Kimberly Wiefling '84
Kimberly Wiefling is the author of one of the top 100 project management books in the US, "Scrappy Project Management: The 12 Predictable and Avoidable Pitfalls Every Project Faces", and the founder of Wiefling Consulting, LLC, a scrappy global consulting enterprise committed to enabling her clients to achieve highly unlikely or darn near impossible results, predictably and repeatedly. Her company has helped individuals, teams, and organizations realize their dreams through a combination of courageous leadership, project management excellence, sheer determination, and plain old stubbornness. She has worked with companies of all sizes, including one-person ventures and those in the Fortune 50, and she has helped to launch and grow more than half a dozen startups, a few of which are reaping excellent profits at this very moment. She spends about half of her time working with Japan-based companies that are committed to developing truly global leaders. Kimberly's leadership workshops are extremely popular with her Japanese clients, who are delighted to find the experience highly interactive, expressive and transformative, a refreshing change of pace from the lecture style typical in many Japanese companies.
Kimberly attributes her scrappiness to being raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and to the sheer luck of genetics-her whole family is seriously scrappy. (Thanks, Mom and Dad!) A physicist by education, she earned a master's degree in physics from Case Institute and a bachelor's in chemistry and physics from Wright State University. Kimberly spent a decade at HP in engineering leadership and product development project management roles. She then spent four years in the wild and whacky world of Silicon Valley start-ups before leading one to a glorious defeat during the dotcom bust of 2001 as the VP of Program Management. (Indeed, the company was purchased by Google, but as luck would have it, for pennies on the dollar... Drat!) Vigorously scrappy, she reemerged from the smoldering remains of the "Silicon Valley Mood Disorder" to launch her own company, consulting worldwide from Tokyo to Armenia, as well as the once-again-vibrant Silicon Valley. Kimberly is the executive editor of The Scrappy GuidesTM, and a regular contributor to ProjectConnections.com. She is also the lead blogger on the UC Santa Cruz Extension's The Art of Project Management Blog.
Feel free to contact her at kimberly@wiefling.com or check out her web site at www.wiefling.com. You can order her book on Amazon and see the hilarious video of the nearly-true story of the precarious last hurdles that she overcame to get the book published at YouTube.
