Gemba Academy

5 Ways to Be More Grateful and Why Lean Thinkers Should Care

By Ron Pereira - March 4th, 2022

“Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues but the parent of all others.” -Cicero I’ve been thinking about gratefulness a lot lately. Being grateful is something I try to do…but often fail at. There are many

Using Artifacts to Make Our Thinking Visible

By Jon Miller - February 28th, 2022

In sports, statecraft, gambling, and other competitive endeavors, it often pays to hide one’s thoughts and true intentions. What we indicate and what we actually intend are often different. We hold our cards close to the chest an

Continuous Improvement Development for Leadership and Professionals

By Steve Kane - February 25th, 2022

This article was written by John Knotts. John is a senior coach at Gemba Academy. If you have studied anything about change management, you will have seen some type of change model; I embrace the change continuum model shown below bu

How to Let Small Things Bother You

By Jon Miller - February 21st, 2022

An interesting New York Times article points out how many of us have become desensitized to the dangers of this pandemic over the past couple of years. This is due to the constant alarm bells that ring, without always seeing real dange

Formalism for Forms

By Jon Miller - February 14th, 2022

One thing I’ve been doing a lot lately in my job at Gemba Academy is preparation. Specifically, I’m making sure that we have the graphics, figures, and forms our video editors need to do their job smoothly. The audio portio

Leverage the Power of Safety to Drive Cultural Transformation

By Kevin Meyer - February 11th, 2022

Earlier this week our good friend Mark Graban at Lean Blog reminded me of an article on how former Alcoa CEO Paul O’Neill focused on improving workplace safety, which contributed to driving growth from $3 billion in 1987 to $27 b

Towards A Practice Pattern for Gratitude

By Jon Miller - February 7th, 2022

Between food, family, and the feeling of gratitude, Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holidays. It’s easy to be thankful when our blessings cover and surround the dining room table. Even when we have little, or when we face stru

The Continuous Improvement Culture Model

By Ron Pereira - February 4th, 2022

This article was written by John Knotts, a Senior Coach here at Gemba Academy In September, we started our journey of Building a Culture of Continuous Improvement. In that first article, I discussed the concept of my model I use to

Leader Standard Work for Time and Contingency Planning

By Jon Miller - January 31st, 2022

Many of us make plans or set intentions to improve some aspect of our lives early in the year, or after a break or period of reflection. We may want to prepare healthier meals, exercise more, increase our earnings, get better at guitar

Building A Culture Of Continuous Improvement Part Two

By Steve Kane - January 28th, 2022

This article was written by John Knotts, a Senior Coach here at Gemba Academy. This is the fourth in a series of five articles written by John. The previous three are hyperlinked below: Over the last three months, we have covered th

From Lean Workplaces to Empowered Work Spaces

By Jon Miller - January 24th, 2022

We could describe what lean management does as an exercise in threefold rearrangement. First, we rearrange what’s in our minds. This often begins with our attitude about what is our isn’t “my job”. It includes h

Continuously Lubricating Processes

By Kevin Meyer - January 14th, 2022

As I push through my later 50s I’m finding that I value flexibility and balance far more than strength and endurance. This is augmented in my case as I’ve always had very high calcium levels, and even after removing dairy

Lean Thinking and Extending the Mind

By Jon Miller - January 10th, 2022

It’s well-known that the the particular method for combining manpower, materials, and machinery known as lean manufacturing matured at Toyota in the latter half of the 20th century. Many organizations, both industrial and not, ha

Crafting Your Continuous Improvement Strategy

By Ron Pereira - January 7th, 2022

This article was written by John Knotts, a Senior Coach here at Gemba Academy Two months ago, we started our journey on building a culture of continuous improvement. We know that continuous improvement brings many benefits to an organi

How Lean Practices Adjust the Difficulty Level of Work

By Jon Miller - January 5th, 2022

One sentence caught my attention around the midpoint of the episode of Hidden Brain, titled Work 2.0: Game On! This was after setting the context of how people often view work as pointless or tedious, while enjoying playing games, even

How to Think About Breakthrough Objectives

By Jon Miller - December 13th, 2021

It’s the time of year when many organizations begin their final review of the past period, and begin looking ahead to the next one. Before setting goals for the coming year, it’s common to zoom out, looking at the big pictu

Continuous Improvement of Learning and Development

By Jon Miller - November 29th, 2021

I was reading through some research on how businesses are evolving their approaches to learning and development. A figure caught my attention: $1,111. This is how much businesses spent per person on training in the year 2020. What stru

Rediscovering the Taste of Toast

By Jon Miller - November 23rd, 2021

This week I had the opportunity to abstain from food for a couple of days for medical reasons. This wasn’t my first experience with fasting. The couple of times I did when I was much younger, I didn’t enjoy it. I was more a

What’s Lean All About?

By Jon Miller - November 15th, 2021

I’ve been working on refreshing and enhancing our learning resources related to Total Productive Maintenance, or TPM. People may be familiar with these letters as they appear in kaizen bursts on a value stream map. In this contex

Thinking Beyond the Brain

By Kevin Meyer - November 12th, 2021

I recently finished one of the more remarkable books I’ve read in a long time: The Extended Mind – The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain, by Annie Murphy Paul. This is a well-researched (over 250 journal citations) yet

Going to Gemba Isn’t Sufficient

By Ron Pereira - November 5th, 2021

As I’ve mentioned before I’m one of several coaches for a high school football team here in Texas. Like just about every other high school football team (and many middle school teams) we film every game and carefully dissec

Five Lean Questions for Rethinking Work

By Jon Miller - November 1st, 2021

The pandemic has caused many people to rethink their relationship to work. A record number of older workers are retiring early. More mid-career people are starting their own businesses. Both new and veteran members of the workforce are

Lessons in Lean and Agility from United Airlines

By Jon Miller - October 25th, 2021

Plans are worthless, planning is everything. Failing to plan is planning to fail. Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face. These and similar adages have been repeated by strategists, generals, and prizefighters over the

A Culture of Continuous Improvement Begins with Leadership

By Steve Kane - October 22nd, 2021

This is the second article, in a series of five, from Gemba Academy Senior Coach John Knotts. The remaining articles in this series will be posted over the next several weeks. Last month, we began our journey of Building a Culture of

Is Problem Solving a Team Sport or an Individual Effort?

By Jon Miller - October 18th, 2021

Have you ever wondered, “Is this particular problem one that a team should tackle, or one that an individual should handle?” A Knowledge@Wharton article shared the results of an experiment attempting to answer this question

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