Gemba Academy

7 Ways to Keep Kaizen Going after Years of Progress

By Jon Miller - November 30th, 2010

Many organizations have pursued kaizen for years or even decades now, 25 years after the publication of Masaaki Imai’s classic book Kaizen. Yet many find that after a few years of progress with kaizen it becomes difficult to main

The Four Pillars of Built-In Quality

By Jon Miller - November 28th, 2010

The TPS house is often drawn with a triangular roof, a rectangular foundation and two rectangular columns between the foundation and roof. The space between the columns is filled with one’s choice of the systems, tools and princi

The Soccer Coach

By Ron Pereira - November 23rd, 2010

I recently completed one of the most humbling experiences of my life… I coached my daughter’s U7 soccer team. The main challenge for me was that I never played soccer growing up. As such, I had a lot of learning to do before I coul

Three Types of Standardized Work

By Jon Miller - November 22nd, 2010

One of our readers Harish asked: Recently I have come across different types of standardized work in two or three places during my research. They are Type 1, 2 and 3. Can you please throw some light on this? While the concept was not n

One Man’s Trash

By Jon Miller - November 19th, 2010

…is another person’s treasure, as the saying goes. Lean is about making effective use of all resources we are wasting whether time, money, information, material or the creative capabilities of people. Too much focus is give

How to Drive Fear and Inaction Out of Organizations

By Jon Miller - November 17th, 2010

One of the main reasons that the authors Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton give for inaction in the face of knowledge in their highly useful book The Knowing-Doing Gap is fear. They cite a statistic that one in six people have held bac

Lead with Just the Power of Ideas

By Jon Miller - November 16th, 2010

I watched the movie Inception during a recent flight. It is a film about planting ideas into the minds of businessmen by sneaking into their dreams. This sounds difficult until we consider the film’s viewpoint that all existence,

The Problem With Gurus

By Ron Pereira - November 15th, 2010

Gurus really bother me. These gurus come in many different shapes and sizes. They may think they know all there is about lean, or six sigma, or cooking, or coaching a sports team, or raising a family. You see, gurus are everywhere and

Assessing “Respect for People” on a Gemba Walk

By Jon Miller - November 14th, 2010

In a comment posted to an article about 3 things to check during a gemba walk, lean thinker and author Bob Emiliani commented: For decades the focus of gemba walks has been on operations and evaluating continuous improvement activities

6 Ways to Ensure Fear Doesn’t Win

By Ron Pereira - November 8th, 2010

How motivated are you right now? Very? A little? Not much? The honest answer to this question might explain how happy and fulfilled you feel as a person. Let’s explore why this is. Defined, motivation can be said to be the psychologi

FastCap Lean Tour: "Do Kaizen First" Every Day

By Jon Miller - November 7th, 2010

Here is another great video from innovator and lean leader Paul Akers. In this video members of one of Gemba Consulting USA’s lean tour groups from Bombardier Aerospace share their impressions while visiting FastCap. Bombardier i

Three Things to Check During a Gemba Walk

By Jon Miller - November 5th, 2010

As the teaching and implementation lean becomes more of a business there are an increasing number of 72-point surveys and 40-criteria lean maturity assessments. These certainly have value since an end-to-end customer-focused business l

Effective Visual Controls and the Minimum Noticeable Difference

By Jon Miller - November 2nd, 2010

On a recent trip to a market in southern China it occurred to me that there must be a thriving industry producing red ink in this country. By red ink I mean not financial losses but the literal wet and sanguine stuff that so much of th

The Non-Standard Semantics of Standardization

By Jon Miller - October 31st, 2010

The words standard, standards, and standardization with their associated concepts and meanings cause a lot of trouble for lean thinkers and others whose intentions are to promote continuous improvement without the lean label. A basic p

Six Degrees of Taiichi Ohno

By Jon Miller - October 26th, 2010

I was recently asked my view on an idea going around the community of lean thinking people. This notion goes that in order to be a sensei one must be separated by no more than two or three degrees from Taiichi Ohno. Without any disresp

Facing Adversity – Ron Washington Style

By Ron Pereira - October 25th, 2010

I live in the Dallas Fort Worth area… as such, I’ve been completely consumed with the excitement of the Texas Rangers making the World Series. And while there are so many amazing story lines with this young team… the aspect I wa

The Smallest Steps Towards Quality Improvement

By Jon Miller - October 24th, 2010

There is a story about a consultant, apocryphal perhaps, who charged $10,000 for putting a chalk mark on the part of a machine that was causing big problems for his customer. When the customer complained that the charge was excessive f

Practical Pokayoke: Preventing Phone Charger Loss

By Jon Miller - October 19th, 2010

This is an example of a great pokayoke (mistake proofing). My road warrior colleague Kent is prone to forget his phone charger, leaving them plugged in when he departs. The photo above shows the simple yet brilliant application of the

The “Lean Group” Syndrome

By Ron Pereira - October 18th, 2010

I had a recent discussion with a relative who works in a large Chicago based hospital. As it turns out, this particular hospital is attempting to use lean to improve their processes. During our discussion I could tell something wasn’

Ambiguous Visual Controls: Lost in the Supermarket

By Jon Miller - October 16th, 2010

Visual controls must at the very minimum be unambiguous, and either indicate normal versus abnormal or to positively specify a problem condition in order to be useful. Ambiguous visual controls are a waste of print and only good as exa

Blog Action Day: Water

By Jon Miller - October 15th, 2010

Most of us take water for granted. It is colorless, tasteless and runs within, on or around our bodies every moment of our lives. Water flows and forms around obstacles, freezes and cracks the hardest stone, evaporates and floats away

Waste Rules the Empty Spaces Between Us

By Jon Miller - October 13th, 2010

The latest episode in the chronicle of the lean journey at Group Health Cooperative in Washington State is A Story from the Front By Dr. Wellesley Chapman. Dr. Wellesley writes about the experience of launching the lean transformation

Hand Washing Conundrum… at a Major Coffee House

By Ron Pereira - October 12th, 2010

I was recently washing my hands inside an establishment that sells coffee. I am not big on calling companies out, especially companies trying to improve… which this company is. Anyhow, after I washed my hands I went to dry them.

10 Mistakes in Starting Lean Enterprise Transformations

By Jon Miller - October 11th, 2010

The are plenty of mistakes people can make when starting up a lean enterprise transformation. Interestingly, many of these mistakes are similar if not identical to those entrepreneurs make in starting a business. Perhaps these mistakes

Wasting Time in 3 Billion Meetings

By Jon Miller - October 8th, 2010

Meetings are one of the few times when humans have the opportunity to positively and constructively interact with one another, yet it seems businesses and organizations large and small struggle to make them effective. In fact often mee

Gemba Academy Blog

Blog Archive