Kara joined King County as a Lean Specialist in October, 2015. In her time here Kara has facilitated many process improvement events throughout the County including: Finance and Business Operations Division, Wastewater Treatment Division, the Department of Public Health, and the Assessor’s office. Kara is helping to build a culture where employees are empowered to improve their own processes using Lean principals by eliminating waste that prevents them from meeting their customer’s needs.

Prior to joining King County, Kara spent 18 years at Virginia Mason Medical Center where she helped them become a national Lean leader by using Lean principals to streamline their processes and improve their customer experiences. During this time Kara led over 100 Kaizen events, improved business processes and patient flow, and contributed to improvements in revenue their operations. In 2012 Kara had an opportunity to go to Japan for a Gemba Kaizen tour, where she visited Toyota manufacturing facilities.

Kara is a Seattle native, and she and her husband and three children are avid sports fans, trying to enjoy all that the Pacific Northwest has to offer. 

Before joining the County, Lori was an internal Lean consultant at Group Health for 8 years.

Lori's first exposure to Lean was as a reluctant participant in an improvement workshop. Nine years and more than 100 improvements later she has overcome the skepticism and is excited to help teams at King County discover the power of improving their own work.

Martine joined the Continuous Improvement Team in 2016, and has been with King County in the Department of Community and Human Services since 2003.

She was hooked on Lean from her first Lean event in 2012, and has been learning all she can about it since then (including being in the first cohort of the King County Lean Apprentice Program).

She loves that Lean gives people permission to be creative and the tools to make their jobs more fun.

Gary Kurihara was chosen as King County's Lean Transformational Director in April 2016 to led us on the next phase of our Lean journey.

Gary comes to King County with experience across several industries and, most recently, led a Lean transformation of a major corporation with more than 18,000 employees in the United States. 

A native of Hawaii, Gary and his family are excited to be heading westward again, after spending four years in the Chicago area.

He is deeply committed to the values of King County and is looking forward to driving our continuous improvement culture change through knowledge sharing, vocal advocacy, and visible, hands-on leadership.

The best way to learn Lean and how to do Kaizen is by practical application, and that is how Ben learned it at Genie Industries. He started out on the shop floor building scissor lifts and once he took a Lean class, he was hooked. He learned how to weld, build pneumatic and hydraulic machines, and became an engineer tech after a few years of learning and implementing the things he was taught.

Since he was a kid he wanted to become a teacher, so he shifted gears from doing Kaizen to teaching others about Kaizen by becoming a Lean Leader. During that time he facilitated over 46 week long Kaizen events, trained hundreds of people in Lean principals and led major projects. He even worked on building an automated guided vehicle that drives itself and automatically drops off parts to workstations (no it didn't take over anyone's job, it actually reduced the amount of walking by a couple miles).

In his spare time Ben likes to build things with his son Logan (Legos, models, wood projects, robots), ride around on his motorcycle and try out new beer brewing and food recipes.

Angela joined King County in December, 2015. She came from Washington State where she worked as a project portfolio manager, senior analyst, and consultant to operational process owners throughout the agency.

She led strategic projects that involved the use of advanced process improvement and project management methodologies. Her experience includes successful facilitation of diverse and performance driven project teams from project initiation through project completion.

Angela is excited about working with the King County teams to help level their workload while providing superior service to King County citizens.