Gemba Academy

Review of The Lean Startup by Eric Ries

By Jon Miller - March 27th, 2012

My experience with startups extends to starting Gemba Research, a consulting and training company which we merged last year with Kaizen Institute, Gemba Academy, an online lean training venture, and three other business selling lean-re

Webinar Replay: Using SPC to Make Better Management Decisions

By Ron Pereira - March 27th, 2012

Update: This webinar can now only be seen by subscribers to the Complete Lean Package. In this pre-recorded webinar, Mark Graban, author of Lean Hospitals and the upcoming book Healthcare Kaizen, showed how simple statistical process c

Lean, Bias, Impartiality and Justness

By Jon Miller - March 18th, 2012

I considered myself to be appropriately biased against biases, but it turned out I was wrong. Such is often the way with cognitive biases. Reading Daniel Kahneman’s book Thinking, Fast and Slow, I learned to think of biases in a

Perseverance & PDCA

By Ron Pereira - March 13th, 2012

“Let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us” (Hebrews 12:1). The ability to persevere through the tough times we experience as lean and six sigma practitioners is extremely important. In fact, the ability to persev

Kanban Systems Overview Video

By Ron Pereira - March 5th, 2012

Here is a free overview video introducing our Kanban course. And here’s a summary document of this video in PDF format that can be downloaded and printed. Visit gembaacademy.com to learn more about our available courses and acce

Lean Retail Exercise: “Not My Job” Edition

By Jon Miller - March 1st, 2012

The retail industry has a poor image when it comes to the motivation level of its employees. They are often portrayed in popular culture as neither well-trained nor well-paid, not always inspired to deliver a great customer experience.

Building Excellent Systems: Top-down or Bottom-up?

By Jon Miller - February 27th, 2012

“We have to take these pockets of excellence, these islands of excellence and make them systems of excellence.” These could be words of an executive in encouragement of a kaizen team, spoken in any number of languages, at a

Improving Point of Use Lid Storage at Starbucks

By Ron Pereira - January 31st, 2012

On a recent visit to a Starbucks inside the San Francisco airport, I snapped a picture of their cup lid dispenser. As you can see they store lids in this unit and present it close to where the “final assembly” Barista does

Consumption Rate, Replenishment Time, SWIP and Why Glaciers Need Love

By Jon Miller - January 22nd, 2012

Over the past week, the greater Seattle area was met with the largest snowfall in a decade or two. Recently I was in New York City, where the season’s supply of snow had dropped last October, with barely a blizzard since. Back in

10 Rules for Good Gemba Walks

By Jon Miller - January 12th, 2012

Elmore Leonard is an American novelist who has written lean and taut crime novels for a half-century. He is the Toyota of crime novels if that’s a compliment. Reliable, not flashy, always delivering on the promise of a hard-boile

10 Books Every Continuous Improvement Practitioner Should Read in 2012

By Ron Pereira - January 12th, 2012

I hope everyone had a safe and happy new year and that things are off to an awesome start for you and yours! To help kick off the new year I thought I’d share a list of the 10 books I recommend all Continuous Improvement Practitioner

Kanban: The Art of the Japanese Shop Sign

By Jon Miller - January 4th, 2012

The kanban has met many adventures on its way to becoming a popular tool for the limitation of tasks, projects and works in process. As superhero origin stories go, kanban has an interesting one. As long ago as 8th century Japan, guide

And with your spirit

By Ron Pereira - January 3rd, 2012

Roman Catholics around the word recently saw a huge change to the way Mass is celebrated. Specifically, there were several changes to the prayers we say. For example, prior to the change if you walked up to any Catholic and said, “Th

Leaning Into 2012

By Jon Miller - January 1st, 2012

Many years ago when I was first learning how to drive a car, my dear young aunt Ruth rode with me on an Illinois country road. She taught me the importance of accelerating when going into a curve. This was deeply counter-intuitive to m

The Best of LSS Academy – 2011 Edition

By Ron Pereira - December 29th, 2011

Well, friends, another year has come and gone. As always, I’d like to sincerely thank each and every one of you for taking the time to visit LSS Academy. We now have more than 16,000 subscribers which is simply mind blowing! I

2011 Management Carnival Annual Roundup

By Ron Pereira - December 26th, 2011

I’m excited to take part in this years Annual Management Carnival. I chose three of my favorite blogs and hope you enjoy the following articles as much as I did. Dan Pink Jim Collins on 3 ways to avoid demotivating people at work

An Easy Way to Make Your New Year’s Resolution Stick

By Ron Pereira - December 15th, 2011

Action is the foundational key to all success. -Pablo Picasso As 2011 comes to an end and we look forward to 2012… many of us will make new year’s resolutions. Some will commit to working out, some will commit to getting organi

Gemba Glossary: Value Stream Mapping

By Ron Pereira - December 8th, 2011

Here is the next video in our Gemba Glossary video series. This one focuses on Value Stream Mapping. If you missed any of our earlier Gemba Glossary videos please follow the links below. Gemba Glossary: 5S Gemba Glossary: The 7 Waste

The 5th Myth about the Respect for People Principle

By Jon Miller - December 7th, 2011

In an excellent blog post by Jamie Flinchbaugh today he introduces 4 myths about the principle of “Respect for People”, saying: But respect for people means different things to different people. To some it means avoiding la

All Bleeding Stops Eventually

By Ron Pereira - December 6th, 2011

Here’s a fact you may not have realized… all bleeding stops eventually. The key question, of course, is how long it takes to stop it. Do we quickly apply a band-aid and limit the damage to our body or do we sit around and wait unti

Kaizen and the Moisture Content of Fabrics

By Jon Miller - December 2nd, 2011

Fabric is one of the oldest technological artifacts of humanity. Water is essential to our survival and ubiquitous in our daily lives. So it is fitting that these two things come together in a metaphor about kaizen – changing thi

The Courage to Try

By Ron Pereira - December 1st, 2011

I was recently speaking with a Gemba Academy customer who’s looking to start a small lean consulting company. I’ll call this person Bob for the sake of this article. About Bob Bob explained that he doesn’t have a college degree b

Live Built in Quality Seminar in Denton, TX

By Ron Pereira - November 29th, 2011

Peterbilt Motors, Gemba Academy and Kaizen Institute are pleased to present a half-day live workshop on Monday December 5th 2011 on the subject of “Built-in Quality”, one of the two pillars of the Toyota Production System h

Live Seminar: Built-in Quality, Dallas – Dec. 5, 2011

By Jon Miller - November 28th, 2011