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United by Problems

By Jon Miller - October 5th, 2015

Nothing divides people like a solution. It seems the larger the problem, the larger the divide. I am reminded of this painfully with every mass shooting, as we had this past week at a community college in Oregon. We grieve as a natio

Ron’s Favorite Gemba Academy Podcast Episodes

By Ron Pereira - October 2nd, 2015

On April 30, 2014 we released the first two Gemba Academy podcasts. To be 100% transparent, we weren’t quite sure what to expect. When we started the download “numbers” weren’t huge but, as you can see in the graph, we’ve see

A Rational Plan is a Prediction

By Jon Miller - September 28th, 2015

One question that I hear a lot is, “Can you show me an example of success in my specific environment?” with lean, continuous improvement, agile and so forth. My most common answer is, “No.” Although I would lik

Missing the Soil, or The Inadequacy of Our Lean Management Metaphors

By Jon Miller - September 21st, 2015

The purpose of lean is to build an organization that creates value for people – its customers, employees, shareholders and community members – on a sustainable and long-term basis. If we asked a farmer, “How do we g

Standard Work Saved a Company

By Steve Kane - September 18th, 2015

By Steve Kane I’ve been an aviation enthusiast most of my life. I started flying sailplanes a couple of years ago and recently transitioned to power planes. The first lesson in flying is an introduction to standard work—specifical

How to Gain Insight from Customers and Gemba

By Jon Miller - September 14th, 2015

Lean thinking places a focus on the customer and on the gemba. These are two great sources of information for innovation, increased revenues, and problem solving. The way to gain more insight from customers and from the gemba is to be

Discovering the Value of People

By Kevin Meyer - September 11th, 2015

By Kevin Meyer Big news in the business world: Wal-Mart is famous for keeping costs down, including employee-related costs. In Joplin, the company is testing a new approach: investing in workers through higher wages and training, on th

Why We Do Things This Way

By Jon Miller - September 7th, 2015

I have spent much of my career in pursuit of answers to the question, “Why do you do things this way?” When I am getting to know a client, either an individual leader for coaching purposes or an business for the purpose o

Derek’s Lean Story

By Ron Pereira - September 4th, 2015

It was a Monday morning around 7:30 AM. I walked into the training room and glanced around. I’d been in this training room many times before but something felt different… I just couldn’t put my finger on what it was. I carried on

The Pursuit of Imperfection

By Jon Miller - August 31st, 2015

One of the widely accepted guiding principles of lean thinking is to “pursue perfection”. This is rather broad and imprecise when compared to the other guidelines of identify value, map value streams, flow and pull. Pursue

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