First, welcome to Walsworth, Jen. Thank you for taking some time to chat with us today. Can you start by sharing how this opportunity with Walsworth came about?

This is a great story about how relationships matter. I met Tiffany, a corporate recruiter that I’ve worked with, a couple of years ago. We discovered we both lived overseas in the same place and time, and both are now in the greater Kansas City area. We found a lot in common and continued to touch base periodically. 

In early summer she reached out to me with what she described as ‘an amazing fit.’ She described Walsworth, the culture, the values, the innovation and the industry to me. She talked about the company, who the organization is, what it represents, how it has conducted itself over the decades. The combination of long-term vision, sound business practices, and steadfast integrity aligned very closely with my own priorities and values.  

My career has been a rich journey across industries and geographies as well as time in consulting and the C-Suite. This stage in the Walsworth journey and the position seems to be an incredible fit and come at the perfect time in my career.

When you started having the conversations with people here, what did they describe to you as your role with the company?

In my conversations, I was struck with the focus in several areas: drive for exceptional customer experience, building a full suite of printing capabilities, continuous improvement and embracing of AI integration potential.  

In joining the leadership and technology team, my role is to build upon the strength that has brought us to this point, cast and mold the vision of the future of Walsworth enabled through the best technology, and be frank and direct about where we are today. To do this, we will honor the past, be excited about the future and honest about the present. I think about enterprise technology as a combination of macro capabilities.

It is core pillars of enterprise technology capabilities that strengthen the ability to deliver again the organizational strategy: Strategic planning & execution, creating exceptional customer & employee experience, delivering operational excellence, driving innovation and managing risk and governance.

My commitment is to create the opportunities for our team to be their best, contribute and grow. 

There’s a lot of changes on the horizon – people, process and technology move together to succeed in those changes; modernizing plant solutions, modernizing customer experience, enabling multi-location planning, supercharging the sales organization and establishing data as a competitive advantage, just to name a few.

I’m inspired by the steps the company has already taken to pivot and embrace AI technology. The suite of potential solutions that AI can bring to the table: it’s not just one thing and it’s definitely not just a shiny object.

You mentioned AI, what specifically have you been doing with AI these last couple years?

Three main things:

1. Helping companies to integrate AI into business and technology strategy in a way that drives value. Helping to answer questions like, ‘what is really possible now’, ‘what do our teams need to understand’, ‘what are the risks and regulations that we need to keep abreast of’, ‘how do we lay out our intention and a roadmap to progress at a pace the company needs’, and ‘how do we keep up to date with the rapid changes with AI in the enterprise landscape’?
2. Helping teams to drive AI adoption at the knowledge worker level. It’s more than just flipping a switch and turning it on. The combination of education, measuring change adoption and incentives form the basics of the program.
3. Elevating the capabilities and interplay of data, security and AI capabilities wholistically for organizations.

I find that curiosity is a critical component in this time. Everyone is a learner, and everyone is a teacher.

Obviously you haven’t had time to do any sort of full assessment yet, but just through initial conversations, have you gotten an idea where Walsworth is with its AI adoption?

Based on our conversations, I think Walsworth is doing some of the key things you want to see a company doing as they go down this journey: establishing a governance and connecting AI principles; organizing an education process. People need to understand what AI is. It’s not a scary thing, but it also needs to be used with wisdom. Put the human in the middle.

You talked about your recent consulting. Can you tell us a little bit about some of your earlier career stops?

Sure. I grew up on a small farm south of Kansas City. My father was a farmer and served in the Army National Guard, and my mom was a mathematics and computer science schoolteacher. As a family, we were grounded both in our local small town and in the broader world. My Dad, with his military responsibilities, traveled all over the world and so this little farm girl was always interested in how the world worked. I didn’t realize it at the time, but our conversations around the family dinner table shaped who I would grow up to become; we solved math problems, looked things up in the encyclopedias and talked about good teams and leadership. 

Once I was old enough, I went off to college and studied international business. I hadn’t ever left the Midwest, and here I am with a degree in international business. I started my career in logistics and supply chain, and that gave me the opportunity to go live and work in Germany.

I loved it because if you’re curious how the world works and you want to understand how materials move around the world, it was the right job. Maybe a little bit geeky, but very fascinating. 

Then I got recruited into process and controls consulting, and I continued to layer into my foundation how businesses work, where you can identify process and control changes. I was recruited to work at Arthur Andersen, and that’s where I merged how businesses work with how systems work. I did a number of manufacturing systems implementations early in my career.

Then you took a bit of a pivot?

This is the mid 90s, and I had a mentor who talked a lot about new technologies. A lot was happening in Silicon Valley, so I made the choice to leave my comfortable Midwest consulting team and moved to Silicon Valley to work for a start-up. That was risky for me because I left everything I knew.

I took a role at LVMH Group DFS, where I really spent the bulk of my career. LVMH Group is luxury brands and retail. There were a number of times when I was like, ‘what’s a farm girl doing here,’ but it was a fairy tale opportunity to travel across Europe and Asia and meet some amazing people. I did that for almost 14 years. Two of my three kids were born in San Francisco, and the other was born in Singapore.

This satisfied my curiosity for how people live and work around the world. It gave me a rich appreciation for all the different perspectives that bring something rich to the workplace.

During this time, we’re flying back and forth overseas, and this nice older lady asked my son Gavin, ‘Where are you from?’ And Gavin says, ‘I’m from the airport.’ That’s when we’re like, ok, we need to move back home.

So, we moved back to the Kansas City area to be close to family. I moved back without a job. My parents still had their farm, and I have extended family here. I took a series of transformation-driven CIO positions for companies including Beauty Brands, a jewelry company, a manufacturing company, as well as retail and wholesale companies.

And then I had a professional friend call me out of the blue and ask if I would like to consult with them. That’s when I moved back into consulting, which I’ve now been doing for about seven years. During that time, I’ve missed the enterprise side of things.

What do you see as your priority for the first 30 days, 60 days, 90 days?

I had a call with Andy (Billett) a few days ago because I wanted to get in my mind what the first 30-60 days should be. And the good news with Walsworth is, everything is good. Rome is not burning, right?

I have taken on roles where it was a crisis situation, and I needed to go in and right the ship in terms of technology. That’s not the case here. So the focus is to travel to all the different locations and really get to know the business operations. Because to me, the best technology serves how the business needs to operate and what the strategy for growth is.

I like to be firmly grounded in how things work. One of my favorite questions to ask is, ‘if you had a magic wand, what would you make happen?’ That question freezes the constraints but lets you know what’s in their thoughts. It creates a space for creativity.

You talked about getting back to this area and making it your permanent home. Is your husband also from the Midwest?

My husband Rick is actually from St. Louis. But when you think about living in Singapore and moving back to the Midwest, St. Louis and Kansas City are kind of the same. We decided on KC and moved his mother here.

Can you tell us a little more about your family?

Willow, our oldest, just graduated from the North Carolina School of the Arts. Willow is incredibly talented, with a degree in design and production, and just recently moved to Oregon. If you can conceptualize something, Willow can manifest it physically, build it, design it.

Gavin is 20 and just finished a year in the engineering program at K-State. He’s now focusing on the more esoteric questions in life and taking a semester to study ethics, psychology, sociology and logic.

And our youngest Sky is a high school senior at Barstow. Debate is life for Sky, who is obsessed with the discover and interplay of law, human behavior and the bigger questions of why.

What do you like to do for fun?

Whenever we can, we hike. We like the outdoors. I have this theory that there are beach people and there are mountain people. We like to be active and seek the mountains and nature. Our family likes to travel together; whether the Ozarks, plains of Kansas, mountains in Colorado or the upper east coast, Yosemite, redwoods, coastal California and Oregan, as well as places further like Cancun, Montreal, Ireland, China, Indonesia and Thailand.

Our family are big game players. We like tabletop games; we like puzzles. 

My husband is a serial entrepreneur. He owns his own business called Fresnel Services, a digital storytelling business. It’s a combination of voice acting, podcast production as well as corporate executive coaching, helping executives with their speaking and digital presence.

He also plays in a band, and two of our kids are in that musical world. 

What do they play?

When I first met Rick, I asked, ‘What do you play?’ And he was like, ‘I’m a musician.’ Kind of like, musicians play all the instruments. We have 8 guitars, 6 bass guitars, more pedals and microphones than I can count. We have several sets of drums, a piano and two keyboards. Anything that could be in any sort of 90s band. Gavin plays the bass guitar and is a jazz musician. Willow is a drummer and vocalist, while Sky is a vocalist. 

You mentioned you grew up on a farm, right? Where was that specifically?

That would be Bates County, Missouri, between Adrian and Drexel, which is just east of Louisburg, Kansas. Growing up, we were a typical family farm.  We raised cattle, hogs, farmed row crops and hay. Now, my father and brother concentrate on beef cattle farming and hay production.

And you still have family there?

Yes, our family farm is outside Louisburg. My dad owns the farm. He has about 150 head of cattle, and they farm hay for the animals. He and my brother kind of co-manage the cattle across three different farms. (My dad) is one of seven, so I have aunts and uncles all across a couple counties down there.

Every Sunday, we go to Miss B’s in Louisburg for breakfast. Once a month we meet for auntie and sister’s lunch. It’s just that kind of family.

You’re new here, so you could probably tell us just about anything as an answer to this question. But what’s an interesting fact about you that most people might not know?

I’m the Financial Chair of the Glenwild Cemetery down near my family farm. It’s the cemetery most of my family has been buried in since the 1800s. My mom was most recently the Financial Chair, and I took it over after her.

When you lived in other countries, what did you miss most from here?

Actually, thunderstorms. (laughs) In Singapore, you get rainforest rain – it will be sunny, then it will be cloudy and then the rain just falls like a shower. But you don’t get that Midwest storm building on the western front kind of thing.

I also missed the kind of birds we have here. When you’re up early in the morning, I call it the morning chorus. When you live in different parts of the world, the birds sound different because you have different mixtures of birds, making the mornings feel different.

Not sure how much of an avid reader you are in your spare time, but do you have a favorite book?

I am a hugely prolific reader. My favorite book at the moment is called West With Giraffes. 

It’s a historical fiction about the first giraffes that were brought to America and were destined for the San Diego Zoo. It tells the story of their trip from the port in New York and traveling by train across America. It’s a great story.

Do you have a favorite movie or TV show?

That’s a hard question to answer. If my husband were here, he’d ask what genre.

From a movie perspective, I’m pretty simple. Every year, we wrap our presents on Christmas Eve. My husband and I have a long-standing tradition where we turn on When Harry Met Sally, put all the presents on the bed and wrap them. Did we get too many or not enough? Did the wrapping take the whole movie? It’s a fun, lighthearted little bit of Christmas there.

Do you have a favorite meal or type of food?

I really like to cook, but I would say that my favorite meal out would be Indian food.

We found this place called Aahaa. It’s in Overland Park and is great. I like South Indian food in particular, and it’s very authentic. And you can’t go wrong with the name Aahaa.

What do you like to cook?

I typically host Thanksgiving. Do you know about spatchcocking turkeys? When you split them and cook them. That’s my new favorite thing to do because it cooks the turkey in like two hours.

This time of year, I like to make soup – any kind of squash soup.

You’ve lived all over, but as far as traveling just for fun, do you have a favorite vacation?

I would say there’s two. We took the kids to Disney in Florida, and it was just the perfect time. They were just the right age. Every moment was spectacular. We had friends who recommended we go in the fall, the weekend before Thanksgiving so it’s not crowded. Our kids were probably 11, 8 and 5; it was good.

Another was a family trip to China. We went on a 12-day tour, and it was really memorable for the kids. We got to see things you only ever see in movies or coffee table books. Being able to walk in really ancient places is pretty spectacular.

If you had a personalized coffee mug, what would it say?

My first would be, “your vibe attracts your tribe.” It reminds me how important it is to be authentic.

Another would be “assume positive intent.” Or you know maybe, “the Chiefs are best” or “Mom rocks.” (laughs)

Do you have a favorite memory or a particular accomplishment from your career that you’re most proud of?

I would say that I am most proud of the fact that members of more than five of my teams have gone on to become CIOs or CTOs in their own right. It’s a fantastic feeling to see them carry on what we created as a team and build their own teams.

My teams from all over the world still reach out to me and ask me to be a reference just because of the relationships created.