To be sure, with more than 650 articles, navigating through the Gemba Academy blog can be daunting.

The good news is we’ve assembled some of our best content on this page making it easy for you to find exactly what interests you the most.

Lean Thinking Articles

Put simply, lean thinking is all about respecting people while constantly striving to improve ourselves and the processes we encounter each and every day. We’d invite you to explore the following lean thinking articles!

• Value Stream Mapping Overview 
• Are Dishwashers Lean? 
• How Would you Explain what Lean is to a 7-year-old?
• The “Lean Group” Syndrome 
• Womack’s Lean vs. Ohno’s TPS 
• How Do You Measure Success? 
• Simplicity 
• Kanji & Humilty
• Ban the Stop Watch
• Genchi Gebutsu: Do you Really Understand it?
• Great, here comes Mr. “Oh No!” 
• 10 Books all Lean Thinkers Should Read
• Why Flow Counter Clockwise?
• 10 Benefits of One Piece Flow
• JKE Update: One Million Spark Plugs Per Day
• Who’s Winning?
• How to Determine Cycle Time, Takt Time, and Lead Time 
• The 7 Steps to Hoshin Kanri
• Kaizen Rules: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5
• Why Heijunka?: Part 1, Part 2

Leadership Articles

The ability to lead people, professionally and personally, is at the heart of continuous improvement. As such, we invite you to explore the following leadership focused articles.

• I Want to Be Like Benny 
• The Spiritual Side of Continuous Improvement
• 3 Things You Can Do When Your Manager Doesn’t Support Continuous Improvement
• Entropy, Salmon, & Swimming
• I Presently Struggle With
• The Way of the Goose: 5 Leadership Lessons
• Practice Makes Champions 
• The Long & Winding Road 
• Shadows or Reality
• Subsidiarity: A (Medieval) Lean Principle
• Leadership & Standard Work
• Respect for People: Japanese Style
• 7 Practical Ways to Respect People
• Repent, I mean Hansei! 
• Knowledge & Thinking
• Dealing with Doubting Thomas
• 7 Tips to Better Brainstorming
• The Highest Form of Human Excellence
• I am, therefore I think 

Six Sigma Articles

Six Sigma is an extremely powerful continuous improvement methodology that can and will change the way you look at problem solving once fully adopted. To help you begin, or possibly continue, this journey we’d invite you to explore the following six sigma related articles.

• Getting’ Jiggy With It!
• My Take on Lean & Six Sigma Certifications
• Descriptive Statistics: Part 1, Part 2
• The Heated Law of Dispersion
• Span – GE’s Variation Weapon
• Explaining the Central Limit Theorem
• The Cause & Effect Matrix
• 10 Steps to Creating a FMEA
• Hypothesis Testing
• 5 Critical Control Chart Characteristics you May Not Be Aware of 
• How to Create Meaningful Safety Graphs
• The Critical Difference Between Defects & Defectives
• Explaining Cp & Cpk 
• Taguchi Loss Function 
• Taguchi Index – Cpm
• How Beer Influenced Statistics
• Regression: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 
• Repetitions vs. Replications
• Fun with Confidence Intervals: Part 1, Part 2
• 8 Reasons your Lean or Six Sigma Initiative Could Fail