Eric Pope

From a satellite phone call to a Shingo Prize

In 2005, Eric was a week into a backcountry trip in the Canadian Rockies when a phone call changed the direction of his career: a promotion into manufacturing operations, a field he had no formal background in. What followed was two engineers with no fixed way of doing things, discovering that a single principle — flow — could turn a struggling product line into the best-performing one in the business.

As Vice President of Operations at US Synthetic (2006–2020), Eric was there from day one — from the very introduction of lean and continuous-improvement thinking to the organization — through the entire transformation, and beyond. Where most leaders join a transformation already underway, Eric has lived the whole arc firsthand: introducing the concepts, building the culture, and everything that followed. He led the growth of a grassroots continuous improvement culture that took employee-driven improvements from about five a year to nearly 75,000, helped the company grow roughly tenfold, and earned the 2011 Shingo Prize for manufacturing excellence — recognition that specifically called out the organization's ability to engage and empower its people.

He went on to lead the ChampionX Way as Vice President (2020–2025), and currently consults on continuous improvement culture for a global enterprise spanning 120,000 employees, four business segments, and more than 100 countries. He founded Culture by Design Partners in 2014 to teach the same methodology to other leaders, so it doesn't take twenty years to learn — and wrote Designing Culture to put that same methodology directly into the hands of any leader, anywhere.

Eric holds an MBA and a BS in Mechanical Engineering from BYU, is a registered U.S. Patent Agent, speaks Japanese, and is a frequent keynote speaker on lean culture transformation — including at the ASSEMBLY Show.