Gemba Academy

Putting Things on Top of Other Things

By Jon Miller - January 11th, 2016

One of my favorite comedy sketches is the “Royal Society for Putting Things on Top of Other Things” by Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Over the years I have grown to appreciate its insight into organizational behavio

How Applesauce Saves a Hospital $30,000 per Year

By Ron Pereira - January 8th, 2016

2016 definitely started with a bang for the Gemba Academy video production team! We just recorded another Gemba Academy Live! episode at Franciscan Health in Indianapolis. It was the first time we’ve visited a hospital and let

How I Stopped Making New Year’s Resolutions

By Jon Miller - January 4th, 2016

A friend asked me this past weekend about my resolutions for 2016. To our mutual surprise my answer was, “I don’t have any.” This caused me to reflect on why I had not set any New Year’s resolutions for 2016.

A Goal to Explore Out of the Box

By Kevin Meyer - January 1st, 2016

By Kevin Meyer Unless you try to do something beyond what you have already mastered, you will never grow. – Ralph Emerson It’s that arbitrary time of the year when many folks reflect on the past and set goals for the coming yea

Lessons from The Past Year on Lean Coaching

By Jon Miller - December 21st, 2015

Looking back on 2015, it was a career transition year. After 20+ years of being in the travel-based lean consulting and training field, I decided to take the travel out of the equation. It was a self-imposed constraint, forcing me to

Happy Winter Solstice

By Steve Kane - December 18th, 2015

By Steve Kane I always enjoy the holiday season. Not only because of the holidays themselves, but also because of the renewed energy I get from ending one year and beginning another. This is the time to reflect on the year that was

Gaming Our Way to Lean Management

By Jon Miller - December 14th, 2015

Gamification is a relatively new buzzword for the application of features of game-playing such as point scoring, competition with other players and so forth, into business activities. Game-playing involves rules, scoring, opportunities

Now, at the Gemba

By Kevin Meyer - December 11th, 2015

By Kevin Meyer If we are not fully ourselves, truly in the present moment, we miss everything. – Thich Nhat Hanh Many people have a problem with letting go of the past – whether painful or pleasant. Not me. I’ve always been able

Reflections on Hoshin

By Jon Miller - December 7th, 2015

Over the past two of weeks I have had six unrelated conversations about hoshin planning. In contrast, this number is zero to one in any typical two-week period during the year. Perhaps this is because of the end of year interest in

6 Steps to Leading (and Improving) Yourself

By Ron Pereira - December 4th, 2015

By Ron Pereira “You must manage yourself before you can lead someone else.” – Zig Ziglar We concluded our Culture of Kaizen course with a module on the importance of taking care of yourself since you’re not going to be effectiv

Why Repeat? Why Repeat? Why Repeat? Why..?

By Jon Miller - November 30th, 2015

As a part of our working lives, repetition gets mixed reviews. When we repeatedly do our jobs well, we are often rewarded. But increasingly, we are exhorted to do our jobs better. We call it continuous improvement, in which we repeat

Do Not Title this Blog Post

By Jon Miller - November 23rd, 2015

One of the unexpected pleasures of business travel over the years has been stumbling across well-intentioned but poorly executed visual controls. As a result I’ve written more than twenty posts based on “ambiguous visual c

5 Thoughts On Dealing With Leadership Resistance

By Steve Kane - November 20th, 2015

By Steve Kane Gemba Academy recently conducted a one-question survey. The question was “What are you struggling with on your continuous improvement journey?” The most common response was related to dealing with leadership resistanc

What We Talk About When We Talk About Overburden

By Jon Miller - November 16th, 2015

We place high expectations on lean. Lean will make customers happier, empower employees, enlighten leaders, spur business growth and deliver bottom line results. Lean can certainly enable organizations to accomplish all of these th

A Reflective Perspective on Schein

By Kevin Meyer - November 13th, 2015

By Kevin Meyer I will take time to be alone today. I will take time to be quiet. In this silence I will listen… and I will hear my answers. – Ruth Fishel One of my great pleasures is going for a walk on the beach a couple blocks fr

What We Have Here is a Fluid Dynamics Problem

By Jon Miller - November 9th, 2015

This weekend I attended a community recital to hear my daughter play piano. There were 23 children playing solo and duet pieces on the piano, violin, cello, clarinet and saxophone. There were even a few singers. At the conclusion

How to Problem Solve with a Virtual Team

By Ron Pereira - November 6th, 2015

By Ron Pereira Brainstorming, done correctly, can be extremely powerful. In a traditional brainstorming session a group of people normally come together with a bunch of Post-It notes and/or a white board. Folks often log their ideas on

Another Good Reason to Walk the Gemba

By Jon Miller - November 2nd, 2015

From factory floor to hospital floor, the people who work on the gemba have long suspected the existence of a negative correlation between how much time management spends in the office and the quality of the decisions they make. Now

What is the Opposite of Irony?

By Jon Miller - October 26th, 2015

Suppose you are passionate about vacuum cleaners. New models. Vintage models. Sales. Repair. Perhaps you are even a genius when it comes to servicing vacuum cleaners. An artist. You find purpose in enabling others to move dirt and debr

Review of The Lean CEO by Jacob Stoller

By Jon Miller - October 22nd, 2015

[Full disclosure: Jon Miller was involved in proofreading and providing suggestions to the author Jacob Stoller. Jon was not compensated and has no financial interest in the book.] Most books about lean management are written by

Problem Solving Paradigms

By Jon Miller - October 19th, 2015

There is a story about an executive team of a certain U.S. automotive company that is very revealing about their problem solving paradigms, related in the book Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics by Richard Thaler. The au

Improvement Through Personal Fulfillment

By Steve Kane - October 16th, 2015

By Steve Kane Tony Robbins is well known for his motivational speaking, books, interviews and articles. A consistent theme in his work is the six human needs. 1. Certainty: assurance you can avoid pain and gain pleasure 2. Uncertaint

Change Management Lessons from Big Trees Transplant

By Jon Miller - October 14th, 2015

This may be the best unintentional video on nemawashi ever. For those new to nemawashi, it is a Japanese word meaning “preparing roots of a tree for transplant” but is known to us as part of the consensus-building and chang

Toolkits or Aids to Knowledge and Creativity?

By Jon Miller - October 12th, 2015

The great mystery in the history of lean is not so much how and why Toyota and a handful of Japanese companies were able to make large strides in business excellence, but why so many have failed to follow their example. In a word, th

Discovering the Inner Merton

By Kevin Meyer - October 9th, 2015

By Kevin Meyer If you are too obsessed with success, you will forget to live. If you have learned only how to be a success, your life has probably been wasted. ― Thomas Merton, Love and Living Sometimes there are dots just waiting to

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