Kimberly Wiefling is a Founding Member and Global Consultant at Silicon Valley Alliances, where she transforms managers into leaders and groups of people into teams. Known for her unique style, Kimberly’s superpower is bringing people with diverse backgrounds and cultures together, connecting them across borders, boundaries, and barriers of every kind, to achieve what seems impossible but which none could achieve alone.
As a serial entrepreneur, long-time consultant, coach, trusted advisor, and valued partner working with global companies, Kimberly has used her expertise with culturally diverse employees in over 100 countries, including the US, Europe, and Asia, and in 50 Japanese companies.
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
- Kimberly Wiefling shares how she was involved in stereotypically male activities and roles
- How Kimberly went from Air Force avionics technician to working in Silicon Valley
- Kimberly’s experience working for startup businesses, the dot-com bust, and where that led
- Kimberly’s work with Japanese companies and doing a lot of coaching, consulting, and leadership programs as a result
- Why building trust and fostering psychological safety is crucial for team building and innovation
- Kimberly describes Silicon Valley Alliances and how it came together
- How going virtual in March 2020 opened up significant opportunities
In this episode…
Do you own a business that needs a transformation, but you’re not sure where to start? Does your company struggle to compete in the global marketplace?
Learning how to turn managers into leaders, construct a solid team, foster innovation, and deal with culturally diverse people can be game-changers. As a worldwide expert consultant and advisor, Kimberly Wiefling has leveraged the power of her experiences to help global businesses conquer what seems almost impossible. With her experience collaborating with culturally diverse groups, Kimberly imparts her knowledge to company leaders so they can tread the business world and effectively scale in the international landscape.
In this episode of the Rising Entrepreneurs Podcast, John Corcoran sits down with Kimberly Wiefling, Founding Member and Global Consultant at Silicon Valley Alliances. Kimberly describes her journey to becoming an expert consultant and how her leadership programs strengthen companies from the inside out. She also talks about her unique interests and coaching style, why she became an Air Force avionics technician, how she ended up working with Japanese companies for 10 years, and what she’s doing now.
Resources mentioned in this episode
- Entrepreneurs’ Organization (EO)
- EO San Francisco
- EO Accelerator
- John Corcoran on LinkedIn
- Rise25
- Kimberly Wiefling on LinkedIn | Website | Books | YouTube
- Wiefling Consulting
- Scrappy Women in Business
- Anthony Wood on LinkedIn
- Roku, Inc.
- Silicon Valley Alliances
- Yuko Shibata on LinkedIn
Sponsor for this episode…
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The relationships you form through podcasting run deep. Jeremy and John became business partners through podcasting. They have even gone on family vacations and attended weddings of guests who have been on the podcast.
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Episode Transcript
Intro 0:02
Welcome to the Rising Entrepreneurs podcast where we feature top founders and entrepreneurs and their journey. Now let’s get started with the show.
John Corcoran 0:12
Alright, welcome everyone. John Corcoran. Here I am the co host of this show. And for those of you who have not listened to any of these podcast episodes before, you can check out our archives we’ve got all kinds of interesting interviews with smart CEOs, founders and entrepreneurs of companies. Check out interviews with the co founders or CEOs of Netflix, Kinkos, YPO, EO, Activision Blizzard lending tree, and many more. And I’m also the co founder Rise 25, where I help connect b2b business owners to their ideal prospects. And we also want to give a big shout out to EO San Francisco, which this episode is brought to you by EO Entrepreneurs Organization is a global peer to peer network of more than 16,000 Plus influential business owners with 200 chapters in 60. Plus countries if you’re a founder or co founder owner, or controlling shareholder of a company generating over a million dollars a year in revenue, and you want to connect with other like minded successful entrepreneurs, eo is really for you. And iOS. San Francisco is the local chapter in the San Francisco Bay area. You can learn more at eonetwork.org/sanfrancisco. All right. My guest here today is Kimberly Wiefling. She is a longtime consultant, coach, advisor, trusted advisor valued partner, she works with companies globally, we’re going to talk about all of the work that she’s done in India, and Japan and in different countries. She likes to say she turns managers into leaders and turns groups into real teams that can get the impossible done. And so I’m really excited to talk with you Kimberly about that. But first, you grew up in rural Pennsylvania family of welders, you say that if you were born a male, you would have been a welder your entire life. But you took the next ticket out of there, which was joining the military, which was your ticket getting out of rural Pennsylvania. But even before that, I want to get to this as a kid you raise money because you wanted to go to a different high school.
Kimberly Wiefling 2:03
I did, I collected junk around the house and the neighborhood and things and I went to the flea market every week and I would sell things at the flea markets. I could get money to go to a special high school Catholic girls school where you had to wear a uniform. Why did I want to go that bad? I don’t remember.
John Corcoran 2:22
And you do you pay for it yourself from all this? Crazy?
Kimberly Wiefling 2:27
Yeah, it’s crazy. And I’m not as crazy as the fact that when I left home, joined the military, I joined the US Air Force so I could get the GI bill because I wanted to get money for college. I got a marksman ribbon because I’m a really good shot. Because I grew up hunting and fishing and BB guns and guns in the backyard. And
John Corcoran 2:45
yeah, so there must have been some stories there. Were a good shot. Were you impressed? Some or were some man got a little embarrassed. There’s got to be some kind of story around. Yeah, that sounds like a scene from a movie really? Actually.
Kimberly Wiefling 3:03
That for a different podcast? Yeah. That’s
John Corcoran 3:06
really cool. So you So you joined the Air Force. And you were actually an avionics technician. So you’re working on the technology that goes into planes,
Kimberly Wiefling 3:17
right? Yeah, he’s working on F four jets, helicopters and cargo planes. And I, you know it sit in the cockpit of the f4 jet and troubleshoot the electronics and then figure out which box to pull out and take back to the job to fix it. And then you know, hope the ejection seat would launch me into the air while I was troubleshooting.
John Corcoran 3:37
Wow. And you said that that actually happened?
Kimberly Wiefling 3:40
Well, someone did that, I think on purpose. But the worst thing that happened on purpose, like, Yeah, I think he wanted to go for a ride. Well, he wanted to kill himself. So he launched himself into the roof of the hangar, so I was real careful not to touch that button or that pull that cord. When I was driving to work one day, I one of the Air Force screamed overhead came to a stop and fell like wily Coyote, four cars ahead of me and blew up. So it wasn’t without risk, even though it was not in a time of war. So now I can always tell people hey, I’ve served my country. Have you ever had a plane almost fall on you?
John Corcoran 4:16
Yeah, well, you’re dealing with incredibly heavy, heavy machinery. You’re dealing with explosives, all that kind of stuff. combustible materials for
Kimberly Wiefling 4:24
jet has a glide ratio of zero. I mean, I’m a physicist by education. And that just means when it stops, it drops.
John Corcoran 4:30
Wow. Wow, nuts. So you ended up going and you get a job, actually, after that working for Hewlett Packard. So this is the beginning of you starting to work for Silicon Valley companies.
Kimberly Wiefling 4:42
Well, I was working at Hewlett Packard in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and little did I know at the time, though, I was one of the first two female repair men. That’s what they called me, you know, women repair man, and my customers would see I was taking all these tools and I’d go and work on mass spectrometers and gas chromatograph liquid Chromatographs and Auto samplers, and they would say, Look, she’s going to use wrenches. And I’m like, oh, yeah, I got a gear puller, too. You want to see it. It’s so exciting.
John Corcoran 5:08
I have to make an observation here because my grandfather, my father and grandfather were in the Air Force. My grandfather, typical stoic pilot personalities, very taciturn type of individual. And a lot of military people are like that. Is there a point where you kind of realize my personality is not really cut out for this kind of the both the the kind of the military type of hierarchy, and also maybe the corporate world too?
Kimberly Wiefling 5:35
Well, you know, you’re talking about your, your relatives were officers. And that’s a very different thing to be an officer in the military. My observation at that time, being an enlisted enlisted people like me, we went in there because we didn’t really feel like we had many options. And for me, if I wanted to go to college, I needed to get the GI Bill. Because back at that time, I was a girl and my dad wasn’t gonna waste money sending a girl to college, right? Because she was just gonna get married and have kids and he was a welder. And he was a blue collar worker. So it wasn’t fair to expect that of him. But officers are different. You know, they get into college education, and they’re much more higher level higher prestige in the military.
John Corcoran 6:14
Well, you certainly excelled. When it came to academics, you end up getting your master’s degree in physics. I
Kimberly Wiefling 6:20
did. I was a scientist. I thought Albert Einstein was the coolest guy ever. I got a bachelor’s degree in chemistry and physics, and then a master’s degree in physics. And I realized, finally, yeah, I don’t want to be in the academic world. So I quit and went to school at Packard. And that’s when they got that really cool job repairing mass spectrometers.
John Corcoran 6:41
And that brings you to Palo Alto and Silicon Valley. Eventually, okay.
Kimberly Wiefling 6:47
Because I was already working in HP. And I would come out to Silicon Valley to take classes on how to repair these very complex, hated devices. And then I made some friends and one of my colleagues was working out here. And then they said, Why don’t you look for a job out here? So I started searching the jobs and I found something in manufacturing, engineering, and boom, I was in California, Silicon Valley with my people. Oh my gosh, I’m not the weirdest person here. Oh,
John Corcoran 7:16
I love that about California. There’s all kinds of different people and you know, you can feel comfortable. And so you and you do end up eventually working for a number of different startups. What was that experience like any of them really particularly memorable? Even if they didn’t last?
Kimberly Wiefling 7:31
Three failed startups. One was the $700 million crater in the ground in South San Jose, called Ken dessins. Another one was replay TV, which is like chemo. Oh, yeah.
[continue to page 2]
John Corcoran 7:44
Well, early. That was one of the early TiVos. Yeah.
Kimberly Wiefling 7:47
Then I went to group fire where we were fired as a group. When the dotcom bust happened. It was a spinoff from Xerox PARC. And that was amazing working with these people, brilliant geniuses from Xerox PARC.
John Corcoran 8:00
And for those who don’t know what Xerox PARC, is, or I think it’s still around, don’t tell people what it is.
Kimberly Wiefling 8:06
Bunch of brilliant think tanks kind of people who were never able to commercialize things. And they had spun out this company. And I am pretty proud to say that we did create something called personalized search. And eventually, after our demise, it was purchased by Google for pennies on the dollar. And I think it did contribute to their personalization. So when you type in Java, it knows whether you mean coffee, or the island or the programming language. So I was part of that,
John Corcoran 8:37
huh? I know I was I was trying to remember about replay TV. I knew I’d heard an interview recently. And I believe correct me if I’m wrong. Anthony Wood was a founder ReplayTV, who now is the founder of Roku?
Kimberly Wiefling 8:52
Yes, he’s wildly successful. Now with roku. I wish I would have joined that company instead.
John Corcoran 8:57
Did you? Do you recall working with him? Or was it a
Kimberly Wiefling 8:59
long course? Oh, my gosh, it was a 2530 person company. When I first started we grew to over 200 Before it was obvious, I was gonna have to leave or be laid off whenever things started going, going running a box. So what do you recall
John Corcoran 9:13
about him individually?
Kimberly Wiefling 9:16
Anthony, what he’s a brilliant genius. And you know, all the downsides of that.
John Corcoran 9:23
People are saying Silicon Valley. Right?
Kimberly Wiefling 9:25
Well, and when I talked, I’ve worked with lots of engineers and you know, look at me, I’m a physicist, but I’m also this kind of human being I’m very expressive and intense. And some of my engineering colleagues have said, I’m really talking to you is like talking to a blowtorch. And I’m like, Well, I don’t complain about you being boring. So I try to be nice and embrace the style diversity, but I have to say that it has been a bit of a challenge adjusting to working with the technical people that they’ve had to work with. Sometimes I I have to slow down. Yeah, be less excited, and then go for a walk with them. So they don’t need to make eye contact with me when we talk.
John Corcoran 10:09
much interesting to take that approach, in order to be able to communicate with people is actually consciously making a decision like that. And which actually leads me to kind of the next step in the journey. So you ended up through a couple opportunities doing a lot of work in Japan. We’re also an interesting culture, right. So that must have an interesting one for you talk a little about what that experience was like how you ended up doing so much coaching consulting work in Japan?
Kimberly Wiefling 10:40
Yeah, I was working almost entirely with Japanese companies for over a decade. And I ended up meeting the Japanese here, they were coming to Silicon Valley back row. 15 years ago, they wanted to learn about Silicon Valley mindset and innovation, because Japan has trouble with innovation because you’re not allowed to take risks, make mistakes or fail. And in Silicon Valley, we call a failure, a prototype right now. So NTT Docomo came over here and you see stuff came over here for the English Language Institute, but they wanted to give them a little taste of Kimberly Wiefling work shock therapy. So I did a couple of hours, one year, the next year, six hours, and I met this amazing person. Yuko Shibata, who Little did I know was an executive at the biggest English language company in all of Japan. And they were looking to expand into offering more kinds of programs like leadership, what I was doing and team effectiveness. So we started working together.
John Corcoran 11:39
Wow. And you had over 100 trips to Japan, and Denmark and pan and all over the world.
Kimberly Wiefling 11:45
Yeah, these companies do business. You know, one of my companies that I work with does business in over 100 countries. Wow. Wow. That was so so here’s the thing I go. Eventually I asked one of my friends who lived in Japan for five years is married to Japanese. I said, Excuse me, but I’m a woman and women aren’t very well accepted in Japanese business. I’m really curious why I’m so wildly successful because I’ve worked with over 50 companies in Japan, including Suntory, Yamaha motors, Daiichi, Sankyo pharma, and you name it. And he said, Oh, Kimberly, you’re not a woman in Japan. You’re not a man. And you’re not a Japanese woman. So you’re kind of an alien. I don’t have a gender there. So I’m of the gender issues of being a woman, physicist and engineer. Ah,
John Corcoran 12:36
interesting. So that as a result, these Japanese executives, business people, listen to what you had to say,
Kimberly Wiefling 12:43
Oh, it’s so funny. Because here are the executives aren’t that interested in knowing how they need to change in Japan, the executives hire me, but they come into the middle level, high potential leaders of the future, they come in and they say, I am Mr. Sakai. I am 62 years old, and I am going to retire and play golf. You must lead this company paint it. But they don’t come to my workshop. No, no, no, no. You know, I tried to get the executives in Japan interested in doing my workshop. And they said, No, Kimberly, it’s too hard. Yeah, so now we have one company working with for 16 years 20 of the seven month programs with 400 graduates, and the whole company 11,000 people is starting to feel the changes, not just from me, but from the graduates and other people coming together to say, we don’t want to be a Japanese company, we want to be a global company, proud of our Japanese heritage, and doing business more and more around the world. Because, as you know, in Japan, the economy is flat population is shrinking. And if you are a company in Japan, and you want to grow your revenues, is not happening inside of Japan, then you got to go outside and hire crazy non Japanese people like me and learn to work with us. And that’s what we do 25 People 10 Different countries in the same room for a day, a week, seven months over a period of time, you know, virtual or in person. And it happens and these people look around and each other and go, Hey, you know what, we have a lot of differences. But we have one thing in common. We care about this company. And we have to solve these problems together. And all the cultural differences dissolve in the face of that.
John Corcoran 14:20
So walk me through if you you go over to Japan, and you have people from all over the globe, in in a conference room, and you want to teach them to be more innovative, to be okay with failure to embrace the prototype approach. And what are the sorts of exercises that you do with them? Or how do you even begin to get them to leave the cultural baggage behind and to embrace that level of innovation?
Kimberly Wiefling 14:49
Oh, so half the people for example, last month I was in Japan, half of the people there were from Japan, the other half were from other countries and they were wrapping up seven months working together and they This was their second week in person together since they had met in Frankfort last September. And here’s what I do when I first meet them, especially for the Japanese. But for everybody, I say, Now, you must make at least three mistakes per day in this workshop, or you fail this program. And they’re like, what? And I’m like, oh, and my assistant will be keeping track, she’s to be writing down. So please tell her when you make mistakes. So you know, so you won’t have to fail the program. And they’re like, hey. And then about an hour or two later, one of the most shout out, Kimberly son, I made a mistake, please write it down. So that’s one of the ways we crack the ice there you
John Corcoran 15:40
have them play Jenga, like, what do you do like in order to
Kimberly Wiefling 15:43
get? So now, John, you know, this is serious. I’m a physicist, and I based what I do on data. Now, the top causes of failure in teams, the number one is they do not build trusting relationships. So the number one thing we got to do is build relationships, build trust, and create psychological safety. So that it is safe to take risks, make mistakes together, learn together and fail forward. And that starts with something as simple as sharing your life journey. And I just love to have them draw your life journey, happiness versus time. And they start to see that, well, you know, everyone’s life journey has ups and downs. And they’re all kind of up into the right, which is the positivity bias, also called hope. And when they start to discover how much they have in common, then they start to like each other. And the other thing that’s so critical to this is, you got to make it fun. When people are having fun and playful, there are 300% more creative. So we do games, we do activities, we make it fun we make we take rubber chickens around we’ll have a bow was I showed them last month, I showed them a video of 10,000 starlings flocking and self organizing, and this emergent behavior of the flock. There’s no CEO bird, there’s no bird or chart, they don’t have bird planning meetings, then I said, I want you to act out and show me what you can learn from this, they can help your company. Every one of the teams that we created like five teams to do this, got these feather boas dressed up like birds were flying around the room, like, it was crazy not to sit there going, oh my gosh, this is a serious company that makes polymers. So we do it’s called enclosed cognition. So we have them, we’re innovation stocks, and we have them dressed, not in black, brown, gray, blue, or white. And we also use what’s called priming. So we will decorate the room with some kinds of things that are more conducive to creativity, and try to encourage them to use some things visually, that can support a different mindset and a different approach. Hmm,
John Corcoran 17:53
that’s great. I want to ask you a couple other things before we run out of time. So you were part of something called Silicon Valley alliances, which I love the story behind this, how it came together, what is Silicon Valley alliances,
Kimberly Wiefling 18:07
Silicon Valley alliances is a bunch of people who all have our own companies, but we love working together so much. We met through working together with my agent long ago, a lot of us, some of us been working together for over a decade. And we all have our own companies. But we don’t want to say to huge companies that are our clients. Oh, yeah, working with weakling consulting, we want to say Silicon Valley alliances, it’s so much more exciting. And then when they work with us, they like to say they’re working with Silicon Valley alliances, but we are an umbrella, over a bunch of small companies, most of them sole proprietorships, or I have a little S corporation. But it does expand greatly our credibility, I would say,
John Corcoran 18:47
such a smart approach. I also want to ask you about now you’re running this company, you, as you said traveled to hundreds of different company countries around the world. March of 2020, happens, the world grinds to a halt. And it’s really interesting to me the way that you reacted to it because I know a lot of people that do speaking and training and did a lot of travel, you know, and they really struggled. But take me back to that period of time of what you did.
Kimberly Wiefling 19:15
Okay, so first thing I did was I started a daily virtual happy hour with my mother and some friends. So every day for over 500 days, we would meet on Zoom, and we would have all kinds of fun things or we would talk about depressing things. Or we would just sit there and have like wear a lampshade on your head day or whatever. And then I also that same week, I started weekly meetings with my consulting collaborators, which is a broader group beyond Silicon Valley alliances, that we called ourselves, possibilities people. And we met every week for 70 weeks to explore what does this prep make possible that would not have been possible otherwise, and we supported each other in pivoting to virtual. We also reached out to our friends in our social circle and said you know Why don’t we have a patio outside, we can do risk manage dinners that we started doing in June dinners at a distance every Friday and Saturday night 200 dinners at our home. And we did musical concerts, we figured out how to help musicians overcome the technical challenges of synchronizing when they had to play from separate places. And then we finally after a period of time, we brought them to our home, outside, they would play outside, we was doing that out to the crowd. And finally, we offered to a couple of our clients, pandemic pricing free. We said in May, April in May of 2020, let us practice our virtual skills on you and the alumni that you have from our programs. And we won’t charge you you just give us feedback and let us practice our virtual skills. Well, a couple of the companies. After two months of that two of the biggest companies came to us and said, Kimberly, we must start paying you and like Okay, sure. And eventually, one by one over the next six to nine months, the various companies stopped saying let’s wait till it’s over. And they started saying what can we do virtually? And thank goodness for my SBA team and my possibilities people. They helped completely virtualized everything we did. There’s only a few exercises we weren’t able to do that we did in person. It was beyond anything I could have imagined.
John Corcoran 21:20
I love the little emojis that you have the physical emojis you’re holding. That’s great. I toss it. Well, I know we’re almost out of time. I want to wrap up with a question I was asked, which is my gratitude question. I’m a big fan of expressing gratitude, especially to those who have helped you along the way. You mentioned the Silicon Valley alliances. It sounds like there’s some really valuable relationships are there who would you call out? Who would you want to know thank and acknowledge.
Kimberly Wiefling 21:46
I want to thank Yuko Shibata. She has transformed my entire life when I met her back in 2007. I never dreamed that that would result in me working in over 50 Different companies in Japan and traveling so many places all over the world and making a great deal of money by the way. Yuko Shibata, my most amazing executive ever an executive woman in Japan, a country that is has the lowest percentage of women in the executive roles. I will always consider her my Japanese sister and my greatest mentor.
John Corcoran 22:20
That’s great. Where can people go to learn more about you Kimberly?
Kimberly Wiefling 22:24
I’ve got Wiefling Consulting, I’ve got wiefling.com, I’ve got kimberly.com, we I’ve got Silicon Valley Alliances, or just call the police don’t know where I am. I’m just Yes, please do check out but if you Google for Kimberly Weasley, I’m the only one on planet earth I was told there is a limit one to a planet. So there’s only one of me and you’ll find me and you’ll be able to find my email address my phone number reach out. I’d be very happy to have a conversation for possibilities and explore. What does this make?
John Corcoran 22:55
Kimberly, thank you so much for your time.
Kimberly Wiefling 22:57
Thank you, John. It’s a pleasure.
Outro 22:59
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