Connecting the Dots

SUZIE BISHOP is Vice President of Product Development at The Center for Leadership Studies, where she has spent over a decade transforming how the Situational Leadership® Model is taught, experienced, and applied by leaders worldwide. She joined CLS in 2012 to help modernize the organization’s marketing and product offerings and has since become one of its most visible and decorated leaders.

Suzie is the architect of the Situational Leadership® Essentials course—the next generation of CLS’s flagship training program—which she designed from the ground up to meet the needs of today’s modern learner through digital, cohort-based, and blended learning. The program has earned CLS consistent placement on Training Industry’s Top 20 Leadership Training Companies list from 2015 through 2026, as well as the 2026 Training Magazine Leadership Development award and Novie award.

Suzie was recognized as one of Elliott Masie’s prestigious ‘30 Under 30’ in the learning and development industry and has received CLS’s internal Situational Leader Award three times—the organization’s highest leadership honor. In 2025, she was named a Silver Stevie Award winner for “Most Resilient Female Leader” and authored a top 10% LinkedIn article in Leader to Leader Journal. She is a Certified Stakeholder-Centered Coach through Marshall Goldsmith’s coaching methodology, a member of MG100, Goldsmith’s elite global coaching community and a Certified Professional in Training Management.

As co-author of this book alongside Sam Shriver, Suzie brings a fresh, practitioner’s lens to a model she has lived, taught, and built her career around—and a passion for bringing it to the next generation of leaders who are just beginning to discover what it can do.

Suzie is a graduate of North Carolina State University (B.S., Communications, 2012) and is based in Raleigh, NC, where she lives with her husband Brandan—a former NFL player—and their two children.

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• CME credit is available for up to 3 years after the stated release date

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Tony Hayes is a global operations executive with more than 30 years of experience driving enterprise transformation, multi-site manufacturing, global supply chain, and operational excellence across Fortune 500 and leading industrial organizations. Throughout his career, Tony has partnered with CEOs and executive leadership teams to improve operational performance, accelerate profitable growth, and build high-performing organizations through disciplined execution and operational excellence.

Recognized for his collaborative and results-oriented leadership style, Tony excels at aligning people, processes, and strategy to achieve sustainable performance improvements. His expertise spans enterprise operations, Lean transformation, manufacturing excellence, supply chain optimization, operational turnarounds, organizational scaling, and leadership development. He is known for building accountable, high-performing teams while creating cultures of continuous improvement that enable organizations to achieve strategic objectives and lasting competitive advantage.

Beyond his executive responsibilities, Tony served as the Chair of the Michigan Lean Consortium and an Executive Advisory Board Member for the Shingo Institute, reflecting his commitment to advancing operational excellence and leadership development. He holds a Master of Business Administration and dual Master of Science degrees in Operations Management and Manufacturing Management from Kettering University, a Bachelor of Science in Construction Management from Michigan State University and has completed executive leadership development through McKinsey's Executive Leadership Program, Michigan Ross Executive Education and Lean Six Sigma Black Belt certification.

Tony believes sustainable operational excellence is achieved by developing exceptional leaders, empowering teams closest to the customer, and fostering cultures of accountability, continuous improvement, and disciplined execution. He is committed to creating lasting value for organizations, employees, customers, and stakeholders through collaborative leadership, operational excellence, and transformational business performance.

• Link to claim CME credit: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/3DXCFW3
• CME credit is available for up to 3 years after the stated release date

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John A. Dues serves as the chief learning officer and chief operating officer at United Schools in Columbus, Ohio. He is an accomplished systems leader and improvement science scholar-practitioner and recently published his first book entitled Win-Win: W. Edwards Deming, the System of Profound Knowledge, and the Science of Improving Schools. Throughout his career he has served on the founding teams of seven school and nonprofit organizations. John has a BA from Miami University, an M.Ed. from the University of Cincinnati, is a Teach For America alumnus, and completed the Improvement Advisor program through the Institute for Healthcare Improvement.

• Link to claim CME credit: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/3DXCFW3
• CME credit is available for up to 3 years after the stated release date

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Cheryl Strauss Einhorn is the creator of the AREA Method, a decision-making system for individuals, companies, and nonprofits to solve complex problems. Cheryl is the founder of the decision-sciences company Decisive, offering leadership training, curriculum, coaching, and professional development services, and is an adjunct professor at Cornell University. She is the author of the award-winning books Problem Solved about personal and professional decision-making and Investing in Financial Research about financial and investment decisions and Problem Solver, about the psychology of decision-making and Problem Solver Profiles. Her newest book is The Human Edge, Smarter Decisions In the Age of AI. For more information, check out Cheryl's TED talk and visit areamethod.com.

• Link to claim CME credit: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/3DXCFW3
• CME credit is available for up to 3 years after the stated release date

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• Scott Mautz is a popular keynote speaker, trainer, and author whose books include the bestselling Leading from the Middle and The Mentally Strong Leader.
• He’s a former Procter & Gamble senior executive who successfully ran several of the company’s largest multi-billion-dollar businesses.
• Scott’s a leading instructor on LinkedIn Learning, where his courses have been taken over three million times.
• He’s a former faculty member of Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business for Executive Education.
• He’s been named a “CEO Thought-leader” by The Chief Executives Guild and a "Top 50 Leadership Innovator" by Inc.com, where his column drew nearly 2 million monthly readers.
• Scott frequently appears in a variety of national media.

Link to claim CME credit: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/3DXCFW3

CME credit is available for up to 3 years after the stated release date

Contact [email protected] if you have any questions about claiming credit.

Elisabeth Swan has spent more than 3 decades helping people figure out what’s wrong with processes—and what to do about it. A Lean Six Sigma Master Black Belt, she has coached and taught thousands of problem solvers, from local nonprofits to Fortune 100 companies, helping them build better systems and stronger problem-solving cultures.

These days, she’s equally interested in what we’re not trained to look for: what’s working, who contributed, and what people are doing that’s worth repeating. Her latest work, The Praise Paradox™, explores how our natural tendency to spot problems can cause us to overlook the contributions that drive both continuous improvement and human performance.

Elisabeth is the award-winning author of Picture Yourself a Leader and co-author of The Problem-Solver’s Toolkit, and co-host of the Just-in-Time Cafe podcast. She teaches Lean at UC San Diego Health and has taught improvement and leadership courses at UC San Diego, UC Davis, and the University of Denver.

Before all that, Elisabeth performed with ImprovBoston—an experience that still shapes how she thinks about curiosity, experimentation, listening, and the importance of building on what other people have to offer.

• Link to claim CME credit: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/3DXCFW3
• CME credit is available for up to 3 years after the stated release date

Contact [email protected] if you have any questions about claiming credit.

John A. Dues serves as the chief learning officer and chief operating officer at United Schools in Columbus, Ohio. He is an accomplished systems leader and improvement science scholar-practitioner and recently published his first book entitled Win-Win: W. Edwards Deming, the System of Profound Knowledge, and the Science of Improving Schools. Throughout his career he has served on the founding teams of seven school and nonprofit organizations. John has a BA from Miami University, an M.Ed. from the University of Cincinnati, is a Teach For America alumnus, and completed the Improvement Advisor program through the Institute for Healthcare Improvement.

• Link to claim CME credit: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/3DXCFW3
• CME credit is available for up to 3 years after the stated release date

Contact [email protected] if you have any questions about claiming credit.

Barry O’Reilly is an entrepreneur, executive advisor, and bestselling author who works with senior leaders to redesign how their organizations perform, make decisions, and innovate at scale.

He is the co-founder of Nobody Studios, a global Top 10 AI venture studio building and launching 100 companies in five years—applying venture-speed experimentation to de-risk new business creation before significant capital is deployed.

Barry is the author of Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale—part of Eric Ries’s Lean Series and recognized by Harvard Business Review as a must-read for CEOs—and Unlearn: Let Go of Past Success to Achieve Extraordinary Results, a repeatable system that enables leaders to surface legacy behaviors, replace outdated assumptions, and build the capabilities required to perform under uncertainty. His latest book, Artificial Organizations, challenges leaders to redesign work, judgment, and productivity in an era defined by human and machine intelligence.

His work is grounded in enterprise transformation and venture-scale execution. He serves as faculty at Singularity University, contributes to The Economist, and advises boards and executive teams of global, high-growth and established organizations.

• Link to claim CME credit: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/3DXCFW3
• CME credit is available for up to 3 years after the stated release date

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Brad Nelson is the author of I Think, Therefore I Know: Scientific Thinking for Unscientific Organizations, co-host of The Agile for Agilists podcast, and organizer of Agile Detroit. Drawing on experience in lean manufacturing, software development, and organizational change, he explores how incentives, feedback, and learning shape organizations and the people within them. He lives in Metro Detroit.

• Link to claim CME credit: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/3DXCFW3
• CME credit is available for up to 3 years after the stated release date

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Dan Pontefract is a renowned leadership strategist, author, and keynote speaker with over two decades of experience in senior executive roles at companies such as SAP, TELUS, and Business Objects. Since then, he has worked with organizations worldwide, including Salesforce, Amgen, Nestlé, Virgin Media O2, Autodesk, BMO, the Government of Canada, Manulife, Nutrien, and BDO, among others.

As an award-winning and best-selling author, Dan has written six books: THE FUTURE OF WORK IS GREY, WORK-LIFE BLOOM, LEAD. CARE. WIN., OPEN TO THINK, THE PURPOSE EFFECT, and FLAT ARMY. His 2024, Work-Life Bloom, is the 2024 Thinkers50 Best New Management Book and the Gold Medal Winner of the Axiom Business Book Awards. He also writes for Forbes and Harvard Business Review.

Dan is a renowned keynote speaker who has presented at four TED events and has delivered over 600 keynotes. He is an adjunct professor at the University of Victoria’s Gustavson School of Business and has received over 25 industry, individual, and book awards.

Dan’s career is interwoven with corporate and academic experience, coupled with an MBA, B.Ed, and multiple industry certifications and awards. Notably, Dan is listed on the Thinkers50 Radar, HR Weekly’s 100 Most Influential People in HR, PeopleHum’s Top 200 Thought Leaders to Follow, and Inc. Magazine’s Top 100 Leadership Speakers.

• Link to claim CME credit: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/3DXCFW3
• CME credit is available for up to 3 years after the stated release date

Contact [email protected] if you have any questions about claiming credit.