Gemba Academy

Review of A Fine Line by Hartmut Esslinger

By Jon Miller - February 18th, 2010

On the recommendation of Matthew May, author, speaker and consultant to blue chip companies on innovation, lean and change, I read A Fine Line: How Design Strategies Are Shaping the Future of Business. Written by Hartmut Esslinger, fou

5 Questions to Ask Before You Attempt to Implement Kanban

By Ron Pereira - February 18th, 2010

My first manufacturing experiences were with two different multi-billion dollar manufacturing companies who happened to run massive ERP systems meaning we had massive MRP systems running the shop floor. Sound familiar? Anyhow, as a y

Excerpts from An Interview with Taiichi Ohno, July 16, 1984

By Jon Miller - February 16th, 2010

One of the rewards of last week’s office kaizen activity at Gemba was the discover a copy of the 1984 interview with Taiichi Ohno. The original paper An Interview with Taiichi Ohno, July 16, 1984 is in Japanese and can be found o

The Ultimate Sacrifice: Serving Others

By Ron Pereira - February 16th, 2010

Note from Ron: This might be the most significant article I have ever written on this blog. Please read it all the way through as I need your help. Someone close to me and my family has recently re-deployed to Afghanistan… for the fi

Subsidiarity: A (Medieval) Lean Principle

By Ron Pereira - February 14th, 2010

Guest Post by Mark R. Hamel of Gemba Tales OK, there probably weren’t many lean practitioners in the Middle Ages, but Thomas Aquinas, the 13th century theologian, philosopher and all around brainiac did play a significant role in dev

Kaizen Goes Kaput? Not So Fast

By Jon Miller - February 13th, 2010

In recent weeks there have been many articles purporting to put the finger on the cause for Toyota’s quality troubles. Most of them are solution-jumping and not worthy of further exposure or response. I felt compelled to address

Gemba Research Office Layout Kaizen #11

By Jon Miller - February 11th, 2010

Over the past week we have been chipping away at some office kaizen at the Gemba Research office near Seattle. The major activities so far have included a layout change, some 5S and other small improvements. In the 6 years that we have

Gemba Tales: Lean stories, lessons and reflections

By Ron Pereira - February 9th, 2010

Over the last year several new lean and six sigma related blogs have appeared. I follow most of them. Some I like more than others… which is to be expected I guess. Anyhow, one of the newer blogs that has definitely caught

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

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