Tyson Heaton spent 15 years running operations in manufacturing at JBS, Schreiber Foods, and Greencore, learning lean on the floor before moving into enterprise technology leadership at O.C. Tanner. The frustration he found there became a throughline: organizations that had mastered continuous improvement on the shop floor were treating their technology layer as a black box, a dependency to manage rather than a capability to master. He now leads LEI's LeanTech/AI initiative, working with organizations done accepting that tradeoff -- the work is moving faster than most can keep up with, and he'd rather be part of sharpening that thinking than watching from the side.