The past 30 years may well be remembered as a dark age of U.S. manufacturing. But where lean production pushed know-how back onto the shop floor, this pushed the shop floor and its know-how out the door altogether. Beyond that were the problems that a Boeing engineer, L. J. Hart-Smith, had foreseen in a prescient white paper that he presented at a 2001 Boeing technical symposium. “Aerospace Executives Finally Rediscover the Shop Floor,” Aviation Week declared on the cover of a recent issue. As for the rest of corporate America, one of the strongest signals may be coming from the company Boeing has striven so hard to emulate: GE.