What It Really Takes to Lead a Business Transformation in Industrial Manufacturing

Nashay Naeve built her career on crossing lines others don’t: technical to strategic, local to global, classroom to factory floor.

When the conversation turns to business transformation in industrial manufacturing, the instinct is to reach for the same playbook: cut costs, consolidate suppliers, push digital adoption. Nashay Naeve doesn’t start there. She starts with the team.

Naeve is the President of the Engineered Plastic Components Business Unit at Tsubaki Nakashima, a global precision manufacturer supplying injection-molded components for medical devices and precision spheres for coordinate measuring machines (CMMs). She oversees manufacturing facilities in Europe, the United Kingdom, and the United States, carrying full profit and loss responsibility for a team of more than 100 employees, and is currently guiding the business through a focused phase of growth and operational transformation.

Key Takeaways:

• Engineering fluency matters at the executive level. Naeve’s technical foundation gives her credibility on the floor and in the boardroom.
• Cultural immersion is a competitive edge. Years living and working in China, and completing a graduate degree in Mandarin, shaped how she leads across cultures.
• Transformation in manufacturing is a people problem first. Before changing the business model, she builds the team capable of executing it.
• Women in industrial P&L leadership are still rare. Naeve is deliberate about visibility, knowing it shifts what others see as possible.

A Background Built for Complexity

Naeve grew up in a small town in Iowa. Her father farmed. Her summers involved detasseling corn in the fields, unglamorous, physical, early-morning work. That upbringing gave her something a lot of corporate resumes lack: a baseline comfort with how things actually get made.

She earned a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Iowa State University, supplemented by study-abroad time in Australia, Peru, Costa Rica, Taiwan, and mainland China. Those weren’t just passport stamps, they were an early investment in cross-cultural fluency that would define her career.

Her most demanding academic decision came when she enrolled at Tsinghua University, widely considered the MIT of China, for a Master’s in Automotive Engineering. As the only non-Chinese student in her cohort, she completed every course in Mandarin and defended her thesis in Mandarin. It taught her how to operate under pressure in an environment where the rules, the culture, and the communication norms were not built with her in mind.

She later completed an MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, with a focus on General Management, rounding out a foundation that runs from factory floor to boardroom.

The Career That Built the Leader

Naeve spent seven years at Caterpillar, working across marketing, production engineering, and software support, including time in China during the height of industrialization, when the pace of growth was relentless and the margin for error was thin.

She then moved to DuPont Electronics, where she led large product portfolios in consumer electronics, built new business lines from scratch, and contributed to M&A strategy. After that, she brought that operating experience to Redwood Materials, a startup in sustainable battery material recovery, supporting its growth and scaling initiatives.

Each role added a different dimension, product management, business development, startup scaling, international operations, that now informs how she runs a multi-continent manufacturing business.

Visibility in a Space That Doesn’t Always See You

Naeve is one of relatively few women holding a general management role at this level in industrial manufacturing. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, women represent roughly 30% of the manufacturing workforce overall, but executive and P&L leadership roles remain disproportionately male-dominated, particularly in industrial and precision manufacturing sectors.

She’s direct about why this matters: representation at the leadership level signals what’s possible for others coming up in the industry. That’s why she is intentional about building her public platform and positioning herself as a thought leader in global manufacturing management, not only to advance her own career, but to shift the narrative around who belongs in these roles.

The Bottom Line

Business transformation in industrial manufacturing doesn’t follow a formula. It follows leaders who have the technical depth to understand what they’re changing, the cultural fluency to bring diverse teams along, and the financial discipline to make the numbers work.

Nashay Naeve has spent her career building exactly that combination, from Iowa fields to engineering labs to the executive suite.

A story everyone thinks was built upon luck, but it was built upon strategy.

You can follow her career and insights at linkedin.com/in/nashay.