About Purpose is about your purpose.
Aim: Identify and articulate your purpose.
Arm: Shape yourself around your purpose.
Act: Achieve your purpose.
Programs:
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Independent Partners
Large Firm Capability, Small Firm Flexibility
About Purpose, Inc. is a strategic union of independent professionals in different disciplines designed to lend both breadth and depth to our customers. We are all seasoned practitioners with years "in the trenches." Each of us has experience and expertise which, taken together, guarantees large firm capability with small firm flexibility.
(For a short bio, click on the Partner's name).
Bob Ryan, Principal - OD, strategic planning and group facilitation, leadership and ethical systems
Karen Ray - OD, collaboration, training design
Dale Mize - Quality systems, ISO, Six Sigma
Mark Komen - Culture assessment, leadership
John Pope - Marketing and sales
Larry Selin - Higher education, business-education interface
Jim Ryan - Web learning, interactive multi-media
Short Biographical Descriptions
Bob Ryan, Principal
Bob Ryan has made a career out of facilitating more productive and satisfying relationships among people in the work place. He has experience in both public and private sector, for profit and not-for-profit corporations, union and non-union shops, and in urban and rural settings. He has extensive experience in social service delivery systems and health care. He holds a Masters degree in Hospital and Health Care Administration. He has provided consulting services ranging from statewide systems change projects to one on one coaching for skills improvement. He is acclaimed for his stand-up training techniques and is skilled at needs assessment, curriculum design, and evaluation.
Past clients include various departments of Minnesota State government, various state and national professional associations, urban and rural health delivery systems, hospitals, nursing homes, and small businesses. He specializes in the development and use of ethical systems in quality, productivity and service delivery and in strategic thinking, planning and decision making.
One of his major focus areas is that of facilitating groups. He is a certified facilitator for The Alternative Board TAB, which is made up of business owners and CEOs in non-competing industries. He operates two groups in the East Metro area of the Twin Cities. He has facilitated several state-wide task forces; private, for-profit, in-house quality improvement teams; non-profit boards and staff work groups; and works with resolution of inter-group conflict.
He has co-authored two training manuals in divergent subjects—one, in statistical process control and the other in interviewing victims of child sexual abuse. He is a co-developer of the Leadership Development Academy, a customized, five-day curriculum to improve quality in leadership.
Karen Ray is president of Karen Ray Associates, a consulting firm that specializes in training and organization development for government, community and non-profit agencies. She holds a master's degree in applied behavioral sciences from Whitworth College, Spokane, WA, with a specialty in organizations and human development.
From 1977 to 1983 Karen was executive director of a literacy-focused agency mandated to collaborate by state and federal funders. Her consulting practice began when she decided to combine this collaborative experience with her training expertise to problem-solve with agencies involved in joint ventures. Collaboration is now the theme of her work with organizations in many states. Karen trains others in collaboration workshops and provides consulting services to ongoing collaborations.
Based on research conducted by the Wilder Foundation and on personal experience, Karen coauthored Collaboration Handbook: Creating, Sustaining and Enjoying the Journey with Michael Winer in 1994. This award-winning book guides nonprofit staff through partnership ventures.
Just released is her new book, The Nimble Collaboration: Fine-Tuning Your Collaboration for Lasting Success. This book has already been nominated for an award from the Association of Non-Profits.
Dale K. Mize president of Advanced Quality Engineering, Inc. has over 14 years of experience consulting and training and 21 years of technical and managerial experience comprised of 4 years in customer service, 7 years in product engineering, and 10 years in manufacturing as a quality engineer, quality manager, corporate director of quality assurance. The majority of his career was spent with the General Electric Lighting Business Group, where he designed products, developed manufacturing processes and designed quality systems for high technology lighting products. During the five years he spent with Wagner Spray Tech Corp., he designed and implemented a comprehensive quality system based upon Total Quality Management principles.
He began implementing SPC in glass forming operations at General Electric in 1976 and has since implemented SPC into a multitude of processes, both manufacturing and service. Since 1988, he has consulted and taught for over ninety companies and has trained over 7500 persons in various quality topics, primarily Statistical Quality Control. For the past nine years, he has been adjunct faculty at The Management Center, University of St. Thomas, where he is also the Program Chair for Six Sigma. He also provides seminars regularly through the South Dakota Technical Institutes and the Iowa Technical Colleges. He is a senior member of the American Society for Quality, a Certified Quality Engineer and Certified Quality Auditor. He has presented papers and workshops on SPC at the Minnesota Quality Conference, at the Second International Applied Statistics in Industry Conference in Wichita, Kansas and the 1995, 1996, 1999, 2000 and 2001 TQM/ISO Symposia sponsored by South Dakota State University. He is co-author of the SPC training workbook, An Ounce of Prevention. He holds an AAS in Electronic Engineering Technology and a BS in Quality Management from the University of Minnesota.
His primary services have been assessing, training, and implementing Total Quality Management, Statistical Process Control and ISO 9000/2000, QS 9000. He also consults in many other areas of quality control such as, quality system design, process capability studies, failure modes and effects analysis, quality function deployment, experimental design, and quality improvement teams.
Mark Komen is president of Kodyne, Inc. whose mission is to help people work together and to help organizations and individuals grow and succeed.
Kodyne, Inc. is a management consulting company focusing on the “people side of work.” Kodyne offers individual development workshops for improving personal effectiveness, leadership, and management skills; team process training and troubleshooting; situational and developmental coaching; organizational culture assessment; and management consulting/facilitation services drawing from founder and president Mark Komen’s 30 years of engineering design, project, and functional management experience in the electronics and manufacturing industries.
Mark has worked in, led, managed, and consulted with self-directed work teams since 1987. In addition, he has presented management development workshops to representatives from various Minnesota state, county, and city agencies, and he has worked with managers and executives in numerous industries to help them understand how their leadership drives their organizations.
Mark is a Certified Facilitator for The Alternative Board-TABÒ, an international organization that provides peer advisory services to business owners to help them achieve their personal and business goals. He is also certified by the Infinite HorizonsÒ Institute as a Strategic Business LeadershipÒ Coach, providing strategic planning services for small-to-midsize businesses.
Mark is presently servicing a contract to assess the current organizational culture of a transnational, private-sector manufacturing company and to establish the parameters of a culture that maximizes the effectiveness of that organization. This multi-phase project ensures employee behavioral alignment with the desired culture via personal development workshops at all levels of the organization and examines the commensurate organizational processes, policies, and practices on a systemic basis to support a move to the desired culture.
Mark holds a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering and Master of Engineering degrees from the University of Kansas in Lawrence, KS and a Master of Arts degree in Organizational Leadership from the College of St. Catherine in St. Paul, MN.
Mark has lectured on the topics of team processes, team-based innovation, leadership, and organizational ethics for such organizations as Michigan Technological University, the University of Minnesota, and the College of St. Catherine, and has presented workshops for the Midwest Electronics Exposition, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, the Printing Industry of Minnesota, and the Minnesota Public Employee Labor Relations Association.
John Pope is a principal in the John Pope Company, a 15-year old management consulting company that provides a wide range of consulting services to small businesses. Areas of expertise include strategic and marketing planning, marketing execution, and human resources. John has extensive experience in business-to-business consumer-packaged products, hard goods, retailing and business start-ups.
His corporate experience includes many Fortune 500 companies in which he has either been an employee or a consultant. John received an MBA from the Stanford Business School (1964) and a BA from William College (1962).
Building on more than twenty-five years in public and proprietary postsecondary education, Dr. Selin leads a collaborative of established consulting professionals concerned with adding value at the intersection of education and business. To business clients, LMG provides needs assessments and strategic planning to ensure alignment of learning resources with business objectives. For education and training organizations, the focus is on assessment of client needs and development of effective learning strategies, including those utilizing e-Learning modes such as CD-ROM and the Internet. Organizational and personnel performance improvement are targeted.
Dr. Selin’s professional experience includes adult education at the levels of freshman through doctoral student. He is currently a member of the doctoral faculty of Walden University, an accredited, distance-learning university. Throughout his career, he has served in senior management positions for planning, management research and information systems, and human resources. As a systems thinker, his professional interests continue to be in organizational development and performance improvement through planning, management, and evaluation systems. To collect information from groups, he conducts focus groups and leads development of survey instrument design, data collection, and analysis.
The LMG network of professional consultants includes engineers and information technologists with senior management experience for technology, business development, marketing, and training. It also includes experienced distance educators, instructional designers, and program evaluators. LMG also enjoys alliances with other consulting firms with expertise in distance education: planning (including business plans and marketing), design, and evaluation.
Larry earned his doctoral degree in Education at the University of Minnesota and has other degrees in Educational Psychology and in Mathematics. His professional associations include the Minnesota High Tech Association (MHTA), American Society for Training and Development (ASTD-SMC), Performance Improvement Network (PIN), and a special interest group of the International Society for Performance Improvement (ISPI). His advisory and volunteer activities primarily concern the needs of immigrant and inner city families. He chairs the board of directors for Family and Youth Advancement Services, Inc., an organization serving Hmong youth and families, and serves on the advisory board for America’s Kids Connect, a group advocating effective use of technology in K-12 education.
PERSONAL EXPERIENCE in corporate America as a marketing director, new product development director and line general manager is the foundation of Jim Ryan's consulting practice. This organizational background and experience enables him to make critical connections for his clients between concept and implementation in the real world of organizational challenges DEPTH of practical experience includes a successful career in corporate America spanning staff and line general management responsibilities of a work center with 300+ employees, 8 branches and full P&L responsibility. That depth is combined with more than 17 years of consulting, training and process facilitation for his own firm, JRA, with a wide range of organizations, including government, health care and not-for-profits of all sizes.
SKILLS include consulting and training around management and leadership, teaming, negotiation and conflict resolution, strategic sales and marketing, communications skills and process facilitation.
INTERACTIVE MULTIMEDIA & DISTANCE LEARNING became part of JRA’s expertise in 1993. JRA Interactive MultiMedia develops and produces customized interactive multimedia learning using programs ranging from highly cost-effective templates to MacroMedia’s Authorware Professional ™, deliverable on CDs or inter/intranet servers. The LearningStream.com is a Net-based system for reinforcing classroom- or net-based training and insuring transfer of learning, and JRA also delivers Knowwware Learning Management Systems and its N*Lightning authoring tools. The system include implementation, training, maintenance and ongoing tech support.
A sample of client organizations includes:
PriceWaterhouseCoopers
ProStaff Flexible Staffing Solutions
Fair-Isaacs - DynaMark
BI Performance Systems
Wells Fargo
Park Nicollet Health Systems
CIGNA Health Care
Jim holds a Bachelor of Science (Social Sciences) degree from Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. and did graduate marketing work at the Bernard Baruch Center at CUNY in New York City.