January 2010 | Gemba Academy

What Are Your Thoughts About Toyota’s Situation?

By Ron Pereira - January 31st, 2010

As regular readers of this blog know, I am not a big “news” reporting guy. In other words, I rarely read a news story and then bang out an article around it since, honestly, this type of writing bores me beyond words. But, unless y

Former Toyota Quality Manager’s Thoughts on Historic Recall

By Jon Miller - January 28th, 2010

This does not seem like the Toyota we know. The latest recall from Toyota related to its faulty accelerator continues to expand. Toyota has stopped sales of eight major models in the U.S. and the jury is still out as to how far this wi

Live Strategy Deployment Video Workshop

By Ron Pereira - January 28th, 2010

I recently facilitated two different Hoshin Kanri (aka Policy Deployment) workshops. Both have been extremely successful and the teams I worked with were able to reflect, align, and energize all at the same time. I plan to write more

Seven Sayings for Successful Continuous Improvement

By Jon Miller - January 27th, 2010

Getting started with continuous improvement is easy but keeping it going is hard. Even though we speak of long-term thinking as one of the central tenets of continuous improvement and kaizen, many of us opt for the short-term actions,

LEI Brings the Healthcare Gemba to You, Virtually

By Jon Miller - January 24th, 2010

Way back in the day when I was traveling all over the country as an interpreter for Japanese consultants I imagined what it would take to remove the non-value added part of this process: the travel. I imagined a the Japanese sensei wal

Review of “Work the System” by Sam Carpenter

By Jon Miller - January 21st, 2010

The title of Sam Carpenter’s Work the System: The Simple Mechanics of Making More and Working Less is deceiving. It sounds like another “4 hour workweek” promise-of-personal-wealth-and-happiness book of the moment. In

Building Lean Awareness Worldwide, and a Geography Lesson

By Jon Miller - January 19th, 2010

Mark Graban shared some visitor statistics from his blog this week, asking his readers to guess which country ranked #2 in readers, after the USA. Curious about this blog, I fired up the Google and found some interesting results. We st

TPS Jargon Check: What is the Meaning of Yosedome?

By Jon Miller - January 18th, 2010

A few months ago Bruno asked, “What is the meaning of yosedome?” Pronounced “yo se dough may” it almost sounds Spanish but it was not a word I had ever heard before and was unable to help Bruno. This week Ian fr

Going Analog

By Ron Pereira - January 18th, 2010

Technology is great, no doubt about it. After all… it’s because of the Internet and computers you’re reading these words. Not so long ago this wouldn’t have been possible. So, let me be clear, I am not a techn

The Dirty Secret of Science

By Jon Miller - January 17th, 2010

There is an interesting article in Wired magazine titled The Neuroscience of Screwing Up. The main lesson from the article is that humans innately ignore inputs that contradict or don’t fit within their world views. As such, we n

Month: January 2010