Gemba Academy

How to Make Time for Kaizen

By Jon Miller - February 9th, 2010

In the early stages of exploring kaizen and other formal continuous improvement systems people always ask, “Where will we find time for kaizen in addition to all of our other work?” Ideally kaizen should be something done n

5 Ways to Achieve Drew Brees Like Flow

By Ron Pereira - February 8th, 2010

As I watched the Super Bowl last night – where, I must admit, I was cheering for the Colts – I couldn’t help but marvel at how well Drew Brees was playing. To be sure, he was in the zone from the 2nd quarter through the end of th

5 Ways To Become a More Productive, Healthy, and Happy Person

By Ron Pereira - February 2nd, 2010

No matter what you do for a living one thing is certain – personal productivity matters. A lot. My wife stays home raising our 4 kids. She does her very best to be productive. I run a company, among other things. I do my very best to

We Learn Nothing from History

By Jon Miller - February 2nd, 2010

Even as Toyota mops up the mess from their sales volume-driven expansion-related quality problems, challenger Volkswagen AG “…unveiled an ambitious plan to boost annual sales to eight million vehicles in the midterm and to

Don’t Let the Door Hit You in the Ass

By Ron Pereira - February 2nd, 2010

Man, oh man. The lean and business blogosphere feels as if it’s about to explode. Ever since everyone’s “model” of how to run a business (a.k.a. Toyota) has run into serious trouble people seem to be jumping off the TPS bandw

What Lean is Not and Never Will Be

By Jon Miller - February 1st, 2010

Industrial anthropologist, best selling author and eminence grise John Shook wrote a thoughtful column on the recent debate around what lean means and where we need to go next. He concludes that lean has always been about Toyota but no

What Are Your Thoughts About Toyota’s Situation?

By Ron Pereira - January 31st, 2010

As regular readers of this blog know, I am not a big “news” reporting guy. In other words, I rarely read a news story and then bang out an article around it since, honestly, this type of writing bores me beyond words. But, unless y

Former Toyota Quality Manager’s Thoughts on Historic Recall

By Jon Miller - January 28th, 2010

This does not seem like the Toyota we know. The latest recall from Toyota related to its faulty accelerator continues to expand. Toyota has stopped sales of eight major models in the U.S. and the jury is still out as to how far this wi

Live Strategy Deployment Video Workshop

By Ron Pereira - January 28th, 2010

I recently facilitated two different Hoshin Kanri (aka Policy Deployment) workshops. Both have been extremely successful and the teams I worked with were able to reflect, align, and energize all at the same time. I plan to write more

Seven Sayings for Successful Continuous Improvement

By Jon Miller - January 27th, 2010

Getting started with continuous improvement is easy but keeping it going is hard. Even though we speak of long-term thinking as one of the central tenets of continuous improvement and kaizen, many of us opt for the short-term actions,

LEI Brings the Healthcare Gemba to You, Virtually

By Jon Miller - January 24th, 2010

Way back in the day when I was traveling all over the country as an interpreter for Japanese consultants I imagined what it would take to remove the non-value added part of this process: the travel. I imagined a the Japanese sensei wal

Review of “Work the System” by Sam Carpenter

By Jon Miller - January 21st, 2010

The title of Sam Carpenter’s Work the System: The Simple Mechanics of Making More and Working Less is deceiving. It sounds like another “4 hour workweek” promise-of-personal-wealth-and-happiness book of the moment. In

Building Lean Awareness Worldwide, and a Geography Lesson

By Jon Miller - January 19th, 2010

Mark Graban shared some visitor statistics from his blog this week, asking his readers to guess which country ranked #2 in readers, after the USA. Curious about this blog, I fired up the Google and found some interesting results. We st

TPS Jargon Check: What is the Meaning of Yosedome?

By Jon Miller - January 18th, 2010

A few months ago Bruno asked, “What is the meaning of yosedome?” Pronounced “yo se dough may” it almost sounds Spanish but it was not a word I had ever heard before and was unable to help Bruno. This week Ian fr

Going Analog

By Ron Pereira - January 18th, 2010

Technology is great, no doubt about it. After all… it’s because of the Internet and computers you’re reading these words. Not so long ago this wouldn’t have been possible. So, let me be clear, I am not a techn

The Dirty Secret of Science

By Jon Miller - January 17th, 2010

There is an interesting article in Wired magazine titled The Neuroscience of Screwing Up. The main lesson from the article is that humans innately ignore inputs that contradict or don’t fit within their world views. As such, we n

Five Change Management Errors that Make You Wish You’d Read this Article Sooner

By Jon Miller - January 12th, 2010

As part of the U.S. government spending to boost the economy, our city has been digging up ditches, replacing pipes and putting down sidewalks near my house for the past 6 months or so. The signs and announcements were there for weeks

What’s the ROI of a 5S Program?

By Jon Miller - January 11th, 2010

A reader asked, “What’s the ROI of a 5S program?” She explained that she had read on another blog that it was impossible to calculate an ROI for a 5S program and that this was troubling for her. She has been leading 5

Introducing the 5 Why “So What” Test

By Ron Pereira - January 10th, 2010

We, over at Gemba Academy, are busy finishing up our 8 Step Practical Problem Solving course which is modeled after the Toyota Business Practice (TBP) methodology. In one of the modules we’re exploring 5 Why Analysis in more detail s

Agile Kanban Journal Day 200: Small is Beautiful

By Jon Miller - January 8th, 2010

Last June I began using what the progressive folks in the software development community are calling an agile kanban board to track, and ideally to speed up, work on my various projects. The biggest benefit from this so far has been to

2 Ways to Handle Varying Inventory Levels When Creating Value Stream Maps

By Ron Pereira - January 7th, 2010

Shaunak, a reader of LSS Academy, recently sent me the following question via email. By the way, if you have ever have questions related to continuous improvement (lean and/or six sigma) feel free to email me. I will do my very best

Kanji and Humility

By Ron Pereira - January 6th, 2010

“We come nearest to the great when we are great in humility.” – Rabindranath Tagore My friend, and fellow Texas lean blogger / Big Ten college football fanatic, Mark Graban wrote an article earlier this week summarizing ten t

Lean Product Design, 3P and Nature’s Greatest Engineers

By Jon Miller - January 4th, 2010

Over the holidays I had the chance to catch up with some reading as well as visiting some bookmarked websites. One of my favorites is the TED video lecture series. The 20 minute talk by Janine Benyus titled Biomimicry: Innovation Inspi

3 Ways to Stop Failing at New Years Resolutions

By Ron Pereira - January 4th, 2010

As we start off the new year one thing is for certain… there will be lots of resolutions stated. Everything from weight loss to improving the way money is managed will be focused in on for, at the very least, 7 to 10 days. Yep.

Knowing When to Stop: More TPS & the Tao

By Jon Miller - January 2nd, 2010

There is no set path to a successful change. Although once we understand it, we see that the lean path is the simplest of things, nobody can grasp it. If our leaders could gain control of a surefire approach change management everythin

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