Great example of Lean Leadership – Rockwell Collins CEO Clay Jones in 2006

In 1999, I joined Rockwell Collins (Collins Aerospace). After a few months, I realized we needed to deploy more Six Sigma methods. But there was this Lean program I kept hearing about that was started a few years earlier that I didn’t know very much about.

The CEO at the time was Clay Jones, and he was a strong advocate for Lean. He was CEO one month before I started, and retired in 2013, when the baton was passed to the current CEO of Boeing, Kelly Ortberg. After seeing the rise of the program for 14 years, I was worried that the Lean program would fall apart, since it was primarily Clay’s initiative (it started 1-2 years before he became CEO).

But fortunately it held up and continued to thrive, and is still going strong over 25 years later through many mergers and acquisitions.

I now realize how lucky I was to work for a company that had CEO support for process improvement. But it wasn’t always perfect, and we had our challenges, but when we got too far off track, he helped us get back on track. He talked about Lean in EVERY speech he gave, and I think it was key to the success Rockwell Collins had during that time.

I found a speech given by Clay back in 2006 to the Lean Aerospace Initiative (LAI) (click link for full speech without my comments), which was about 9 years into the Lean journey, and 7 years into his role as CEO.

I split the speech into 6 parts for the Lean Six Sigma Bursts podcast, and after each segment, I share my thoughts and personal experience as an employee and Lean practitioner during that time. Hope you enjoy, and share this video with your leadership team!