Gemba Academy

7 iPhone Tips to Boost Your Personal Productivity

By Ron Pereira - February 1st, 2019

Over the last month I’ve begun to experiment with some personal productivity boosting techniques. You see while I have developed some decent Leader Standard Work practices over the years I still waste(d) far too much time on no

How Wrong Should We Be?

By Jon Miller - January 28th, 2019

A Scientific American article titled How Wrong Should You Be? offered an answer to a question that has been in the back of my mind for a long time. Like many answers, this one raises further questions. Taiichi Ohno’s wrote in Wor

What’s the Thinking Behind the Tools

By Steve Kane - January 25th, 2019

I have a small hobby business I run on the weekends. It involves some simple assembly and kitting, which I do in my basement. I’ve come to the point where flow has become the next problem to solve. What’s the Convention

New Toyota Kata Resources Page

By Ron Pereira - January 23rd, 2019

Starting this month we are publishing a monthly article on a continuous improvement topic, with an accompanying resources page with resources, videos, and tools to support it. This month’s topic is Toyota Kata (TK) and the Scientific

How to do Direct Observation of Knowledge Work

By Jon Miller - January 21st, 2019

Knowledge workers are people who make their living primarily by thinking. They include software programmers, scientists, academics, physicians, lawyers, engineers, managers, architects, designers, accountants and various other white-co

The Importance of Problem Breakdown for New Year’s Resolutions

By Jon Miller - January 14th, 2019

Endings and beginnings are both good times for reflection. Many people set goals for the new year around now. My habit is to carry over most resolutions or personal goals from year to year. A positive way to view this is that there is

Herb Kelleher: Creating Economic Value Based on Human Values

By Kevin Meyer - January 11th, 2019

A legendary CEO, Herb Kelleher of Southwest Airlines, passed away last week. Many articles have already been written memorializing him, including this one by Bill Taylor in the Harvard Business Review and this one by our friend Mark

The 10 Commandments for a Lean Journey

By Jon Miller - January 7th, 2019

Raymond Chandler was an early 20th-century novelist of detective fiction. Most of his books were turned into movies. Fans of the genre may recall Humphrey Bogart’s iconic portrayal of Chandler’s detective Philip Marlowe. As

The Best of Gemba Academy’s Blog – 2018 Edition

By Ron Pereira - January 4th, 2019

Happy New Year! I pray 2019 is a fantastic year of personal growth and learning for you and yours! Now that 2018 has come and gone I wanted to take the opportunity to revisit the top blog articles from last year. Before we get to t

Small Improvements Instead of Resolutions for the New Year

By Steve Kane - December 28th, 2018

We’re closing in on the new year, a time when big ideas about improving our lives come to mind. It’s common knowledge that new year’s resolutions typically abandoned by Valentine’s Day. Taking on too much

A Day in the Life of a Gemba-focused Executive VP

By Jon Miller - December 17th, 2018

One of the essential principles of lean management is go to gemba. This is far more than literally going to the scene of the problem when doing root cause analysis or going the occasional gemba walk. It is an “ism” or philo

Who do you want to be?

By Ron Pereira - December 14th, 2018

A few weeks ago, in episode 239 of the podcast, I mentioned I was reading (actually listening) to the book Atomic Habits by James Clear. I finished listening to it. It was good. Real good. So good I bought a hard copy and am no

Respect for “Respect for Human Nature”

By Jon Miller - December 10th, 2018

There are three main perspectives on the lean thinking pillar of respect for people. First, respect for people means that all stakeholders deserve respect. A business does not prosper long-term focusing only on a few of them while igno

Avoid the Arbitrary Constraints of Time

By Kevin Meyer - December 7th, 2018

It’s that time of the year again when many people ask “where did the year go?” and furiously try to wrap up projects, crank out potentially unnecessary production, create plans and budgets for next year, and perhaps s

What Does it Mean to Measure Twice, Cut Once?

By Jon Miller - December 3rd, 2018

Last week I was appreciating some of our old podcasts and video interviews with lean practitioners. Our interviewer Ron Pereira always likes to ask a series of short, rapid-fire questions. One of my favorites is, “What is the bes

Lean Thinking and Embodied Cognition

By Jon Miller - November 26th, 2018

In the study of the mind through philosophy, psychology and biology, there is a theory called embodied cognition. Unlike the assumption that the mind is generated only by the brain, embodied cognition claims that many features of cogn

Applying Job Relations to Job Instruction

By Steve Kane - November 23rd, 2018

A customer I collaborate with from time to time is responsible for continuous improvement in several factories here in the US. For the ease of telling the story, we’ll call this customer Joe. Joe’s organization is begin

Three Ways to Slice the Social Loaf

By Jon Miller - November 19th, 2018

Humans accomplish things in teams. From the most basic unit of the family to local community to sports clubs to for-profit and non-profit organizations, people working toward a common goal is how we get big things done. Things one pers

How does Lean Thinking Help Us to Prepare for the Unpredictable?

By Jon Miller - November 12th, 2018

One of the goals of lean problem solving is to prevent recurrence of problems by finding and addressing its root causes. We identify the factors that are critical good outcomes. We learn when and how they vary outside of desired para

Looking Forward with Alfred Adler

By Kevin Meyer - November 9th, 2018

Meanings are not determined by situations, but we determine ourselves by the meanings we give to situations. – Alfred Adler I’m not really sure how it started, but one day a couple months ago I found myself diving down an i

How to Use Trees and Fish to Diagram Root Causes

By Jon Miller - November 5th, 2018

How effective we are at solving problems and keeping them solved depends on our ability to address them at their source. When we put out fires but fail to put in measures to prevent similar ones in the future, we fight the same fires a

AME 2018 Recap & KataCon5

By Ron Pereira - November 2nd, 2018

This past week was incredible. We were at the AME conference in San Diego and, man, was it fun! We were able to connect with so many people from all over the world. Our annual cocktail party was a success with around 350 people att

Five Questions to Reflect on Both Process and Results of Problem Solving

By Jon Miller - October 29th, 2018

When an organization’s culture is results-driven it is easy for people to receive the signal that it is okay to get results at any cost. This can lead to hiding poor results or problems. It can lead to false or shallow problem so

Disrupt Your Thinking

By Steve Kane - October 26th, 2018

Learn Something New Autumn seems to be conference season in the Lean community. I’ve attended events hosted by the Colorado Lean Network and the Michigan Lean Consortium in the past few weeks. Conferences are great opportunitie

Three Core Beliefs Fundamental to Standard Work

By Jon Miller - October 22nd, 2018

Standard work and kaizen are often described the two cornerstones of the Toyota Production System house, a.k.a. lean management. The various systems, methods and tools that make up the lean way of working rely on setting provisional st

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