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Better outcomes. Stronger teams. Starting sooner than you think.

LEI coaches bring 300+ years of hands-on experience and deep roots in the Toyota Production System to help your organization deliver results — and build the people who keep delivering them.
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SOUND FAMILIAR?
Your strategy is clear. Execution is inconsistent across the organization.
Operational improvements get launched. Then the old patterns quietly return.

Your business is growing, but you're not sure how to scale output without simply adding headcount.

Product development takes too long or misses what customers actually need.
You've brought in consultants. The recommendations sit on a shelf.

Constant performance pressure starves people development undermining innovation, leadership, and growth.

WHAT MAKES LEI DIFFERENT

Coached by leaders who have done it. Not consultants who have studied it.

LEI coaches have held P&L responsibility, led operations and product development from the inside, and worked directly within Toyota and Toyota-affiliated organizations. Your leaders are being challenged by someone who has navigated the same pressures they're facing now.

Founded in 1997 by James P. Womack, the management expert who coined "lean thinking," LEI has spent nearly three decades working hands-on with more than 200 organizations across manufacturing, construction, healthcare, food service, technology, and government.

We work alongside your team on real challenges until your people have the capability to keep improving without us. That's how performance change becomes permanent.

Principles, not playbooks

Every engagement starts with your specific situation, challenges, and goals. We don't prescribe a template and then fit you into it.

Real problems, not classroom exercises

Learning happens on live business challenges, on the floor, in the office, or in the product development process, with measurable results from the start.

Your team owns the work

LEI coaches guide problem-solving. Your people run the experiments, own the outcomes, and build the muscle to lead improvement themselves.

Capability that outlasts the engagement

We develop problem-solving coaches at every level of your organization so improvements compound long after we exit.

WHERE WE FOCUS

Three areas where leadership teams most often need support

Most engagements begin with one specific challenge in one part of the business. The right starting point is where the business need is real and a leader is ready to work on it directly.

Strategy and Leadership

When problems surface at all, it's often through meetings and reports disconnected from where work actually happens. Leaders carry more initiatives than any team can execute well. Accountability is diffuse. The gap between what strategy says and what the organization does stays wide, and conventional approaches don't close it.

WHAT CHANGES  

Strategy stops living in powerpoint decks and executive retreats and becomes integrated in everyday work.

  • Priorities become fewer and clearer.

  • Leaders spend less time in review meetings and more time developing the people doing the work.

  • Problems get solved where they occur instead of escalated until they become crises.

Operations

Processes designed in silos accumulate waste over time, and that waste becomes invisible to the people working inside them. Teams execute the process they were given, struggle to hit performance targets they can't sustain, and repeat. Less than 10% of activities in a typical operation add direct value to the customer. The rest is overhead your organization has learned to absorb.

 WHAT CHANGES 

Waste that was invisible becomes obvious, and the people closest to the work develop the skills to eliminate it — without waiting for direction from above. 

  • Defect rates drop.

  • On-time delivery improves.

  • Your team stops firefighting and starts improving. 

Products and Process Development

Products launch late, over budget, or miss market expectations. Engineering and manufacturing operate in silos. Innovation cycles are slow and expensive, and knowledge from one program rarely carries forward to the next.

WHAT CHANGES 

  • Products reach market faster.

  • Development costs come down.

  • Engineering and manufacturing stop working against each other. 

  • What your team learns on one program carries forward to the next — so every cycle gets faster and less expensive than the one before. 
HOW WE WORK TOGETHER

Three stages to get started

We don't lead with a proposal. We start by understanding your situation, then design an engagement that fits.

Define a Meaningful Business Challenge

We start with questions, not solutions:

  • What business challenge are you trying to solve?
  • What in the work is preventing you from meeting your goals?
  • What capabilities do your people need to develop?
  • What does success look like, and who needs to be involved?

We provide introductory training as needed so everyone starts from shared context.

Understand What's Actually Happening

We go to the gemba to observe, ask questions, and understand current reality. Then we facilitate a structured conversation with your leadership team about what's working, what's contributing to the gaps, and what a better future state looks like.

Gemba: the place where value-creating work actually happens, whether that's the factory floor, job site, or design lab.

Design Experiments and Build Capability

Together, we build an actionable plan to close the gap between where you are and where you need to be. This is a roadmap for running disciplined experiments, measuring results, and developing your team's problem-solving capability as you go — with LEI Coaches to guiding and coaching you the whole way. Not a report on a shelf.

The key principle: We don't lead with a pre-packaged solution. We start by understanding your situation, then design an approach that fits.
PARTNER RESULTS

Performance outcomes from organizations that have worked with LEI

Across industries, the pattern is consistent: better performance, and the internal capability to sustain it.

GE-appliances
  • Doubled overall business while reshoring US manufacturing
  • Became the #1 appliance company in the US
  • Added 3,500 US manufacturing jobs
  • Grew US supply base by 290%, strengthening supply chain resilience
"The reason we were able to outperform competitors during the Covid-19 crisis was because of the strength of our lean enterprise."  

— Kevin Nolan, CEO, GE Appliances, a Haier Company

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  • Recordable incident rate (RIR) fell from 5.0 to 0.93 in Turner New York
  • Panel installation time cut by 50%; cable installation time by 90%
  • Curtain wall damage reduced by 95% on a major NYC project
"LEI coached us on how to approach problems and solve them permanently. We did not want to be tethered to them for the next 100 years. Through LEI's train-the-trainer method, we learned how to coach others in problem-solving."

— Charlie Whitney, VP & General Manager, Turner Construction

technipFMC

  • Next-generation subsea system: 50% lighter, 33% faster lead time

  • Parts count reduced by 33%

  • Hit cost and development time targets on a complex multi-year program
"We realized the full potential of our product when we redesigned the value stream addressing engineering, manufacturing, supply chain, and services."
 
— Paulo Couto, SVP of Engineering, TechnipFMC
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Restaurant Group

  • Profitability improved by 2.2%
  • Waste reduced by $70,000
  • Kitchen jobs made measurably easier and more consistent for staff
Improvement efforts focused on the kitchen value stream. Small operational changes compounded into significant bottom-line results without compromising food quality or service.



200+ organizations coached across manufacturing, construction, healthcare, food service, technology, and government.
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Companies We've Worked With

GEA
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technipFMC
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gilbarco
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Why results stick: LEI addresses both dimensions of performance — the technical (how work flows, how products are developed, how systems operate) and the human (how leaders coach, how problems get surfaced and solved, how capability spreads). Fixing one without the other is why most improvement efforts eventually unravel.

Common Questions

How long does a typical engagement last?
Focused engagements on a specific challenge typically run 3–6 months. Multi-year Co-Learning Partnerships cover enterprise-scale transformation and build successively deeper capability over time. Scope and duration are determined together based on your situation, not a standard package.
Do we need to know anything about lean before starting?
No. We meet you where you are. The goal is making something better and learning at the same time. If introductory training helps orient your team, we provide it as part of the engagement.
What does LEI charge for engagements?
Investment depends on scope, duration, and the level of coaching required. In our initial conversation, we'll discuss your budget parameters and design an approach that delivers value within those constraints.
Why does LEI refer to the organizations it works with as partners?

Because the relationship is genuinely mutual. Your team brings deep knowledge of your business and its challenges. LEI coaches bring tested principles and experience across industries. Neither is sufficient without the other.

What gets built — the problems solved, the capability developed — comes from both sides working together. We learn from every organization we work with. That's why we call it a Co-Learning Partnership.

How is this different from hiring a consulting firm?
A consulting firm delivers recommendations. LEI develops the people who will implement and sustain them. Our coaches work directly with your leaders, managers, and frontline leaders, building their ability to identify problems, run experiments, and develop their own teams. When the engagement ends, that capability stays. 
Can LEI help with our specific industry or type of challenge?
Yes. We've worked across manufacturing, construction, healthcare, food service, technology, government, and other sectors, and across a wide range of functional areas and problem types. The core principles apply across contexts. What varies is the specific application to your environment.

 

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Tell us about the challenge you're working on. We'll tell you honestly whether LEI can help, and what partnering together might look like.

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