Rethink and Discovery
New Ways of Looking at Old Problems-The Program Overview

This "Thought-Leadership Program" is designed to share business and technological views that clarify understandings and stimulate an industry-wide change and transformation process. The plan is to host three sessions of the Rethink and Discovery program each year. Different panels of distinguished academic, business, and industry leaders will lead the sessions. Each will present informative and provocative views to help stimulate and guide the discovery of needed industry changes in education, business, and technology. The Rethink and Discovery program is jointly created and sponsored by the Center for Paper Business and Industry Studies (CPBIS) and the Institute of Paper Science and Technology (IPST).

The Rethink and Discovery program series is intended to foster open and direct public discussions that will ultimately help get at the real roots of the industry's financial problems. As such, these sessions will be designed to make more clear how the paper industry should redefine its core technologies, support services, employee development and training programs, customer relations, and product development and innovative thinking.

Fifteen years ago, the forest products industry comprised 3% of the S&P 500. Today, the entire paper industry is 0.6% of the S&P 500 and declining. According to Jim McNutt, Executive Director of the CPBIS, "Industry leaders are mindful of the issues and the need for fundamental change and transformation of the industry; the problem relates to the old adage of defining the process to fix the bicycle while continuing to ride in the race." The Rethink and Discovery initiative is intended to serve as a process that helps us fix that bicycle while staying in the race.

The first Rethink and Discovery program ("Beyond Today's Papermachine") was web-broadcast from the Paper Summit 2002, held in March 2002, at the Georgia World Congress Center in Atlanta.  Taking a first look at gaps, needs, and barriers in the technology and business management arenas for the paper industry, the first program had some 150 conference attendees, and it attracted interactive participation from 36 other multi-participant locations around the world, including real-time questions and views being submitted to the panelists from Finland , Brazil , England , Spain , Mexico , and the U.S..Katherine Buckman-Davis, Chairman of the Board of Buckman Laboratories Group provided the keynote and Jim McNutt of the CPBIS and Bob Kinstrey of Jacobs Engineering co-hosted the program.

The second "Rethink and Discovery" program (with the Superintendents' Roundtable) was web-broadcast from the Paper Industry Management Association's (PIMA) 83rd Annual International Management Conference held in San Francisco in June 2002.

To download the webcast, please click here: Rethink and Discovery II webcast and allow the CentraOne software to install itself.

Focusing on Division and Mill Level operations management issues, this program included two panel sessions, one with the recent past, current, and incoming PIMA Presidents, and one with Seven Mill Level Management leaders.   Del Raymond, Director, Strategic Energy Alternatives at Weyerhaeuser provided the keynote address at Rethink and Discovery II -- Superintendent's Roundtable. Katherine Buckman-Davis, of Buckman Laboratories served as the program's host.

Further Rethink and Discovery programs are in the planning stages for the months ahead.  The third in the program series is planned for October 2002 during the annual meeting of the North Carolina State University Pulp and Paper Foundation in Raleigh , North Carolina .  The fourth in the series is tentatively planned in conjunction with the PaperCast Finance Conference to be held at IPST in Atlanta in February 2003.  Further information on the forthcoming Rethink and Discovery programs will be posted on the CPBIS web site in the coming weeks.