by Gary Mintchell | Jun 16, 2026 | Business, Leadership, News, Productivity
Given my interests about manufacturing, Lean, strategy, leadership—and dealing with strong bosses with mental health issues—I couldn’t resist reading a promo copy of a book covering all of those. And, recommending it. Go, get the book, study it with your team. It’s that good.
Set up with an appointment by Meta’s Sheryl Sandberg, Jon McNeill met Elon Musk who said to him, “I have a problem with Tesla. I can’t get Model X doors to align.” Two hours later, Jon McNeill and Elon Musk were tackling the problem head-on and soon, Jon would join Elon as President of Global Sales, Marketing, Delivery & Service at Tesla (2015-2018).
McNeill, now CEO of DVx Ventures, who sits on boards at GM and Lululemon, says most companies are about to discover the same bottleneck Tesla hit: not enough skilled workers to execute complex processes. He explores this in his new book, THE ALGORITHM: The Hypergrowth Formula That Transformed Tesla, Lululemon, General Motors, and SpaceX (Portfolio; March 24, 2026). He details both the things he learned from Musk as well as the difficulties of working for someone with mental health issues.
The book is packed with stories showing (not telling) how leaders attack team problem solving with out-of-the-box thinking.
Try this on for size. At Tesla, the body shop required scores of robots and a team of robotics engineers to keep them synchronized. It was expensive, complex, and fragile. Jon’s team questioned whether the entire body shop could be eliminated (almost three football fields of warehouse space). The answer: casting. By reducing the chassis from 300 welded parts to 3 cast parts, Tesla simultaneously cut manufacturing costs 50% AND made the process more resilient (fewer dependencies, fewer failure points) by questioning requirements.
Gathering my thoughts, what more perfect time to publish this review than immediately following the Initial Public Offering of SpaceX (which includes xAI and X-Twitter). The trillion-dollar valuation also propels Elon Musk into the stratosphere of finance making him humanity’s first trillionaire.
Musk takes big risks on audacious goals. Enough pay off big to make up for the failures.
- The Algorithm? The five steps contain similarities to Lean and the Toyota Production System:
- Question requirements: Do we need this level of complexity?
- Delete steps: What can be eliminated before we relocate?
- Simplify: Can we redesign for fewer dependencies and lower skill requirements?
- Accelerate: What’s the constraint in a U.S. context? (Often: specialized labor)
- Automate last: Only after simplification should we consider technology (VERY IMPORTANT STEP TO NOT DO THIS FIRST!).
Here are a couple of relevant notes from the book:
Much of the genius in Musk’s companies comes from the legions of smart people empowered by the Algorithm. They’re chasing stretch goals with free license to question everything and innovate boldly.
The Algorithm features a set of best practices, yet one overarching idea infuses them all: Question the status quo.
by Gary Mintchell | Jun 11, 2026 | Commentary, Leadership
I have appreciated Kevin Meyer’s thinking on Lean, manufacturing, leadership, and life for many years. He recently wrote on his blog:
Bob Sutton posted something on LinkedIn this week that stopped me mid-scroll. He was flagging a Brené Brown interview in the Financial Times, in which she described a troubling shift: leaders feeling a sense of relief and permission from the current political climate to be, as she put it, the assholes they’ve always been. Sutton, who literally wrote the book on this (The No Asshole Rule, 2007), has been tracking the organizational costs of toxic leadership for decades. The fact that he was amplifying Brown’s warning suggests they’re both seeing the same thing.
So am I, and it’s been bothering me.
And also, me. As an aside, Brown’s new podcast conversation with Adam Grant called The Curiosity Shop is my new favorite listen
Meyer points to Brown’s deeper meaning:
Brown’s framing is more precise than it might first appear. She isn’t saying the political climate is creating bad leaders. She’s saying it’s licensing them. Leaders who previously kept their worst instincts in check because social and institutional norms demanded it now feel liberated. The restraints have loosened. That’s a fundamentally different, and more dangerous, problem.
Ah, research from the PhD:
Sutton’s research makes the case against this directly. His concept of the “Total Cost of Assholes” is real and measurable: talented people leave, honest input dries up as psychological safety collapses, decision quality erodes. As he put it, “It takes numerous encounters with positive people to offset the energy and happiness sapped by a single episode with one asshole.” The “but he gets results” rationalization doesn’t survive contact with the longitudinal data.
How many of us have followed leaders from many walks of life who have seemingly build careers on character and morals only to be shown to have been deceived?
I can almost understand, not excuse but understand, a purely transactional leader who drops the character mask when the costs of wearing it exceed the benefits. Cynical, but at least internally consistent. What I cannot get my head around is the behavior of people who have spent careers, sometimes entire lifetimes, building identities around moral and ethical frameworks, often explicitly religious ones, and then abandon those frameworks the moment a convenient “end” appears on the horizon.
Character as relationship, not transaction.
But character works like a relationship, not a transaction. Anyone who has watched someone enter a marriage or a partnership convinced they can change the other person already knows how this ends. You don’t change people by accepting their worst behavior; you ratify it. And you signal to everyone watching that the behavior is acceptable, which is how norms collapse.
The harder path, the one that actually maintains what you claim to believe, is staying true to the principle when the shortcut looks most appealing. Especially then. And the irony is that the shortcut rarely delivers what was promised anyway. The downstream effects of tolerating poor character accumulate quietly at first, then loudly: institutional trust erodes, the culture coarsens, the people who care most either leave or go silent. What looked like a faster route to the goal has created an environment in which the goal is now harder to achieve, not easier, because the foundation it required has been eaten away.
He ends his essay much like I often do on my other blog—making it personal.
So the next time you find yourself excusing a leader’s behavior you would never accept from your own kids, your employees, or your friends, ask what that rationalization is actually costing. Not them. You.
by Gary Mintchell | May 26, 2026 | Education, Leadership
This post from Kevin Meyer brought back my first university days.
I was a naive 17-year-old with no guidance from a very small school when I decided to enroll in the College of Engineering at the University of Cincinnati (a large school—there were almost as many freshman engineers as the population of my village). We all arrived on campus. Then they told us that they would “flunk out” 33% of students the first year and another 33% the second. Only about a third of those freshman would be kept in the school to graduate. Almost everything was graded on a massive curve. We all competed against each other.
No complaints. In the end, I received a degree in a course of study I essentially designed for myself. The combination of math, literature, political science groomed me for a career first in management and later in media.
The ruminations began with Kevin Meyer’s thoughts on the ridiculous notion that Harvard awards too many A’s to its students. Notwithstanding that most students enrolling there are A students from where they are from (probably excepting those who get in on a parent’s coattails).
Bill George is someone I usually agree with. He’s been a consistent voice for principled leadership and organizational culture. So when he posted enthusiastic support on LinkedIn for Harvard’s recent vote to cap undergraduate A grades at 20% of any class, and pointed to HBS’s own 1-2-3 grading system as evidence it “works well.”
Is there a real problem?
I sat with that for a while before concluding he’s wrong on two levels: the problem isn’t diagnosed correctly, and the solution doesn’t follow even if it were.
Is 60% A’s actually a problem?
Does that mean that A’s were too easy, or does it mean that the students are smart and do their work?
More than 60% of undergraduate grades awarded at Harvard in 2025 were A’s, up from 24% in 2005. The faculty subcommittee called that grade inflation and voted to cap A’s at 20% of any class. But is 60% A’s actually a problem, or just a number that feels wrong?
Known unknowns—meaning further study needed.
Consider what we don’t know. Harvard admits around 3% of applicants, selecting for academic ability more aggressively than almost any institution on earth (setting aside legacy admissions and the occasional building named after a donor’s family…). Maybe a significant portion of those students genuinely earn A’s on a well-designed, rigorous exam. Maybe the exam was too easy. Maybe the professor grades generously. Maybe the course material isn’t demanding enough to differentiate outcomes. Maybe some combination of all of the above. The grade distribution alone tells us none of that. It’s a symptom without a diagnosis.
The wrong fix for the wrong problem?
Even granting that something has drifted in Harvard’s grading culture, capping A’s at 20% is the wrong fix. It’s the difference between criterion-referenced and norm-referenced evaluation. Criterion-referenced grading asks whether work meets a defined standard. Norm-referenced grading asks how a student ranks against peers. Harvard’s new policy is purely norm-referenced: if 30% of students in a class produce work that genuinely merits an A, 10% will be graded down anyway, not because their work was deficient but because the math requires a loser.
Gregory Samanez-Larkin, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke, left the sharpest comment in the LinkedIn thread: “1-2-3 works well for what? Honestly curious.” Nobody produced a clean answer, which is telling.
Seems they have a lack of definitions. A vague solution to a vague problem.
The actual fix, harder but correct, is to define what an A requires and hold that line. If course material isn’t rigorous enough to naturally produce a spread of outcomes, that’s the problem to address. Capping the grade doesn’t make the course harder. It just penalizes students for the instructor’s design choices.
Meyer refers back to the disastrous Jack Welch era at GE.
Jack Welch made the same error at massive scale with his “vitality curve,” the 20-70-10 system at GE where the top 20% were rewarded, the middle 70% coached, and the bottom 10% fired annually. Mark Graban of Lean Blog asked the obvious question: if GE had to remove the bottom 10% every year, why did GE keep hiring turkeys?
The vitality curve assumes any workforce naturally distributes along a bell curve, so you might as well act on it. But a well-hired, well-developed team isn’t guaranteed to produce a bottom 10% of underperformers. A great leader who recruits carefully, trains well, and sets clear expectations might build a team where the weakest performer would be a star somewhere else. Forcing the ranking anyway fires people not because they failed a standard but because the math requires someone at the bottom.
The variables that actually explain underperformance are the same ones the curve ignores: unclear job requirements, inadequate training, a talented person in the wrong role, compensation too low to attract strong candidates, or simply a manager who tolerates mediocrity and then blames the team for it. Removing the bottom 10% addresses none of those. It just produces a vacancy and restarts the cycle.
Conclusion.
Both Harvard’s grade cap and Welch’s vitality curve skip the hard diagnostic work in favor of a mechanical fix that feels rigorous. Mandating a distribution is easy. Defining what mastery requires, building courses or jobs demanding enough to test it, and developing the people who fall short — that’s the actual work.
When you force or rig the curve, you don’t raise performance. You just guarantee somebody loses.
by Gary Mintchell | Feb 20, 2026 | Business, Commentary, Leadership
I was intrigued by an item in News Items by John Ellis quoting the Wall Street Journal regarding the continued slide in manufacturing employment in the US and the prolonged slide in manufacturing activity. The first Trump administration elicited promises of moving manufacturing to the US with the building of plants. Little of that actually happened. The Biden administration invested a few billion, but what has that brought. The second Trump administration thought that tariffs would provide the protection from competition to jump start manufacturing.
I pose the idea that it takes more than investment. And protection from competition really just allows local companies leeway to raise prices. What it really takes is better, bolder, visionary leadership to search out customer needs, design products they will buy, and then produce the products.
It takes more than waving a few dollars at the problem.
This podcast is sponsored by Inductive Automation.
You can view on YouTube or download on your favorite podcast client.
by Gary Mintchell | Feb 16, 2026 | Leadership
“What you’re supposed to do when you don’t like a thing is change it. If you can’t change it, change the way you think about it. Don’t complain.” I’ve seen this quote attributed many ways. But it’s a good, Stoic thought.
One of my early bosses taught me—don’t come to me with a complaint or problem statement; come with an observation and proposed solution.
In my turn in leadership, people would occasionally come to me with a “cool idea.” The expectation was that I’d go to work on it. I would respond, “That’s a great idea. Why don’t you grab the reins and lead that project.” Usually they would drop the idea and go away. Suddenly, it was not so “cool.” But a good, forward thinking idea with potential—those would get done. And a new leader born.
Click on the Follow button at the bottom of the page to subscribe to a weekly email update of posts. Click on the mail icon to subscribe to additional email thoughts.
by Gary Mintchell | Dec 1, 2025 | Leadership
I receive few stories about good leadership in manufacturing (or anywhere else, for that matter). I read a business book in the 80s called Proactive Management. The author talked about all the stakeholders in a business—including owners, employees, customers, suppliers, community, etc.
For too long now, business has been under the spell of MBAs who studied Milton Friedman’s school of thought that there is only one stakeholder—shareholders. They said, let’s give executive management shares of stock so that they know what’s important. Unintended (or maybe intended) consequences—short-term thinking, share price manipulation, grifting, get-rich-quick schemes.
This is a story about Jody Chastain, CEO of a pharmaceutical manufacturer based in Columbia, SC. The company produces sterile Blow-Fill-Seal (BFS) technology for critical medications with precision and scale. Under Chastain’s leadership — following his career at Fuji Film — the company has experienced tremendous growth, expanding its technical capabilities while cultivating a culture that invests deeply in people.
This year, Ritedose launched “1000 Hours of Purpose,” a bold initiative granting paid volunteer time for employees to support nonprofits addressing urgent needs such as hunger, housing, and youth support. Partnerships include United Way, Homeless No More, Palmetto Place, and Meals on Wheels. The company’s commitment was recognized with the 2025 Outreach Award from the South Carolina Manufacturers Alliance, underscoring how purpose-driven leadership strengthens both communities and companies.
Chastain wrote on his blog A Season of Gratitude and Purpose: A Thanksgiving Message a couple weeks ago.
As we prepare to celebrate Thanksgiving, I find myself reflecting on what’s been a truly momentous year and the many blessings that have shaped both my personal journey and the growth of our organization. Although I typically don’t put much stock in anniversaries, 2025 does mark 30 years since the company’s founding, so it is a natural moment to look in the rearview mirror to see how far we have come and reflect on what brought us here.
Over the past 3 decades, the company has transformed from a showroom for Blow-Fill-Seal (BFS) manufacturing machinery, to a contract development manufacturing organization (CDMO) specializing in sterile, unit-dose medications, and additionally added capabilities to produce our own generic respiratory and ophthalmic medications for patients in need of affordable options.
It’s remarkable to found a company and be in business 30 years later. Only one company that I was part of the startup (out of seven or so) is still in business—and it is on its third owner. Growth is not everything, but a measure of growth is essential.
To support this transformation, our facilities have grown tenfold: from 50,000 to more than 500,000 square feet, culminating in this year’s grand opening of Ritedose Performance Park and our new distribution and logistics center. But growth isn’t just measured in square footage; it’s measured in lives touched and jobs created. Over that same period, our staff has grown from 11 employees to more than 600—a gain of over 500 jobs that support families across our region and strengthen the local economy.
He lists some surprising factors for growth.
As I look at the factors that have driven this exponential growth, one thing stands out. Ritedose has been built on the generosity, mentorship, and support of countless individuals and organizations across South Carolina. And with that good fortune comes a responsibility to give back to our patients, our people, and our community.
Inspired by my own journey and by Booker T. Washington’s words, “If you want to lift yourself up, lift up someone else,” as CEO, I have sought to infuse that same spirit of generosity into our organizational mission. It is a mindset that serves us well.
At Ritedose, giving back is central to our growth strategy and corporate culture. We believe that blessed organizations should bless others, which is why this year, we launched “1000 Hours of Purpose,” a bold new volunteer initiative that goes beyond traditional corporate philanthropy. Instead of simply encouraging staff to volunteer on their own time, Ritedose is donating 1,000 hours of employee paid volunteer time to support local organizations addressing urgent needs like hunger, housing, and youth support.
Can you list any organizations and people your company (or you personally) have supported?
In partnership with United Way of the Midlands, our teams have supported:
- Homeless No More, a transitional shelter for families
- Home Works of America, which provides critical home repairs for low-income residents
- Palmetto Place, a safe haven for homeless youth
- Transitions, which helps individuals move from homelessness to stable housing
- Sorting donations at Harvest Hope Food Bank
- Delivering meals through Senior Resources’ Meals on Wheels
- Organizing inventory for The Cooperative Ministry
A key characteristic of initiatives such as Lean includes emphasis on people.
But investments in programs like 1000 Hours of Purpose are more than charitable gestures; they’re strategic investments in our people. Helping others fosters connection, deepens engagement, and builds a shared sense of purpose. The result is a culture that retains talent and drives performance.
In my other writing on spiritual development, I try to emphasize ideas such as what Chastain notes, “This season reminds us that gratitude isn’t just a feeling, it’s a practice.”
I’d humbly suggest go and do likewise.
