Dan Quayle will be one of the keynote speakers for the annual Quality and Productivity Seminar, Nov. 16 and 17 at Utah State University.
The former vice president, who is chairman of the Competitiveness Center of the Hudson Institute, will speak Thursday, Nov. 17, at 12:30 p.m. in the Kent Concert Hall on the USU campus. His talk about competitiveness in the global market is also part of USU's Convocations Series and is open to the public.Sharing keynote speaker status with Quayle are author Elizabeth Pinchot; Kosaku Yoshida, professor of management at California State University and consultant with Deming Management Alliance; Carolyn Corbin, executive director of the Center for the 21st Century; Verl Topham, vice president and general counsel of PacifiCorp; Marlon Berrett, vice president of Franklin Quest and president of Medical Information Technologies; and Willis Willoughby, director of product integrity in the office of the assistant secretary of the Navy.
Pinchot will talk about taking an organization from a slow-moving bureaucracy to organizational intelligence. She opens the seminar at 8 a.m. Wednesday, Nov. 16. Yoshida follows at 9:15 a.m. He will examine laissez-faire capitalism and re-evaluate the value of cooperation to produce new economic principles.
Corbin speaks at 10:30 a.m. and addresses the massive corporate changes of the past decade and why she thinks they are a dress rehearsal for organization restructuring to come. Topham closes the first day of the seminar at 3:30 p.m., talking about customer service and supplier partnerships.
Berrett will preview the concepts of a new book he is cowriting about the work philosophy needed to compete in the changing work environment. He speaks Thursday at 2 p.m.
Willoughby closes the seminar with a talk at 3:15 p.m. Thursday. He will share his perspective on the growing concern with unemployment.
Concurrent sessions will fill the remainder of the two-day seminar. Executives from such companies as Litton, Marriott, Boise Cascade, John Deere, Novell and Albertsons will address a variety of quality and competiveness subjects.
The concurrent sessions will be Nov. 16 at 1 p.m. and again at 2:15. On Nov. 17, the concurrent sessions will be at 8:30 a.m. and 9:45 a.m.
The seminar is presented by the Partners in Business program in USU's College of Business. Co-sponsorship comes from the Utah Manufacturers Association, the Salt Lake and USU chapters of the American Productivity and Inventory Control Society, the Golden Spike and Salt Lake chapters of the American Society for Quality Control, the Salt Lake chapter of the American Society for Training and Development, and the Idaho Total Quality Institute.
Additional information on this seminar is available at (801) 797-2279 or (800) 472-9965.