The Subject:

Designing Your Business for Kingdom Impact

Can a business really be part of God’s redemptive work in the world? Or is the best we can hope for to make a lot of money to give to the church? Or to missions? Or others that are "really doing God’s work?”

We believe that a business that is designed for impact can be a powerful instrument for bettering the world in everything that it does. We also believe that a business leader that sees their business as God’s instrument of positive change in the world is actively engaged in God’s redemptive work every day they go to work. How is your business designed for impact?

In this lunch and learn, we will:

• Help you evaluate and shape the core purpose of your business
• Explore ways that your business can grow its impact by how you are uniquely positioned to:
           ○ Serve your customers
           ○ Create a healthy work culture
           ○ Engage the community
           ○ Impact society and the world

How can the world be different because your business exists? Come join us on August 24th at The Legacy Centre and explore this question with us.

The Expert:

Dr. Bradley Greene is the founder and principal of GridWell, a Knoxville-based consulting group and a co-founder of Ascend. His expertise is in change architecture through organization and business system design. Through more than 20 years of research and consulting, Dr. Greene has developed a robust system for leading innovative, break-through business design with a proprietary process called reDesign. Using this process Dr. Greene has led organizations as diverse as nuclear medicine to a pharmaceutical distributor to an international disaster relief organization through significant organizational change. Whether it was helping a company make a significant pivot into delivering products and services to new markets or building the systems and infrastructure to support high-velocity growth, the reDesignprocess is a proven method for executing change.

After years of deploying change technology at larger companies, Dr. Greene and the GridWell team combined a smaller set of these tools and techniques into a process for small-to-medium businesses, called Business Design Flow. This process serves as the foundational programming for their partners, Ascend, which is a cohort-based program for smaller, seasoned businesses seeking to grow, but who could not afford to hire consulting directly. For GridWell, this partnership allows them to impact companies of all sizes. 

Brad’s core passion is helping companies unleash the latent creativity and innovation that exists within the people of their organizations. Most of his professional work has involved leading major organizational change, combining business process reengineering with cultural transformation and ultimately leading companies to become perpetually innovative organizations. The common thread of Dr. Greene’s professional career is leading these types of initiatives, whether as an internal employee or an outside consultant, in a manner that requires working cross-organizationally, cross-functionally, and with all levels of the organization from the front-lines to the boardroom.

Dr. Greene’s passion for building healthy, high-performance teams in the business world is founded on his athletic career, in which he was privileged to be a part of some very successful teams. Brad was a part of the University of Tennessee (UT) baseball teams that won back-to-back Southeastern Conference Championships and placed third in the 1995 College World Series. Following his career at UT, he went on to graduate school at the university where he completed requirements for his Masters and Doctorate in Industrial Engineering. His specific area of research was in the application of the Toyota Production System principles to types of businesses other than the high-volume automotive business (i.e. low volume aerospace manufacturing).

Upon completion of his studies at UT, Brad went to work with Nissan North America in the Supply Chain Management group, where he was able to experience the application of Japanese principles of business and manufacturing first-hand. It was during this time that Brad got his first taste of leading major organizational change.  He was part of a team that led the complete integration of the accessory business into the mainstream business processes. This included integrating the sales and marketing, product planning, engineering, production control, manufacturing, purchasing, and supply chain functions of the organization. The result of the reengineering was a $25 million increase in year-over-year profits to the accessory business.

In 2004, Brad left Nissan to join On-Time Performance, a Knoxville-based consulting firm that specialized in major business transformation using the principles of the Toyota Production System. In his first year with On-Time Performance, Brad was part of a team that helped to improve the value of CTI Molecular Imaging from $322 million to a market cap of almost $1.7 billion over 3 years. By streamlining the production of PET/CT scanners, integrating the supply chain, and improving the capability of the distribution system, CTI was able to meet its customer demands better than ever before going from 45-day lead time to 4-days. Through the improvement process CTI was able to free up over $25 million in inventory, which was used to make additional strategic acquisitions. Finally, the synergies created between manufacturing and engineering enabled the product development team to dramatically improve their time from concept-to-market to the point where CTI was able to introduce 10 new products per year up from two per year previously. These new products created a strategic advantage in the marketplace, and led to the substantial improvement in stock performance, ultimately leading to the sale of the outstanding shares to Siemens.

During the time he spent with On Time Performance (which became the Center for Business Transformation, where Brad became the CTO and was responsible for developing industry-specific, standard methodology for transformation), Dr. Greene led major organizational improvement in companies in the agricultural equipment, automotive, construction materials, media, and medical equipment industries. Most of these engagements required Brad to be involved in both the strategic direction and tactical execution of the new organization. The projects also helped to hone his ability to work with all levels and functions of an organization.  In addition, each of these engagements resulted in reduced operating costs and new competitive advantages from which the companies could grow.

In 2005, Brad had an experience that totally reshaped and redirected his life, when he worked with Operation Christmas Child, a project of the Samaritan’s Purse. He led a team that streamlined the system for processing the millions of shoeboxes that flow through their national Processing Centers each Christmas. The team was able to improve the flow time per shoebox from 4.5 hours to 1 minute, and the processing time from 250 seconds /box to 51 seconds/box and the necessary warehouse space required to process a shoebox from 6960 to 96 sq. ft. This increased the daily capacity from 25,000-30,000 per day to 50,000-60,000 per day in the Boone, NC facility. The new process also significantly improved volunteer experience by allowing volunteer groups to work in teams and have a greater sense of satisfaction with their work, because they could see the entire process. This experience had a tremendous impact on Brad, because it opened his eyes to see his business talents and gifts can be used for purposes beyond the world of for-profit business.

In July 2008, Brad left his position as CTO of the Center for Business Transformation and started GridWell with an emphasis on balancing his work with for-profit business organizations alongside non-profit, government and social organizations. This dual emphasis forced him to create a more robust design process for organizational and system design.

Dr. Greene resides in Knoxville, TN, and is married to Julie. They have three children, Hannah (16), Jacob (13), and Sarah Katherine (9).

Lunch Provided.