Lean Enterprise Institute

Kevin Nolan has led GE Appliances through a 15+ year leanshoring transformation across three CEOs and two owners. When asked what changed the company most, he didn't mention cost savings or market share gains. He said: "What changed us is having more of a learning organization. The pride had to leave us. Pride is one of the worst things for creating a learning environment." Think about that for a moment. Most transformation initiatives fail because leaders are invested in being right. We research, we plan, we decide, then we execute our plan. If the plan doesn't work, we defend it or blame implementation. A learning organization works differently. You experiment. You fail. You learn. You adjust. You do it again. And again. GE opened a new water heater facility in Louisville in 2012—their first new plant there since 1957. Fifteen years later, Kevin says: "I still don't think we're anywhere near how good we can be." That's not resignation. That's confidence born from continuous improvement. That's a learning organization. The reshoring wave is here. Companies are moving manufacturing back to the States. Some will succeed. Most will struggle. The difference won't be location or cost. It will be whether leadership has the humility to learn continuously, fail fast, and improve relentlessly. Can your organization let go of being right? Link in comments to watch the full video ⬇️

What does a factory canteen have to do with a lean transformation? More than you’d think. Esquel’s Guilin manufacturing site redesigned their entire dining operation—not just the food, but the workflows, the employee experience, and the skills of the people running the kitchen. The result was 50%+ productivity improvement in kitchen operations, measurable gains in employee health and engagement, and a workforce that went from queuing through lunch to genuinely thriving at work. Well worth a read if you want to understand the meaning of “people-centered” operations. Link in the comments below

A Lean Primer for Leveraging AI Today. Art Smalley Tyson Heaton Sandrine Olivencia Fabrice Bernhard Steve Pereira

Our May Leadership Learning Tour just wrapped in Kentucky — four days at Toyota, GE Appliances, and Summit Polymers with 40+ operations leaders from across North America. What these executives experienced: * Toyota's Georgetown facility, which just received $800 million to prepare for its second US-assembled EV. * GE Appliances' transformation in progress — midstream in a $3 billion manufacturing expansion. * Summit Polymers' heijunka system refined over 30+ years of TPS application. Together, these three companies represent more than $9.5 billion in recent U.S. manufacturing investment. The tour put leaders on the floor to see the management systems behind those headlines — how Toyota tackles hundreds of problems daily through continuous improvement, how GE Appliances reshored production while building capability, and how Summit earned back-to-back GM Supplier of the Year recognition. One participant summed it up: "I've read about lean for years. Seeing how team members own their processes and drive improvement at this scale — that changed my understanding of what's actually possible." Limited spots remain for the November 9–12 cohort. Same companies. Same intensity. Same transformative experience. Josh Howell Allison Diebus, MBA Rachel Regan GE Appliances, a Haier company Summit Polymers Toyota Motor Manufacturing, Kentucky, Inc. Link in comments to apply for our fall cohort ⬇️

Authority doesn't build dimensional control capability. Competence does. The most effective transformations are driven by leaders who are deeply technical, who can simplify complex ideas, and who are willing to work side-by-side with engineers to solve real problems. Leaders who build trust not through authority, but through competence, who show, rather than tell, what good looks like. This matters because dimensional control isn't a set of procedures you can mandate. It's a way of thinking about variation that engineers must internalize and apply to every interface, every assembly path, every design decision. You cannot PowerPoint your way into this capability. You cannot delegate it to a tools team or a training department. The leaders who succeed at building this capability are the ones willing to sit in design reviews and ask the hard questions. How do these parts locate to each other? Where does variation enter the system? What happens when tolerances stack up at this interface? They work through real problems on real programs, demonstrating how to think about variation rather than just describing the process. Engineers follow these leaders not because they have to, but because they see the results. They watch assemblies come together cleanly. They experience launches that don't require heroic firefighting efforts. They solve problems at the design stage instead of discovering them during builds. And once they see it work, they believe. Once they believe, they can't go back. If you're trying to build dimensional control capability in your organization, ask yourself: do you have leaders who can demonstrate this discipline, or do you have leaders who can only describe it? The difference determines whether the transformation takes root or becomes another initiative that fades when attention moves elsewhere. Show, don't tell. Work side-by-side. Build trust through competence. That's how belief systems change. Link in comments below to read more ⬇️

You can't train your way into dimensional control. Most organizations approach new capabilities the same way: buy the software, send people to training, create a checklist, declare success. Then they wonder why nothing changes. Building dimensional control capability requires something harder. It requires organizations to relearn how they design products and processes. Engineers must shift from focusing on individual parts to understanding systems. Senior engineers must rethink long-held assumptions. Teams must recognize that working harder will not improve quality if the underlying approach is flawed. This is uncomfortable work. It challenges the mental models people have relied on for decades. It asks engineers who designed successful products using nominal geometry to accept that a better approach exists. It requires admitting that the problems showing up in manufacturing are actually design problems that could have been prevented upstream. The organizations that succeed at this don't treat dimensional control as another tool in the toolbox. They treat it as a fundamental rethinking of how variation is managed across the entire development process—from concept through production. They invest in deeply technical leaders who can demonstrate what good looks like, not just describe it. And they recognize that belief system change happens through demonstration, not declaration. If your product development process consistently produces dimensional issues that get discovered during builds rather than solved during design, the problem isn't your manufacturing capability. It's your design approach. And fixing it requires changing how you think, not just what tools you use. Link in comments below to read more ⬇️

🎧Listen (or watch) for a powerful perspective on supporting performance without taking ownership away from people with John Shook and Katie Anderson.

Jim Womack pays tribute to Orry Fiume, the exceptional CFO who transformed lean accounting at Wiremold and beyond. Unlike typical financial leaders, Fiume mastered shop floor details and reimagined how companies measure value and competitive advantage. https://hubs.li/Q04hCKgw0

Dimensional control is a foundational engineering discipline that protects critical product attributes by designing for variation from the start. When applied well, it transforms assembly from a firefighting exercise into a predictable, high-quality process that customers notice. GE Appliances, a Haier company Lex Schroeder

What is Lean's real competitive advantage? In his latest piece, Michael Ballé argues that the real power of Lean lies in its ability to turn organizations into learning networks where interaction, engagement, and collaborative problem solving continuously build collective intelligence. The article explores why Toyota’s true breakthrough was not just operational excellence, but the creation of environments where people learn together through kaizen, shared problem solving, and constant interaction. One of the most powerful insights: organizations improve not when individual parts optimize themselves independently, but when the connections between people become smarter. An interesting reflection on what Lean really is beneath the tools. Link to the story in the comments below.