Consulting, Scrappy Style

In one of her many speaking engagements, Kimberly Wiefling ’84 holds a rubber chicken at shoulder height, releases it, and lets it drop to the floor. “What caused the chicken to drop?” she asks the audience. Some say gravity. Others say, “You released it.”

For Wiefling, the rubber chicken illustrates an important point about leadership. The audience members who said gravity was responsible for the chicken’s plummet to the ground represent those who blame circumstances, rather than their own actions, for what happens.

“That’s not what a leader does,” said Wiefling. “A leader focuses on their contribution to the problem and what they can do to change the situation.”

Wiefling gives her audience little rubber chickens as a reminder of this lesson. They love them in Japan, where Wiefling spends about 50 percent of her time, consulting to Japanese companies on leadership, communication, and project management.

Her company, Wiefling Consulting, was formed in 2001 after Wiefling spent 10 years at Hewlett Packard followed by a few turns at several startup companies. Wiefling admits that she began her business “half-heartedly, with one eye on a real job.” In spite of the initial rough spots and growing pains, Wiefling would eventually realize that she had found her calling in life.

“Every time I had a client where I could do something extraordinary or I could help them make a real difference, I knew that it was right for me,” she said. Partnering with Japanese companies over the last five years provided further validation.

“Japanese businesses, as a whole, are embracing the work that I’m doing so enthusiastically,” Wiefling explained. “They are so embracing of my enthusiasm, my passion, my commitment, and appreciative of my knowledge and the broad wisdom that I bring.”

Wiefling’s collaborations with Japanese companies developed out of “pure luck.” She was teaching in the project management and corporate programs at the University of California–Santa Cruz when a group of Japanese business leaders came to the school’s English Language Institute. Little did she know that sitting in the back of her leadership workshop was Yuko Shibata, an executive at ALC Education, Inc., in Tokyo, Japan.

Shibata invited Wiefling and three other colleagues to travel to Japan to present a similar program in Tokyo. The workshop was so well received that it eventually evolved into a full-fledged program on global leadership and management. Wiefling and a team of seven other people now travel to Japan on a regular basis to teach these seminars.

“Kimberly is personally inspiring as well as professionally extraordinary,” said Shibata. “The impact she has had on our clients—global Japanese businesses with employees from dozens of different countries—has been profound. She is truly an agent of transformational change in organizations, including our own, ALC Education, Inc.”

Whether it is an American or Japanese audience or a group of business executives from around the world, Wiefling’s mission remains the same. “We help people learn how to do what seems impossible but is merely difficult,” she said.

She also counsels people on how to overcome the fear of failure. “Failure is not fatal,” she explained. “You’re not going to be a great innovator or leader if you think like that.”

“Scrappy” Kimberly’s words of wisdom

Wiefling’s commitment to helping others achieve their fullest potential led to her book, Scrappy Women in Business: Living Proof that Bending the Rules Isn’t Breaking the Law. It is a collaborative work between Wiefling and 11 of her “scrappy gal-pals” who share their stories.

“I wanted to write a book that tells other women it’s OK if your life and your career are not unfolding in perfect clockwork fashion. If your life is lurching fitfully this way and that and you’ve had kind of a bumpy ride, that is normal. Please don’t feel inferior in any way, because all of us have, too,” she explained.

Published in August 2010, Scrappy Women in Business joins the series of six Scrappy guides produced by Wiefling. Other titles include: Scrappy Project Management, Scrappy Information Security, Scrappy Business Contingency Planning, Scrappy General Management, and Scrappy Project Management in Japanese.

Scrappy Women in Business was also Wiefling’s own personal statement against the glass ceiling many women encounter. “I’m a little tired of seeing the disparity in how women are contributing in our business world,” she confided. “I think people need to understand that we cannot afford to keep half of our population from contributing fully to solving the business problems that we face.”

Wiefling said she has not encountered any gender bias during her work in Japan. Rather, she has experienced an environment of openness and respect that reminds her of her days at Wright State.

“I never suffered any gender bias when I was at Wright State, which didn’t prepare me at all for the realities I would face in graduate school and the real corporate world,” said Wiefling, who graduated with a dual degree in physics and chemistry. She also has a master’s degree in physics from Case Western University.

“As a woman over 50, I’m through pretending it doesn’t matter to me that women are still not contributing and participating fully in the business world,” she added. “I am determined to change that.”

Top 3 “Scrappy Tips” from Kimberly Wiefling

In her books and workshops, Kimberly Wiefling provides “scrappy” tips that apply to anyone at any stage of life.

Tip #1—What you think is impossible is probably only difficult.
“You should never limit your options just because something temporarily seems impossible,” said Wiefling.

Tip #2—Don’t kill other people’s ideas just because you don’t know how to achieve something.
“Each of us, as smart as we are, only knows less than one percent of everything in the entire universe,” Wiefling explained. “Something in the 99 percent that we don’t know could make someone else’s idea possible.”

Tip #3—Everything in life does not have to be neat and clean and tidy.
“You can do what you need to do—it can be messy, lurching fitfully in the direction of your goals. It doesn’t have to be perfect,” she cautioned. “You make mistakes. You fall down and stand back up. You keep going. Being perfect is not the goal.”