Lean Archives | Page 51 of 68

GA 001 | Welcome to the Gemba Academy Podcast!

By Ron Pereira - April 30th, 2014

Welcome to the first episode of the Gemba Academy podcast! We’re extremely excited for this podcast and hope to reach as many people as possible with the good news that is lean and six sigma! During this first episode we share

Is Home Depot’s Expedited Checkout Lean?

By Ron Pereira - March 31st, 2014

It’s warming up here in North Texas… as such businesses like Home Depot are EXTREMELY BUSY places. Yesterday I joined the crowd to buy some tomatoes and other vegetables to plant in our garden. And, yes, the checkout line

My Newest Stand Up Desk!

By Ron Pereira - January 23rd, 2014

Friends, I have a confession to make. In November of 2009 I wrote about my new stand up desk. I was quite proud of how I’d managed to prop an old desk up on some crates… I guess you could say I definitely used my wits over my w

Review of Value Stream Mapping by Karen Martin & Mike Osterling

By Jon Miller - January 14th, 2014

There have been several watershed moments in the development of Western consciousness and practice of Lean management over the past 25 years. Perhaps first was the arrival of Masaaki Imai, Chihiro Nakao and Yoshiki Iwata in Connecticut

Lean Thinker Challenge #4

By Ron Pereira - January 7th, 2014

Welcome to the first Lean Thinker Challenge of 2014! The Situation You’re the owner of a very successful manufacturing company. Your company began its lean journey 10 years ago and has realized tremendous benefits. In fact, lean thin

Review of Humble Inquiry by Edgar Schein

By Jon Miller - December 17th, 2013

It’s a happy day when a favorite author-business philosophers integrates two favorite qualities into 121 concise pages. Edgar Schein has done this in Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling. He argues simply a

What does ‘right first time’ mean in an R&D environment?

By Jon Miller - December 8th, 2013

Decades that have passed since anchoring principles of Lean have been published, reworded and republished, from Deming, Liker and others. Lean tools and their results abound, but Lean behaviors evidencing belief in these principles are

Why the Only Way to Think is Long-term

By Jon Miller - November 20th, 2013

Lean principles are hard to live by. It is far easier to use Lean methods to drive for and achieve results, cash in on performance incentives and leverage that success for a promotion or even a new job, quickly before the lack of susta

What Problem Are You Trying to Solve?

By Ron Pereira - November 15th, 2013

The most frequently asked question we receive at Gemba Academy goes something like this, “What videos should we watch first?” A close second is, “”What lean tools or philosophies should we focus on first?” How to Respond Of c

Lean Gurus Womack, Jones & Shook in 70-minute Video

By Jon Miller - November 14th, 2013

The Lean Enterprise Institute in cooperation with Gemba Academy has produced a free online 70-minute video discussion among Lean gurus and thought leaders James Womack, Dan Jones and John Shook. The 11 videos cover a range of themes in

Process, Results & the Anti-Portfolio

By Jon Miller - November 13th, 2013

What’s an “Anti-Portfolio”? It’s what students or organizational culture would call an artifact. The anti-portfolio is a collection of terrible decisions and costly mistakes, in the same way that a portfolio of

Does Jim Womack Regret Calling it “Lean”?

By Ron Pereira - November 13th, 2013

If they had to do it over again… would Jim Womack & Dan Jones still support calling it lean? And what did John Shook originally think about the book title “Learning to See?” Finally, what is the “Great Stagn

Gemba Online Learning Content Update

By Jon Miller - November 10th, 2013

Video-based Lean training pioneer Gemba Academy has steadily built up a library of learning modules over the past four years. With over 500 high definition videos that can be accessed via DVD or from ain internet connection, new conten

AME Toronto, Lean Accounting, and BMW X5 Seat Manufacturing!

By Ron Pereira - November 6th, 2013

We’ve been EXTREMELY busy over at Gemba Academy! Here’s a short list of what we’ve been up to: We talked all things lean with John Shook, Jim Womack, and Dan Jones at the recent AME conference in Toronto. This 70 mi

How to Engage People

By Jon Miller - November 4th, 2013

A recent Gallup poll showed that a whopping 70% of American workers were either not engaged or actively disengaged from their work. That’s about 70 million people who don’t care about or hate their job. More than the entire

It’s So Good Because It’s So Mutual

By Jon Miller - October 27th, 2013

Over the last couple of years both the application and meaning of “Lean” has been broadened, stretched, and even re-imagined quite a bit. This is largely thanks to its discovery and adoption by people from the software deve

Lean Thinker Challenge #3

By Ron Pereira - October 15th, 2013

Welcome to this week’s Lean Thinker Challenge! The Situation Your cousin, Shane, works for the NCAA and has been tasked with improving a critical aspect of the college football experience. Specifically, Shane has been asked to find a

What Culture Supports a Lean Startup Approach?

By Jon Miller - October 8th, 2013

Today I was fortunate to have the opportunity to sit in on a webinar titled Bringing Lean to Established Companies by lean startup gurus Eric Ries, Brant Cooper, and Patrick Vlaskovits. The webinar was not about bringing Lean per se bu

Process, Result and Value for the Community

By Jon Miller - October 6th, 2013

Last week I had the opportunity to speak in front of group of people learning and leading continuous improvement paired with respect for humanity, at the Lean HR Summit. One of myths of Lean that I attempted to bust was that the prime

Lean Thinker Challenge #2

By Ron Pereira - October 2nd, 2013

Well, it’s safe to say our first Lean Thinker Challenge was a hit… as of a few minutes ago there were 56 comments. Thank you to all of you who joined the conversation! Now, let’s get to this week’s Lean Thinker Challenge! The S

Kaizen Song: Come All You A3 Thinkers

By Jon Miller - September 29th, 2013

Based on “Come All You Coal Miners”, this is the kaizen song… Come All You A3 Thinkers Come all you A3 thinkers wherever you may be And learn of a storyline, from circles of QC The name is nothing special, but its ste

The Man Who Saved Kaizen

By Jon Miller - September 20th, 2013

It is with love and gratitude that we remember Eiji Toyoda, the man who forever changed how the world improves the way we work. He passed on this week, aged 100. He engineered the successful Toyota-GM join venture in California known a

OH NO You Didn’t Really Say That!

By Jon Miller - September 16th, 2013

It pains me to even write these words again: “All we are doing is looking at the time line, from the moment the customer gives us an order to the point when we collect the cash. And we are reducing that time line by removing the

Lean Thinker Challenge #1

By Ron Pereira - September 12th, 2013

OK, so I thought I’d start a new, hopefully fun, series of articles called the Lean Thinker Challenge. This is the first edition! The Situation You’ve just been hired as the VP of Operations for a 200 person manufacturing

8 More Lean Concept Clarifications

By Jon Miller - September 12th, 2013

Everyday conversations with lean learners and lean practitioners make me think that this problem of the erosion of meaning, or even extensions of transference is not unique to A3 thinking. In fact we could list lightly-learned or misin

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