James B. Swartz

Jim’s Strengths

     Jim has 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. In order to do this well, he has dedicated himself to go beyond the fads of the day and to ground what he does in fundamental laws and principles (examples of these laws and principles are given at the website www. seeingdavidinthestone.com).  He has also studied and applied what it takes to develop and sustain aggressive improvement cultures.

     He believes that any organization that is not increasing its value to cost proposition to its customers at a rate of 7% per year will not lead its market. He helps organizations to find and seize high-leverage  opportunities (opportunities that produce the highest gain for the resources required to seize them). He encourages organizations to set a goal of 10% per year increase in their value to cost proposition.      
Consulting Experience
In the past twenty years, he 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. 

    Jim has served eleven of the Fortune 100, plus many medium and small corporations including AC Electronics, Simpson Timber, Granville-Phillips, Hughes Aircraft, General Electric, Kelco Industries, Chemtronics, Motorola, Martin-Marietta Energy Systems, Mason Hanger, Kemet, EG&G, Federal Express, Allied Signal, Bissel Co., US Department of Energy, Garrett Processing,  Sparling, Delco Electronics, Deltronicos, Powertrain Div. of GM, Cadillac Motor, Buick Motor, Anchor Corp., Santa Barbara Research, Endevco Inc., TTI, York Inc., ITT Aerospace, Spraying Systems, Bobrick Inc., Donald Bruce, Golden State, Union Camp, SMIL, Wahl Clipper, ConAir, LeBlanc, RAJones, Columbus Steel SA, Sasol Coal SA, and Landreth Engineering.
The Origins of his Passion and Expertise.
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, Swartz 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 Jim on what could be done when people have the expertise and willingly commit to seemingly impossible objectives.

    For the next ten years, he continued to lead aggressive lean manufacturing initiatives that dramatically improved manufacturing operations. 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.

Training Experience

He has conducted hands-on/interactive workshops on Lean Manufacturing, Fast Time to Market, Overcoming the Obstacles to Lean Implementation, The Lean Office, the Lean Enterprise, and recently Seeing David in the Stone. His training clients include The Presidents Forum, APICS, Productivity Conferences, USDOE, United technologies, Bissel Co., Lectron Products, McDonnell Douglas, Hewlet-Packard, Indiana University, Ernst and Young, Dresser Industries, United Auto Workers, Saginaw Div. GM, Spectralab, Quartz Devices, Argotech, Ideal Standard, Purdue University, University of Wisconsin, University of Nebraska, Arizona State University, and University of Michigan.

      He has delivered over 20 keynote presentations at major conferences around the world. He is sought after as a speaker.

       He is the founder of Cygnus Systems Inc., a computer imaging design and manufacturing operation. He founded Competitive Action in 1987, and is the current chairman. He is the author of the bestseller The Hunters and the Hunted, published by Productivity Press, New York, NY. The book provides a systematic approach to transforming businesses by creating and implementing dramatic, non-linear improvements.

    In the past six years, in addition to his busy consulting schedule, Swartz and his family have researched what was behind the greatest achievements in history. They have found that all the great ones, regardless of their field followed a common Path of high leverage and high meaning strategies to find and seize great opportunities. The Path can be followed by any individual or organization that chooses to reach their maximum potential.  The stories of how great creative leaders like Edison, Smith, Einstein, Curie, Wal-Mart, Michelangelo, GE, Wright, Da Vinci, Gutenberg, Galileo, Nucor, Ford, Gates, Jackson, Sony, Winfrey, and others discovered and followed the Path is in his second book Seeing David in the Stone.
Jim has an MS in Physics as a Bardeen Fellow from the University of Illinois.

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