Karen Martin

Karen Martin, president of the global consulting firm TKMG, Inc., is a leading authority on business performance and Lean management. Known for her keen diagnostic skills and rapid-results approach, Karen and her team have worked with clients such as AT&T, Chevron, Epson, GlaxoSmithKline, International Monetary Fund, Lenovo, Mayo Clinic, Prudential Insurance, Qualcomm, and the United States Department of Homeland Security to develop more efficient work systems, grow market share, solve business problems, and accelerate performance. An in-demand speaker, she’s the two-time Shingo Award-winning author of The Outstanding Organization, coauthor of Value Stream Mapping, and coauthor of two other titles on business performance improvement. Her latest book, Clarity First, is her most provocative to date and is garnering deep praise.

Choose to Be Outstanding

Discover the essential ingredients that drive exceptional performance with this keynote based on Karen’s award-winning book, The Outstanding Organization. Learn how to strip away unnecessary complexity to enable the levels of performance and innovation that make an organization truly OUTSTANDING. Proven, practical, and surprisingly simple, Karen’s system focuses on four key behaviors for excellence—clarity, focus, discipline, engagement—that, once instilled into a company’s DNA, open the door to sustainable growth, profit, and a deeply engaged workforce. Drawn from her latest book, Clarity First, she’ll also explain the critical need for clarity and how to use it to innovate at higher levels and problem solve more effectively.

Advanced Problem Solving

For leaders seeking to improve operations, the ultimate goal is to develop a problem-solving culture that touches upon all aspects of the organization. This session focuses on the questions that you need to ask to drive deeper critical thinking, better problem breakdown, and better root cause analysis. Further, Karen will show you how to sell the need for solving a problem in the first place. She’ll address the multiple hats a problem solver wears, and the organizational mindsets that are critical for good problem solving. Even if you have good problem solving skills yourself, this session will help you spread that know-how to others.