LEAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE - Key Persons

Adrienne C. Trimble

Job Titles:

Leader
Member of the Board of Directors
Vice President and Chief Diversity Officer / Sysco Corporation

Adrienne is a known thought leader for advancing corporate diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives and is a corporate visionary, strategist, and collaborator. Before joining Sysco, she served as president and CEO of the National Minority Supplier Development Council (NMSDC) and general manager of DEI at Toyota North America. At NMSDC, Adrienne initiated several technology innovations within its network, including a custom-designed online community, NMSDC Connections, exclusively for its stakeholders. She also led efforts to expand economic engagement and ownership in the Asian, Black, Hispanic, and Native American communities, testifying, in spring 2019, before the subcommittee on Diversity and Inclusion, affiliated with the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Financial Services. In her role at Toyota, Adrienne worked closely with the company's senior leadership team in developing advocacy and accountability measures to integrate DEI processes across the organization's business operations. She also worked closely with the company's external Diversity Advisory Board, chaired by the Honorable Alexis Herman, former United States Secretary of Labor, which helped the company's rise on the Diversity Inc Top 50 list from #42 to #25 in two years. Her work firmly solidified the company's recognition by third-party advocacy organizations such as Black Enterprise Best Companies for Diversity, the Hispanic Association on Corporate Responsibility, and the United Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. Additionally, in recognition of her efforts to advance economic development for diverse suppliers, The Rev. Jesse Jackson, founder and CEO of Rainbow PUSH, presented Adrienne with their Corporate Leader Award and Women in Leadership Award. A graduate of Wilberforce University, Adrienne holds a Bachelor of Science in Organization Management. She resides in McKinney, Texas, with her husband, Jamiel.

Cesar Gon

Job Titles:

Engineer
Member of the Board of Directors
Cofounder & CEO, CI & T

As CEO of CI&T, Gon has been at the forefront of the trend to combine lean thinking (from the Toyota world) with agile and scrum (from the information technology world), which the company calls digital lean. He and his coauthors describe their journey bringing these two approaches together, where lean management is used to manage agile teams, in the book Faster, Faster: The Dawn of Lean Digital. Today, with 5,000+ professionals and operations across North America, Latin America, Europe, and the Asia-Pacific region, CI&T counts some of the world's biggest brands as clients. An entrepreneur in the tech/digital space since the age of 13, when, having taught himself computer programming by the time he was 11, he sold the code of a chess game to a technology magazine. When he was 23, he founded CI&T, a pioneering digital service company to help large enterprises make shifts at scale, connecting business outcomes with technology solutions. Under his leadership, CI&T - short for collaborate, innovate, and transform - achieved 26 years of consecutive growth and global expansion and became the first Brazilian-based company to go public on the New York Stock Exchange in 2021. Gon is a computer engineer by education, holding a master's degree in computer science from the State University of Campinas. He is also an active investor in venture funds and start-ups. In 2019, the global professional services network EY Named Gon Brazil's Entrepreneur™ of the Year. He has three children, loves tech, lean, wines, cigars, and football.

Fabrice Bernhard - CTO

Job Titles:

CTO
Co - Founder of Theodo Group

James (Jim) Womack - Founder

Job Titles:

Founder
Member of the Board of Directors
Senior Advisor

James P. Womack

Job Titles:

Scholarship and Philanthropy

Our education systems rarely teach lean thinking and practice. To close these gaps in learning, LEI established the James P. Womack Scholarship & Philanthropy Fund (JPW Fund). The JPW Fund supports LEI's mission by funding creative learning experiences in partnership with schools teaching lean thinking and community-based service organizations willing to provide gemba-based learning and improvement opportunities.