2010 | Gemba Academy

Merry Christmas!

By Ron Pereira - December 24th, 2010

Wishing you all a very Merry Christmas and a Happy and Safe New Year! And if you haven’t already heard it, I’d recommend you check out “Gemba Clause” over at the Lean Blog! Enjoy and God Bless!

Making Things is Not About Making Things

By Jon Miller - December 14th, 2010

What is the purpose of a factory? The obvious answer is that a factory is there for the purpose of making things. We can further inquire into the purpose of making things and come up with various answers that basically boil down to

Vote “YES” for the American Innovator

By Ron Pereira - December 13th, 2010

Paul Akers and Jon Lussier are lean thinking business leaders I admire immensely. For the past year they have brought their energy and enthusiasm for lean and business to the AM radio show called The American Innovator. This show run

Hoshin Kanri: Steel, Needles, Tubes, and Logic

By Ron Pereira - December 6th, 2010

Hoshin Kanri. Have you heard of it? If you’ve been around the lean world you likely have. Well, over the coming weeks I plan to cover the highlights of what hoshin kanri is and how you and your organization might best leverage it. In

Who is Responsible?

By Jon Miller - December 6th, 2010

“Who is responsible?” This is a phrase I used to translate all of the time when walking around with one of my Japanese sensei during a consultation. Other interpreters would use the English phrase “Who’s in char

11 Lean Strategy Insights from the Mind of Art Byrne

By Jon Miller - December 2nd, 2010

Bob Emiliani’s latest book, Real Lean vol. 6 contains both controversial and though-provoking ideas about lean as it relates to politics, economics, education, leadership and management. It’s an easy read but not a light re

7 Ways to Keep Kaizen Going after Years of Progress

By Jon Miller - November 30th, 2010

Many organizations have pursued kaizen for years or even decades now, 25 years after the publication of Masaaki Imai’s classic book Kaizen. Yet many find that after a few years of progress with kaizen it becomes difficult to main

The Four Pillars of Built-In Quality

By Jon Miller - November 28th, 2010

The TPS house is often drawn with a triangular roof, a rectangular foundation and two rectangular columns between the foundation and roof. The space between the columns is filled with one’s choice of the systems, tools and princi

The Soccer Coach

By Ron Pereira - November 23rd, 2010

I recently completed one of the most humbling experiences of my life… I coached my daughter’s U7 soccer team. The main challenge for me was that I never played soccer growing up. As such, I had a lot of learning to do before I coul

Three Types of Standardized Work

By Jon Miller - November 22nd, 2010

One of our readers Harish asked: Recently I have come across different types of standardized work in two or three places during my research. They are Type 1, 2 and 3. Can you please throw some light on this? While the concept was not n

One Man’s Trash

By Jon Miller - November 19th, 2010

…is another person’s treasure, as the saying goes. Lean is about making effective use of all resources we are wasting whether time, money, information, material or the creative capabilities of people. Too much focus is give

How to Drive Fear and Inaction Out of Organizations

By Jon Miller - November 17th, 2010

One of the main reasons that the authors Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton give for inaction in the face of knowledge in their highly useful book The Knowing-Doing Gap is fear. They cite a statistic that one in six people have held bac

Lead with Just the Power of Ideas

By Jon Miller - November 16th, 2010

I watched the movie Inception during a recent flight. It is a film about planting ideas into the minds of businessmen by sneaking into their dreams. This sounds difficult until we consider the film’s viewpoint that all existence,

The Problem With Gurus

By Ron Pereira - November 15th, 2010

Gurus really bother me. These gurus come in many different shapes and sizes. They may think they know all there is about lean, or six sigma, or cooking, or coaching a sports team, or raising a family. You see, gurus are everywhere and

Assessing “Respect for People” on a Gemba Walk

By Jon Miller - November 14th, 2010

In a comment posted to an article about 3 things to check during a gemba walk, lean thinker and author Bob Emiliani commented: For decades the focus of gemba walks has been on operations and evaluating continuous improvement activities

6 Ways to Ensure Fear Doesn’t Win

By Ron Pereira - November 8th, 2010

How motivated are you right now? Very? A little? Not much? The honest answer to this question might explain how happy and fulfilled you feel as a person. Let’s explore why this is. Defined, motivation can be said to be the psychologi

FastCap Lean Tour: "Do Kaizen First" Every Day

By Jon Miller - November 7th, 2010

Here is another great video from innovator and lean leader Paul Akers. In this video members of one of Gemba Consulting USA’s lean tour groups from Bombardier Aerospace share their impressions while visiting FastCap. Bombardier i

Three Things to Check During a Gemba Walk

By Jon Miller - November 5th, 2010

As the teaching and implementation lean becomes more of a business there are an increasing number of 72-point surveys and 40-criteria lean maturity assessments. These certainly have value since an end-to-end customer-focused business l

Effective Visual Controls and the Minimum Noticeable Difference

By Jon Miller - November 2nd, 2010

On a recent trip to a market in southern China it occurred to me that there must be a thriving industry producing red ink in this country. By red ink I mean not financial losses but the literal wet and sanguine stuff that so much of th

The Non-Standard Semantics of Standardization

By Jon Miller - October 31st, 2010

The words standard, standards, and standardization with their associated concepts and meanings cause a lot of trouble for lean thinkers and others whose intentions are to promote continuous improvement without the lean label. A basic p

Six Degrees of Taiichi Ohno

By Jon Miller - October 26th, 2010

I was recently asked my view on an idea going around the community of lean thinking people. This notion goes that in order to be a sensei one must be separated by no more than two or three degrees from Taiichi Ohno. Without any disresp

Facing Adversity – Ron Washington Style

By Ron Pereira - October 25th, 2010

I live in the Dallas Fort Worth area… as such, I’ve been completely consumed with the excitement of the Texas Rangers making the World Series. And while there are so many amazing story lines with this young team… the aspect I wa

The Smallest Steps Towards Quality Improvement

By Jon Miller - October 24th, 2010

There is a story about a consultant, apocryphal perhaps, who charged $10,000 for putting a chalk mark on the part of a machine that was causing big problems for his customer. When the customer complained that the charge was excessive f

Practical Pokayoke: Preventing Phone Charger Loss

By Jon Miller - October 19th, 2010

This is an example of a great pokayoke (mistake proofing). My road warrior colleague Kent is prone to forget his phone charger, leaving them plugged in when he departs. The photo above shows the simple yet brilliant application of the

The “Lean Group” Syndrome

By Ron Pereira - October 18th, 2010

I had a recent discussion with a relative who works in a large Chicago based hospital. As it turns out, this particular hospital is attempting to use lean to improve their processes. During our discussion I could tell something wasn’

Year: 2010