ERIC LIN

Consulting

Before Eric became a professor, he spent his career as a management consultant, and he still takes on a small number of clients each year. The work has two parts: figuring out what is actually driving a business, and then helping the people inside it change how the work gets done. Strategy on paper is the easy part. Getting a new way of operating to hold on a factory floor, in a sales force, or across a leadership team is where most of the value - and most of the difficulty - lives.

Eric Lin teaching Eric Lin writing on the whiteboard Eric Lin leading a class discussion Eric Lin with students

He spent nine years at McKinsey & Company, focused primarily on operations and performance transformation engagements for industrial clients. He is at home untangling how equipment, people, and processes can be reconfigured to increase throughput. On construction and mining equipment lines he led lean diagnostics that found 30 to 40 percent throughput improvement potential, redesigned bottleneck operations, and - the part that actually mattered - coached shop-floor leaders and facility managers until the daily habits held after the consultants left. Other work took him into pricing strategy, product mix, and corporate strategy across business units and global markets.

Since 2015 he has consulted independently, usually at the executive level, across a deliberately wide range of industries:

  • Media - advised the executive team on corporate and brand strategy and on a performance transformation.
  • Engineering and construction - diagnosed what drove performance across geography, team background, and project type, so the firm could see which of its own choices were paying off.
  • Healthcare - advised leadership on the metrics that actually predict franchisee performance.
  • Retail - worked with the management of one of the largest South American retailers to measure the impact of front-line leaders and identify the behaviors that predicted store results.

The common thread is a way of working, not an industry. Eric starts with the decision the client is trying to make, takes the messy situation apart into named and ordered drivers, and stays honest about what the evidence can and cannot support. Then he helps translate the diagnosis into changes people can actually adopt, building capability along the way.