Our Team
Katherine Radeka
Chief Executive Officer & Founder
Katherine Radeka is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of the Rapid Learning Cycles Institute. She supports the growing global community of Rapid Learning Cycles Certified® Consultants who are actively using the framework to get their clients' best ideas to market faster.
After her career started as an internal Product Generation Consultant at Hewlett-Packard, she founded Whittier Consulting Group, Inc. in 2005 to help companies developing hardware products become more agile. She has since worked with product development teams on every continent except Antarctica, and in a variety of industries from industrial equipment to medical devices and pharmaceuticals, agribusiness, aerospace, and consumer electronics.
Her current focus is on accelerating the development of sustainable technologies, alternative energy, and helping companies from a variety of industries de-carbonize new and current products. She's the person to call when the world needed your solutions yesterday.
Katherine holds a BA in Chemistry from Reed College and in 2021 was invited to become a Fast Company Executive Board Member. She is a DOE Connector for the American-Made Network, mentoring several startup teams focused on climate solutions.
Katherine has sponsored two TEDx events in the Pacific Northwest. She is also the founder of the Accelerate Net Zero — a platform to support her speaking engagements, podcasts, and other activities dedicated to sustainability and climate mitigation.
Katherine's first book, The Mastery of Innovation, was published in 2012 which won the Shingo Research Award in 2014. In 2015, Katherine published the first edition of The Shortest Distance Between You and Your New Product. Her book High Velocity Innovation was published in Fall 2019 by Career Press. Her most recent book, When Agile Gets Physical, was published on April 6th 2022 and was co-authored with long-time colleague Kathy Iberle.
Kathy Iberle
Non-Resident Senior Advisor
Katherine met Kathy Iberle in 2000, when they were both working for Hewlett Packard's Printer Group. They drove several major programs together before Katherine left HP in 2005 to start Whittier Consulting Group.
They reconnected after Kathy left HP so that Katherine could leverage Kathy's Agile experience. Kathy supported one of the four major programs that led to the development of the Rapid Learning Cycles framework, and said at the time, "If this works — it's a breakthrough!"
Seven years later, hundreds of companies have experienced breakthrough acceleration of time-to-market. Kathy has continued to contribute to the evolution of the framework.
Teri O'Hara
Manager of Education Services
Teri O'Hara manages a team responsible for delivering workshops and courses. She works directly with our team of Rapid Learning Cycles Certified® Instructors to manage our calendar of classes and private trainings.
She is the go-to person for questions about group registrations, course materials and the Learning Management System we use to deliver course content.
Ben Jakel
Marketing Coordinator
Ben Jakel is responsible for our multi-channel marketing strategy, including our email newsletter, social media posts and other channels of communication.
He is the go-to person for questions about how we ensure that our community knows about upcoming workshops and events, or for problems with email newsletter subscriptions.
