Larry Culp on Resistance to Lean: Compliance Isn’t Belief

In early 2025, Eric Veiel asked Larry Culp a question that most Lean deployment articles skip: when you're getting ready to implement one of these programs, is there some hesitation from the workforce?

Culp didn't argue with the premise.

“Well, I think everybody, once you get to a certain age, right, is not necessarily waking up in the morning looking to change or transform the way they go about work.”

That's a CEO conceding that resistance to Lean is a normal reaction and not a defect in the people who have it. The interview was on The Angle, a T. Rowe Price podcast aimed at investors, recorded in December 2024. Not a Lean audience. Which may be why the answer is plainer than the version you'd hear at a conference.

Expose, Don't Jam

Here's how he described the approach at GE Aerospace:

“We want to expose people to these tools and principles, not to jam it down their throats. All we ask is to keep an open mind, and let's jump in and experiment, right? Let's try. Let's maybe even fail but learn and get better through that process. And that's why respect for people is so important.”

Two things in that answer are worth pulling apart.

The first is the ask itself, which is smaller than most Lean rollouts ask for. Not belief. Not enthusiasm. Not a signed commitment at the kickoff meeting. Keep an open mind and try something.

The second is what he does with respect for people. In a lot of writing, that principle shows up as a value statement — we respect our people — that nobody could really argue with or test. Culp uses it as the reason for a specific choice about deployment method. Because you respect people, you don't jam something down their throats.

That's respect for people doing work in a sentence instead of sitting in a slide deck.

Compliance or Belief

Then the line I keep coming back to:

“Again, if this was a CEO-led initiative that gets jammed at everybody's throats, you might get compliance. You won't get belief. You might have people doing what you've asked, but they won't make it their own.”

I've watched a lot of Lean programs produce compliance and get mistaken for success. The boards get updated. The huddles happen. The A3s get filled in. Somebody can produce a completion percentage for the training. Every visible indicator says the thing is working.

Compliance is also cheap to measure, which is part of the problem. Belief isn't. So organizations track the thing they can count and then wonder why the whole apparatus stops moving the moment the consultant leaves or the champion gets promoted or retires.

What Culp is describing isn't softer than compliance. It's harder. Compliance you can require. Belief has to be earned by what people experience.

“Let's Maybe Even Fail”

The part of that quote most likely to get skipped is the shortest.

“Let's maybe even fail but learn and get better through that process.”

If you ask people to experiment, you have to accept that some experiments won't work. That sounds obvious and it's routinely violated. Plenty of organizations run improvement events where the outcome is decided before anyone starts, because a failed test would embarrass somebody. If you already know exactly what will happen, it's not an experiment. It's an implementation.

Culp puts the permission ahead of the ask, which is the right order. And notice who's saying it. This isn't a coach reassuring a team. It's the chairman and CEO, on an investor podcast, telling a room full of portfolio managers that his operating model includes failing. That's a different kind of cover than a frontline supervisor can give.

Whether people at GE Aerospace experience it that way is a separate question, and the interview can't answer it.

The Monday-to-Friday Arc

Culp described the mechanism as a five-day Kaizen event, and gave the arc:

“people who are reluctant on Monday and still skeptical on Tuesday, begin to have a slightly different mindset on Wednesday. And by Thursday night, Friday morning, they are just on fire in all good ways.”

I've seen that arc happen. I've also seen weeks where Wednesday never comes and a few people stay skeptical straight through, sometimes for good reasons nobody asked them about.

So take the Monday-to-Friday version as the CEO's account of the good weeks. That's the version any of us would reach for. It doesn't tell us how often it goes the other way, and Culp isn't in the room for most of them.

He does something unusual right after, though:

“There's a lot still in front of us, so I don't want to paint a picture that suggests that GE Aerospace is an exemplar with respect to lean.”

A CEO declining to claim exemplar status, on a podcast where nobody would have challenged him, is worth more than the 30% output improvement he cited at the Madisonville, Kentucky plant a minute earlier. That number came with no baseline, no timeframe, and no independent verification, which is normal for an investor interview and a reason to hold it loosely.

What This Means for Anyone Rolling Something Out

If you're introducing Lean, or a management system, or daily huddles, or anything else people didn't ask for, the deployment question is whether you're asking for adoption or asking for a try.

Asking for adoption gets you compliance, and compliance is what you'll be able to measure, which will make the program look fine for about eighteen months.

Asking for a try means some tries won't work, and what you do the first time one doesn't work will teach everybody watching more than the training did.

Culp's version of the ask is about as small as it gets: keep an open mind, jump in, and we might fail. I'd be curious how many Lean rollouts you've been part of where the ask was that modest.