Sheila R. Poling is a Managing Partner of Pinnacle Partners, Inc. She has over twenty years experience in the quality and productivity industry.

She previously served as Vice President of two recognized consulting/training firms and a book publishing firm. Her management responsibilities have included managing 25 consultants and an administrative staff of 10. Additional responsibilities included product and seminar development, marketing and sales, client interface and customer satisfaction initiatives focused on organization and operations excellence with a focus on leadership and quality.

Some special projects she designed and managed include a custom workshop created for the Dow Chemical Management Team on "Understanding Variation". This included designing the initial workshop, assisting in material development, working with the Dow Project Team to integrate their feedback into the session and materials, and finalizing the material product into book format (the work from this initiative was redesigned to become one of the best-selling management books ... Understanding Variation: The Key to Managing Chaos, by Donald J. Wheeler).

She also designed and marketed an international live teleconference for General Motors produced through the International Institute for Learning. This teleconference offered open registration for executives from any company or industry throughout the world. This included course design, material development, and production assistance of the conference from General Motors Headquarters. There were 50 GM management attendees in the studio as part of the live presentation that was downloaded to over 15 countries with over 30,000 executives from 150 companies viewing the session at over 700 sites. This live presentation was later edited and marketed as a stand-alone video training seminar. In addition, she was instrumental in working with Dr. W. Edwards Deming and his secretary in publishing his autobiography. She also worked with additional authors in the publication of their books and products.

She has co-authored two internationally recognized books ... Customer Focused Quality, a book on customer satisfaction and service, and Building Continual Improvement; SPC for the Service Industry, with Dr. Donald J. Wheeler. She also co-authored several work manuals including "Perfecting Continual Improvement Skills," and "Strategy Driven Six Sigma-A Champion Overview." In addition she has helped to design multiple course offerings focused on leadership training, organizational and operations excellence, Six Sigma, and statistical process control. She has also served as an internal editor for a featured monthly column in Quality magazine.

Sheila has a degree in Business Administration from the University of Tennessee, is a Senior Member of the American Society for Quality, and a member of the American Marketing Association. She has had the privilege to study and work closely with many of the leaders in the management and process improvement industry including Dr. W. Edwards Deming, Peter Scholtes (author of The Team Handbook and The Leader’s Handbook), Bill Scherkenbach, Dr. Donald Wheeler, Dr. Brian Joiner, etc. She is a member of International Who’s Who, Sterling Who’s Who and was named one of the "94 Meeting Planners to Watch in 1994" by ConventionSouth Magazine.

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