Gemba Academy

Stand Up Desk To Go

By Ron Pereira - November 17th, 2009

I was on the road last night doing some work in my hotel room. After an hour or so my back started to hurt from the crappy chair I was sitting in so I decided to create my very own “stand up desk to go” in honor of my rec

My New Stand Up Desk

By Ron Pereira - November 15th, 2009

I first witnessed so called “stand up desks” in Japan during my JKE trip. As an aside you can read about this amazing trip here, here, here, here, and here. Anyhow, I wasn’t quite sure what to make of the idea. I me

UK Folding Plug – Brilliant Innovation

By Ron Pereira - November 11th, 2009

As a frequent traveler to the UK I can definitely appreciate this device. It’s simple, yet profound. I am not sure if it is available for purchase yet… but if it is I plan to buy one next time I fly across the pond. Wha

Scientific Management 2.0

By Jon Miller - November 8th, 2009

Bob Emiliani wrote a thoughtful call to arms piece in the Superfactory articles section this week. Enticingly titled Free Money, Free Love it predictably delivers neither of those things. Instead Bob makes a case for the need for the l

The Kipling Method vs. the Ohno Method

By Jon Miller - November 4th, 2009

There is an interesting story told by Toyota veterans who worked directly with Taiichi Ohno. When the great sensei and architect of the Toyota Production System was introduced to the 5W1H questions for problem solving, he said “Y

The 5 Universal Laws of Gemba Management

By Jon Miller - November 2nd, 2009

When we say something is “not rocket science” we mean that it is not hard to figure out or to do. If managing people were as easy as rocket science I am sure a rocket scientist would have figured it out by now. Groups of pe

Green Manufacturing Tour of Toyota Tsutsumi

By Jon Miller - October 31st, 2009

An article on the CarAdvice.com.au website titled Toyota’s Tsutsumi Plant – tour a green role model highlights some of the advances Toyota has made at the factory which assembles the Prius hybrid car. Some featured environm

Who Sets the Standard?

By Jon Miller - October 29th, 2009

Over the past few weeks I have had several conversations about standard work and who creates it. In each case I find myself trying to dispel one of the most common myths of the Toyota Production System: that the workers themselves crea

Cardinal Virtues and Leadership Series: Prudence

By Ron Pereira - October 27th, 2009

“In everything consider the consequences.” – La Fontaine A few articles ago I proposed the idea that successful leaders, in addition to being humble, should also practice the 4 Cardinal virtues. I also committed to ex

Your Important Feedback Requested: A Simple 2 Question Survey

By Ron Pereira - October 26th, 2009

I would really appreciate your thoughts on this simple, 2 question survey that should take less than 30 seconds to complete. A big thanks in advance for your time and valuable insight! Click Here to take survey

Skitt’s Law Applied to Kaizen

By Jon Miller - October 26th, 2009

I became aware of a truth about lean problem solving and kaizen yesterday while reading an article about ten internet rules and laws. 4. Skitt’s Law Expressed as “any post correcting an error in another post will contain at

MBWA: Management by Watching the Actual

By Jon Miller - October 23rd, 2009

MBWA was briefly a fad when it was known as Management by Walking Around. Supposedly the visibility of management in the workplace as well as the attention by management improved communication and performance. These days we don’t

Brilliant Value Stream Mapping Icon Fonts

By Jon Miller - October 20th, 2009

Yesterday, Jamie Flinchbaugh shared a discovery on his blog. Also, the nice folks at Ambor have developed several very useful fonts for Lean. Skill Matrix Font The Harvey Balls ideograms are great for filling out the skill matrix. Comp

Thank You and Last Chance to Purchase Lean Audio Book at $7.95

By Ron Pereira - October 19th, 2009

Just a quick post to thank all of you that have purchased the LSS Academy Guide to Lean Audio Book. Your generous support helps us pay the bills around here (i.e. monthly hosting, site maintenance, etc.) without having to plaster annoy

What Would Newt Gingrich do with American Health Care?

By Jon Miller - October 17th, 2009

Newt Gingrich is an American scholar, politician and a man of big ideas. Not all big ideas are meant to be put into practice, but these comments from an interview in The Intelligencer article titled Gingrich: Republican Party Recoverin

Blog Action Day: Climate Change

By Jon Miller - October 15th, 2009

More than 10,000 blogs are writing about climate change today. That’s pretty amazing. It’s not quite like writing 10,000 letters to liberate political prisoners. It’s an interesting way to use the internet to build aw

Cardinal Virtues and Leadership

By Ron Pereira - October 15th, 2009

Our most recent article, Level 5 Leadership, created quite the discussion in the comments section (18 comments as I write this). As is normally the case, I learned a lot from all the comments. I agreed with some of them and disagreed w

Taiichi Ohno Video on Youtube

By Jon Miller - October 14th, 2009

Only it’s in Turkish. Unfortunately that’s not one of my languages, and I can only hear brief snippets of Japanese beneath it, not enough to make out more than a few words. If any readers are capable in Turkish perhaps you

Words of Taiichi Ohno Sensei: Kaizen by Inspiration is Not Kaizen

By Jon Miller - October 13th, 2009

I was flipping through some Japanese books on sayings and speeches given by Taiichi Ohno looking for inspiration for a quick blog post when I found this passage: “Within the Toyota Production System, a lack of ability to do kaize

Seven Essential Qualities of a Lean Leader

By Jon Miller - October 11th, 2009

Profits are on the minds, tongues and priority lists of a lot of people lately. Companies are aggressively managing costs these days. As a result I am sad to see even some avowed lean leaders turning away from the principles and qualit

Level 5 Leadership

By Ron Pereira - October 8th, 2009

In his classic business book Good to Great Jim Collins introduces what he refers to as Level 5 Leaders, our topic in this article. Humility To start with, Level 5 Leaders are humble. In other words, those that Collins and his team of r

Online Training for Quick Changeover and SMED

By Jon Miller - October 7th, 2009

The Quick Changeover and SMED course is now available from Gemba Academy. There are 12 video modules with quizzes and supporting documents, for a total of approximately 6 hours of step by step learning. The twelve modules are; Module 1

Aquatic Life Forms and the Lean Organization

By Jon Miller - October 6th, 2009

One of the guiding principles of the lean approach to product and process design, known as the production preparation process (“3P”) is to learn from how nature does things. Nature, said Johannes Kepler, uses as little as p

How to Use 5S to Manage Kaizen

By Jon Miller - September 29th, 2009

Ronak asked: What should be ideal process flow for kaizen? What I mean is who can give their suggestions, how to evaluate kaizen event, should we plan an event on monthly basis? This is a good question and one that reveals how common i

Kaizen – FastCap Style

By Ron Pereira - September 28th, 2009

If you’d like to see kaizen in action, and I do mean real kaizen, you need to set aside around 23 minutes to watch this video of the FastCap team improving the way some items are packaged. As an aside, FastCap has been practicing

Gemba Academy Blog

Blog Archive