How Lilly gets manufacturing experts thinking like business leaders.

Experts in their function, strangers to the business

Lilly's manufacturing teams are deeply skilled at what they do. But like most people in technical, non-finance roles, they rarely got to see how their day-to-day decisions showed up in the company's results. During a stretch of intense margin pressure, when analysts kept pressing the company on productivity and cost, that gap became hard to ignore. People were hearing the language of the business — gross margin, productivity, cash flow — without the fluency to act on it.

Financial acumen is business acumen. Leaders really need to understand financials in order to lead effectively.Charlotte, Learning & Development

Lilly didn't want to bolt on a finance course. It wanted its technical experts to think past their own function, to see the whole business and understand why the numbers moved.

Two days running the business

Lilly built its answer into a clear development path: foundational courses, a half-day finance primer, then Capsim's Leadership Accelerator run over two days, with a corporate-sponsored MBA reserved for its top talent. Capsim sits one step below that MBA.

1. Corporate-sponsored MBATop talent
2. Capsim Leadership AcceleratorOne step below
3. Half-day finance primer
4. Foundational courses

Over two days, teams run a company and live with the consequences of every decision. They make decisions across the business and watch the results land, until income statements, cash flow, and the balance sheet stop being abstractions and start being tools. Because Lilly lives in manufacturing and quality, the simulation is tuned to that world, so the business they run feels like their own.

What makes it land is that Lilly's own experts are in the room. Between rounds they step to the whiteboard and tie each concept back to Lilly, helping people find where their own roles show up on an income statement. One longtime expert frames the whole business as a kitchen: the cooks are the employees, the building is the kitchen, the equipment is the utensils, the raw materials are the ingredients. Suddenly everything from depreciation to absorption feels familiar.

A partner, not a vendor

Teaching finance to non-finance people goes wrong fast if it turns into a lecture. It didn't here, and the teams credited the facilitators, who behaved less like a vendor and more like part of the team. They worked the breakout rooms to catch anyone who was stuck, and in Puerto Rico, one ran the session in Spanish so people could relax into it.

Most importantly, they're great partners. Between sessions, they constantly checked in: what can we improve? They were fully invested.Jarlath O'Malley, Associate Vice President, Manufacturing Finance

That partnership is a big part of why Lilly has stayed with Capsim. The program has met them wherever they've needed it, in person and over video, in full cohorts across Ireland, France, and Asia, without losing the energy of the room. Wherever it runs, the experience is the same, so teams in every region come out fluent against the same standard.

The real outcome: leaders who see the whole business

By the end of two days, participants don't just understand the numbers, they think differently. People who once saw only their own corner leave able to read the whole business and weigh quality, productivity, and cost the way a general manager has to, then carry that back into the decisions they own on the plant floor.

Ten years on, Lilly is still running the program, and still building on it. It has become a fixture in how Lilly Manufacturing develops its people, the step ambitious experts take on their way to leading.