Dr. Jeffrey K. Liker is Professor Emeritus of Industrial and Operations Engineering at the University of Michigan and President of Liker Lean Advisors. He is author of the international best-seller, The Toyota Way: 14 Management Principles from the World’s Greatest Manufacturer, 2004 (26 languages, over 1 million copies sold), and has coauthored nine other books about Toyota including The Toyota Way to Service Excellence (2016), Designing the Future (2018), and The Toyota Way to Lean Leadership. His articles and books have won thirteen Shingo Prizes for Research Excellence. Recently he has collaborated with Mike Rother to study and write about Toyota Kata. In 2012 he was inducted into the Association of Manufacturing Excellence Hall of Fame and in 2016 inducted into the Shingo Academy. He plays golf, watches football and basketball, and resumed learning classical guitar after a thirty year break. His wife Deb and daughter Emma support his writing and his son Jesse is his toughest critic and best editor.

Jim Morgan, Ph.D. is President of EMC Network, a research and consulting firm specializing in new product and process creation (https://designingthefuture.net/). He is also Senior Advisor to the Lean Enterprise Institute for their lean product and process development initiative (https://www.lean.org/). In these roles Jim has helped senior leaders from a wide variety of industries to improve their organizations development performance. Dr. Morgan’s expertise comes from a rare combination of deep industry experience and rigorous scholarship.

His most recent industry experience was serving as Chief Operating Officer at Rivian, an electric vehicle manufacturer that he helped lead through a critical transition period (https://rivian.com/). Prior to Rivian, Jim spent ten years at Ford Motor Company, first leading the development of Ford’s Global Product Development System (GPDS) then serving for eight and a half years as their Global Director of Body and SBU Engineering during Ford’s historic, product led revitalization under then CEO, Alan Mulally. Prior to Ford, Jim worked at Troy Design and Manufacturing (TDM) for 15 years as Vice President of Operations. TDM is a tier one, global automotive supplier of engineering services, prototypes tools and low volume parts and subassemblies.

Jim holds a Ph.D. in Engineering from the University of Michigan where his original research into Product Development won two Shingo Prizes for Research Excellence. In addition he co-authored (with Professor Jeffrey Liker) the award-winning book The Toyota Product Development System (2006) and Designing the Future (2018). He has also authored or co-authored several book chapters on product development, as well as related articles for the Sloan Management Review, The Engineering Management Journal and other publications.