James Morgan, PhD

Jim is currently a senior advisor at the Lean Enterprise Institute (LEI) and a board member at Adrian Steel. He has a unique blend of industry leadership experience and rigorous scholarship, which he draws from to support senior leaders and help improve organizational performance in the aerospace, energy technology, heavy equipment, defense and automotive industries.

Prior to joining LEI, he was the Chief Operating Officer at Rivian automotive where he was part of the leadership team that developed the R1S and R1T, renovated the Normal Illinois assembly plant, and built-out Rivian’s technical and leadership teams.

Before working at Rivian, Jim served as Global Director of Body and Stamping Engineering, as well as Tooling Operations, at Ford Motor where he and his team contributed to Ford’s historic, product led, revitalization under then CEO Alan Mulally.

Prior to Ford, he was Vice President of Operations at Troy Design and Manufacturing (TDM) during a period of rapid growth.  TDM is a tier one, global automotive supplier of engineering services, prototype tooling and low to medium volume production parts and subassemblies.

Jim started his industrial career as a journeyman model maker where he designed and machined tools, fabricated, welded and assembled experimental parts and vehicles.

Before entering industry Jim served in the United States Navy onboard the USS Enterprise.

Jim holds a Ph.D. in Engineering from the University of Michigan where his original research into product development won a Shingo Prize for research excellence.  In addition, he co-authored two award winning books, The Toyota Product Development System (2006) and Designing the Future (2018).  He has also authored or co-authored multiple book chapters and articles on product development for publications such as The Cambridge International Handbook of Lean Production, The Routledge Companion to Lean Management, The Sloan Management Review, The Engineering Management Journal and others.