James B. Swartz

Jim began his career as a research physicist in 1960 and in the following 26 years in industry, he managed product design, product assurance, production engineering, and led many major projects. In 1976, Jim became manager of a 200 million dollar electronics manufacturing plant. Faced with intense competition, he and his management team studied and adopted the best manufacturing and engineering practices of the world's leading companies. Working with the manufacturing people, engineers, and the union they achieved 30% improvement in productivity and 18% reduction in manufacturing costs in six months. Many operations originally slated to move to Singapore and Mexico were kept in the US. This impressed upon Jim what could be done when people have the expertise and willingly commit to seemingly impossible objectives.

For ten years after this success, Jim led aggressive lean manufacturing initiatives that produced dramatic results. In 1986, he turned his attention to helping outside companies find and seize new product or market opportunities and to redesign their product development and engineering processes to reduce time to market and improve the productivity of engineering operations.

Jim Swartz has been a leader in both the Value Innovation and Deep Lean movements since the mid 70's. He has led or consulted on hundreds of successful lean projects in 9 countries. His 1994 book The Hunters and the Hunted showed how American manufacturing companies were fighting for survival and turning the tide. By 1998, he realized that to be successful in a global marketplace, organizations must master the science and art of Finding and Seizing Great Opportunities. For that purpose he wrote the book Seeing David in the Stone.

Jim made it his life work to help organizations find opportunities to be great, to mobilize their people to willingly support the opportunities, and to rapidly seize them. He has dedicated himself to go beyond the fads of the day and to ground his practice in fundamental laws and principles. He has also studied and applied what it takes to develop and sustain aggressive improvement cultures.

In the past twenty years, Jim and his team have led or facilitated over 500 successful transformations of manufacturing, engineering and business systems in over 50 corporations. 85% of these projects have resulted in large improvement. He has delivered over 30 keynote presentations at major conferences around the world.

Jim has a MS in Physics as a Bardeen Fellow from the University of Illinois.

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