November 2010 | Gemba Academy

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

Month: November 2010