Katherine Radeka

Katherine Radeka has a rare combination of business acumen, scientific depth and ability to untangle the organizational knots to remove the barriers to change.  In the past six years, her consulting firm, Whittier Consulting Group, Inc. has engaged with clients such as Intel, Hewlett-Packard, Buckeye Technologies, The Toro Company, Wells Fargo, Alticor and over fifty other leading organizations. 

In 2005, she logged over 11,000 miles driving around the country to research how the best companies got more ROI from product development.  In 2007, she founded the Lean Product & Process Development Exchange, a nonprofit organization to promote the use of lean thinking to improve ROI from product development.  In 2008, she adapted these concepts to strategy development, where they achieve greater strategic flexibility, and her clients consistently outperformed their peers during the recent recession. 

She is currently the Lead Researcher for the Lean Product Development Benchmarking Study, a major effort to document the current state of lean product development, for a consortium of universities including MIT, Cranfield University (UK) and Chalmers University (Sweden).

She is a regular speaker for the Product Development Management Association and the Association for Manufacturing Excellence.  Her articles regularly appear in PDMA’s magazine, Visions, where she is the most frequently featured cover author in the last three years.  Her other publications include articles for the Journal for Product Innovation Management, TRIZ Journal and Real Innovation.

Katherine has climbed seven of the tallest peaks in the Cascade Mountains and spent ten days alone on the Pacific Crest Trail until an encounter with a bear convinced her that she needed a change in strategic direction.

Our Company Name

Whittier Consulting Group, Inc. is named for Mount Whittier, a 5883' peak in the Mount Margaret backcountry, north of Mount St. Helens in the state of Washington. When Mount St. Helens erupted on May 18, 1980, Mount Whittier was directly in the line of fire. The blast knocked down all the trees and coated everything with layers of grey ash. A forest became a wasteland.

In 1996, Katherine visited Mount Whittier for the first time, and she has returned many times.

She says, "When I first visited, I could still see how desolate it must have been after the eruption. The landscape was covered with charred tree trunks and standing dead forests. But life had begun to return. There were more wildflowers than I had ever seen, bringing birds and other wildlife. Small trees had begun to sprout up on their own.

"Every year, the new trees grew taller. Today, it's a healthy young forest with elk, deer, bears and many small animals. I feel privileged to have been able to witness its rebirth. It is my favorite place on earth."