Gemba Academy

The Value of Friction and Inefficiency

By Kevin Meyer - September 10th, 2021

Our professional lives are generally consumed by trying to make our processes more efficient to reduce waste and help increase the value we deliver to our customers. Our personal lives are similarly consumed by trying to find time on

Blog Writing Workflow and Visual Management

By Jon Miller - September 6th, 2021

Here’s an update on my ongoing experiment in making the process of publishing forty-plus blog articles per year easier, more fun, and defect-free. It’s going well. I set a task for myself every Friday to look at the WIP wit

How to Build a Culture of Continuous Improvement

By Ron Pereira - September 3rd, 2021

This article was written by John Knotts. John recently joined the Gemba Academy team as a Senior Coach of Lean and Six Sigma. A culture of continuous improvement provides any company a significant advantage in the marketplace. But do

Coaching Problem Solvers at Toyota

By Jon Miller - August 30th, 2021

It’s widely accepted these days that sustaining excellence long term requires customer focus and continuous improvement. Organizations increasingly realize that people capable of thinking and solving problems are their greatest a

Don’t Change the Culture, Change the Cultural Inputs

By Steve Kane - August 27th, 2021

Company culture, loosely defined, is a set of shared beliefs, values, purpose, practices, behaviors, artifacts, language, goals, and attitudes within an organization. Changing culture continues to be a hot topic in the workplace. While

Five Practice Patterns for Succeeding as a New Manager

By Jon Miller - August 23rd, 2021

For many, stepping into a management position can bring a mix of excitement and doubt. On the one hand, it’s a recognition that we’ve done a great job in our functional role, and are ready to take the next natural step up i

Upgrading Our Value Stream Infrastructure

By Jon Miller - August 16th, 2021

I recently visited family in the Midwest section of the United States. We could tell exactly when we crossed the county line from the wealthier, more urban, and industrialized county with a much higher tax base into the rural, sparsely

Live Virtual Online Lean Experiences with the Kaas Pass

By Jon Miller - August 9th, 2021

Kaas Tailored has been on their continuous improvement journey for over twenty years. For the past ten years, they have been generous in sharing both the successes and struggles of their journey. More than forty thousand people have wa

How to Lead Without Subject Matter Expertise

By Jon Miller - August 2nd, 2021

This week, while reading a Wall Street Journal article, I was reminded of something James Womack said at a lean conference about a decade ago. It was during a speech about value stream management. He pointed out a main key difference b

Piloting Continuous Improvement

By Jon Miller - July 26th, 2021

During several recent conversations with customers, I found myself discussing the pilot as an effective way to roll out continuous improvement. Like many terms that have settled into common usage in the business world, this can mean di

What Is a Milk Run?

By Jon Miller - July 19th, 2021

The milk run is a method for connecting material movement between multiple sources and a storage location nearer to the point of use or processing. The name comes from a practice in the dairy industry. A tanker truck makes rounds to

Hypotheses from Hansei in Odd Times

By Jon Miller - July 12th, 2021

The Independence Day weekend has turned into sort of a second holiday of thanksgiving for me. It’s a chance to appreciate improving weather, fresh produce, and a moment to reflect on the last half-year. For the past decade or

Reconstructing Degraded Processes and a Yearning for Darkness

By Kevin Meyer - July 9th, 2021

Yesterday I returned from almost two weeks in Iceland, which was tacked on to two weeks exploring Maine. Nearly a month away from the home and office, and our first international trip in well over a year. We had a fantastic time with g

What Problem Are You Trying to Solve?

By Ron Pereira - July 2nd, 2021

One of my responsibilities here at Gemba Academy is to coach our Black Belt and Master Black Belt candidates. And, without question, the most common question I ask during the project selection phase of the journey is “What proble

The Five Steps to Getting Better at Anything

By Jon Miller - June 28th, 2021

Jerry Seinfeld is an immensely successful comedian. He has achieved fame and fortune through his skill at making funny observations about everyday things. An Inc. magazine article asks him why he still works so hard and receives a simp

Learning from a Blogging Experiment Failure

By Jon Miller - June 21st, 2021

We’re about ten weeks into running an experiment in blog post writing. The purpose is to be less deadline-driven, allow time for quality checks and make the writing process less of a weekly struggle. It was going well until this week

Respect for Soft Skills

By Jon Miller - June 14th, 2021

In lean circles we talk a lot about respect for people. Along with continuous improvement, it’s one of two core elements of the Toyota Way brand of lean thinking. In contrast to the tools and techniques of continuous improvement,

How to Think Long Term

By Jon Miller - June 7th, 2021

One of the 14 Toyota Way principles is to think long term. In fact, it’s the first on the list. What does it mean exactly to base decisions on the long term, in the context of lean management? Reading carefully, we can see that n

The Surprisingly Positive Power of Deception

By Jon Miller - May 31st, 2021

Recently I wanted to persuade an acquaintance to try something. It was a simple solution that I was pretty sure would work for them. There was very little practical downside. And yet as anyone who has ever tried to present a solution t

The Value of Lean Certifications

By Steve Kane - May 28th, 2021

It’s often argued that certifications are not required to practice Lean. This is absolutely true. Lean and other continuous improvement methods can and should be practiced by anyone in any organization without a certification or

Roundabout Lessons on Scaling Lean Solutions

By Jon Miller - May 24th, 2021

Traffic roundabouts are one of my favorite flow management devices. There is a physical WIP limit. They’re visual. Look to the left for oncoming traffic, if there is a gap, this is the “pull signal.” No oncoming car in the ci

How to Solve Hard Problems with Kaizen Events

By Jon Miller - May 17th, 2021

Many people are familiar with kaizen as a philosophy and practice of continuous improvement based on making many small changes repeatedly towards a long-term ideal. Often this takes the form of a creative idea suggestion scheme, a simp

On Learning, Listening, and Wisdom

By Kevin Meyer - May 14th, 2021

I’ve long felt that the single best indicator of leadership success, especially at the executive level, is whether the person is a voracious learner. Bonus points if the person intentionally looks for opportunities to learn new

Lessons from Twelve Years in Pursuit of Zero

By Jon Miller - May 10th, 2021

We often see a visual display of the safety performance metric “days since lost time incident” in workplaces. It’s common where the job requires physical labor or where there is injury risk. The more days, or the long

What Is Agile Kanban?

By Ron Pereira - May 7th, 2021

We’re excited to announce the release of our initial Introduction to Agile Kanban course. We have several more Agile Kanban related courses in the works but decided to release this first course now. What follows is the text from

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