking Network, a non-profit company dedicated to the pursuit of “better thinking about thinking,” for individuals and organizations.  Bill earned his B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in mechanical engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, USA.

Contact: Bill can be reached by e-mail at william.bellows@pwr.utc.com for additional information about this pre-conference session.

Tim (right) with Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne colleague Rudy Hernandez (left)

Biography: Tim is in his 29th year  of service to the company currently governed by United Technologies’ Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne business unit in Canoga Park.  Departmental assignments took him from engineering to manufacturing operations to the total quality management office, and to quality in the position of focal point for cause and corrective action  All was preceded by 8 years teaching high school English and mathematics.  He claims that, inadvertently, the company pays him to mess with the frontal lobes of those trapped in the prevailing style of management.  He conducts sessions in Six Thinking Hats, in Lateral Thinking, in Problem Solving and Decision Making and organizes discussions of The New Economics obtaining local participants as well as participants from the US, Canada, and the UK.

He spends three days a week playing soccer, some portion of  each day adoring a Brazilian wife who saves him a fortune shopping, and some time loving a trilingual History Channel watching 17 year old.  He is especially fascinated with books describing the probabilistic and downright weird behavior of the universe and the people in it.  Tim has a Masters in English, has an ASQ Certified Quality Engineer card, and a rather large collection of Brazilian soccer jerseys.

Contact: Tim can be reached by e-mail at timothy.higgins@pwr.utc.com for additional information about this pre-conference session.

Joe with daughter April

Biography: Joe was born and grew up in Los Alamos, New Mexico.  He acquired a B.S. of Science degree in Mechanical Engineering from Oregon State University after which he hired into the Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne (PWR) Canoga Park facility as a Member of the Technical Staff.  He has over 25 years of experience in the design, manufacture and test of rocket engines.  He started his career designing hardware for the Space Shuttle Main Engine; hardware that he has designed is currently flying on the Space Shuttle.  He then moved into management where he could focus more on improving the process of designing hardware and was responsible for both the Combustion Devices Design Department and the Engine Systems Design Department at different times.  His emphasis for improving the Design Process is based on approaching the design of any component from the system perspective, understanding and integrating the manufacturing process and customer requirements into the design.

Joe is currently heading up the improvement activities, called ACE (for Achieving Competitive Excellence) for PWR's Canoga Park Engineering organization. In this position, he is responsible for supporting the improvement of the engineering process by improving the infrastructure and the application of improvement tools.  He also provides engineering support to the various products as needed and is most reciently supporting the development of the J-2X FEMA/CIL.  

Joe has spent a significant amount of time applying systems thinking and Deming’s theory of management to the rocket business and currently presents PWR's Thinking Roadmap seminar, Managing Variation as a System, as well as Design for Variation.

He is an ASQ Certified Quality Engineer and expects to complete his M.B.A. this summer from Pepperdine University.

Contact: Joe can be reached by e-mail at joseph.onstott@pwr.utc.com for additional information about this pre-conference session.



Joe, Tim, and Bill, in a photo from their presentation at the last Ohio Quality and Productivity Forum (Thinking Together About Other Stuff: How Better Thinking is Leading to Better Doing) in Cincinnati in 2000


Seminar Title: Resource Leadership

Date: Friday, April 18th

Length: 6 hours (9:00-12:00pm and 1:15-4:15pm)

Location: Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne - 6633 Canoga Avenue, Canoga Park

Seminar Cost: None

Description: This workshop explores the prospects of better thinking as defined by the management and leadership philosophies of W. Edwards Deming,
Genichi Taguchi, Russell Ackoff, Tom Johnson, and others. Among the topics of discussion will be the "resource management" and it's applicability to variation management, systems thinking, and working together. Blue Pen Companies represent environments of growing levels of team work, wherein “acting locally and thinking globally” is more than a thoughtful expression. By contrast to Red Pen Companies, where team work inevitably translates to “local sub-optimization”, Blue Pen Companies offer the prospect of "working together through thinking together." The seminar will introduce you to these ideas through two experiential sessions which were designed to allow participants to "feel the difference" between Red Pen and Blue Pen Companies.

Target Audience: Individual contributors, members of management, suppliers, and customers who are providing leadership in "resource management" and "resource leadership" activities and in the transformation of "Red Pen Companies" to "Blue Pen Companies."

Organization Issues: Proficiency in thinking together is fundamental to the ability to learn together and work together as "one enterprise."

Objectives: At the completion of the seminar the participants should have the ability to better appreciate systemic interdependencies, the impact of variation, the vitality of people thinking together, and the limitations of individual and organizational knowledge. Taken together, participants will become more aware of how to foster an environment of thinking together, learning together, and working together.

Seminar Handouts: Available for download after the Forum