March 2009 | Page 2 of 3

The Cost of Searching

By Ron Pereira - March 17th, 2009

Studies have shown that the average person can spend around 30 seconds every 5 minutes of their working day searching for something. That’s not too bad… or is it? Consider This Well, if you consider that this is 30 seconds out of a

Accountability for Continuous Improvement

By Jon Miller - March 16th, 2009

Last week a reader by the handle of CILean asked Gemba: I have trouble with staff who appear generally supportive of improvement projects and agree with Senior Management on proposed actions but then fail to implement agreed changes an

It’s Officially On: Gemba Academy Launches

By Ron Pereira - March 15th, 2009

After many, many hours of PDCA (plan, do, check, act) the time has finally arrived for Gemba Academy to officially open its doors for enrollment. Transforming Your Value Streams To get things started we’re offering a course called Tr

Gemba Academy Preview: Calculating Takt Time

By Jon Miller - March 15th, 2009

Gemba Academy opens for enrollment on Monday March 16th, 2009. In the coming months we will offer online training on topics on a wide range of business excellence topics from lean manufacturing, project management, six sigma and other

An Electrically Delicious Lesson on Kaizen

By Jon Miller - March 14th, 2009

What would you do if given a do-or-die mission to create a battery out of simple, non-toxic materials, from a sustainable source, without using specialized equipment, with the added requirements that said battery must prevent scurvy an

The Greatest in the Kingdom

By Ron Pereira - March 12th, 2009

I was recently reading my all time favorite book and came across some comments that caused me to ponder a few of the articles I’ve recently written about being an expert and how many hours it takes to become an expert. Here’

Should Cross-trained Workers be Paid More?

By Jon Miller - March 12th, 2009

“Now that I can perform more tasks, pay me more.” This was the statement that an HR manager was struggling with recently at a company that is in the midst of introducing cross-training for multi-skilled operators as part of

5S Overview Video

By Jon Miller - March 11th, 2009

The launch of our online training service Gemba Academy is just days away. We have been busy at work readying online training courses for lean manufacturing, six sigma, project management and more. We will offer six month subscriptions

An Expert State of Mind

By Ron Pereira - March 10th, 2009

A person going by the name of “ford” left a very interesting comment to my post about it taking 10,000 hours to become an expert at something. Here was the comment: “The moment one gets into the `expert’ state of mind

Kaizen and the Art of Elephant Eating

By Jon Miller - March 10th, 2009

Do you have an elephant that needs to be eaten? If you did, would you know? There is something called the elephant test which comes from the field of law. It is often used for cases in which something “is hard to describe, but in

Month: March 2009