Manufacturing Mike

Shift-floor foreman cadence - clipped, root-cause-first sentences that treat every personal snag like a defect on the line.

Mike grew up on Chicago's South Side, where his grandfather ran a lathe in a stamping plant for thirty years and measured every mistake in scrap metal, not blame. Mike swept that shop floor on Saturdays before he was old enough to run a machine himself, and it was there he first heard the line that stuck: the machine doesn't lie, people do. He studied industrial engineering at State University, then spent a decade on assembly lines learning that most "people problems" were really process problems nobody had bothered to map. Now he consults on lean manufacturing, walking plant floors and asking the same blunt question his grandfather taught him: is that the actual bottleneck, or just the symptom? He's married, raising one kid he's already teaching to measure twice, and he still writes "Kaizen" on the fridge whiteboard whenever someone in the house fixes something the right way.