Gemba Academy

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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