Gemba Academy

How to Civilize an Elevator

By Jon Miller - June 25th, 2018

As recently as four years ago, my worked involved constant international travel. This is no longer the case. I miss very little of that life. One thing that I do miss is the exposure to other cultures, in particular how humans in vario

Set Full Sail

By Steve Kane - June 22nd, 2018

Getting started with lean in an existing organization challenging on many levels. Often some of the most important steps in a lean journey are not recognized. A common place people think they start is with 5S. It’s an

How to Take a Trail, or Not

By Jon Miller - June 18th, 2018

While shopping for gifts with my family this weekend, I noticed the store had many cards, mugs, printed items on the theme of, “Don’t follow the trail made by others but make your own.” This is spectacularly bad advic

Wellness Programs and the Health of Continuous Improvement

By Jon Miller - June 11th, 2018

Logical. Proven. Life-changing. These words equally describe successful health & wellness programs and continuous improvement programs. But do these programs really work in changing behaviors? Professors David Asch and Shreya Kan

A Simple Hand Gesture that is Key to Goal Alignment

By Jon Miller - June 4th, 2018

Lean management aims to serve others by doing more with less, thereby sustainably reaping just rewards for such service. Among other things, this requires everyone in the organization to continuously improve products, processes, servic

Using Solitude and Silence to Enable Personal Reflection

By Kevin Meyer - June 1st, 2018

I will take time to be alone today. I will take time to be quiet. In this silence I will listen… and I will hear my answers. – Ruth Fishel Last Memorial Day weekend, while the rest of the country was enjoying the roar of the Indy 5

Instructions Aren’t Enough

By Steve Kane - May 25th, 2018

During a recent airline emergency, cabin pressure was lost and the oxygen masks dropped from the ceiling. Passengers donned the masks, but not quite as instructed. Mobile phone videos of the incident showed many passengers wearing th

Compassion as a Competitive Advantage

By Jon Miller - May 21st, 2018

“The long-term value of a company is based on the speed and quality of its decision-making.” These are the words of Jeff Weiner, CEO of LinkedIn. He was speaking to the 2018 graduating business school students at the Univer

Why Have Belts in Lean and Six Sigma?

By Jon Miller - May 14th, 2018

Motorola and the General Electric company made the greatest contributions to introduce Six Sigma across business in the 20th century. The deployment of Six Sigma often relied on “belts” of various colors, people who complet

Learn by Preparing to Teach

By Kevin Meyer - May 11th, 2018

Many studies have shown that one of the most effective ways to learn new material is not just to perform an activity with the new knowledge, but to teach it. It’s the reason why several companies ask interview finalists for new

What’s the Right Way to Do a Gemba Walk?

By Jon Miller - May 7th, 2018

From time to time people ask me a variation of the question, “What’s the right way to do a gemba walk?” They want to see an outline of activities, a step-by-step process for planning, taking the walk and reflecting on

Lean Municipal Government Forum in Grand Rapids

New Videos: Lean Municipal Government Forum

By Kevin Meyer - May 4th, 2018

Is your city’s government using lean? If not, perhaps you should forward this to them! We just released a new video series with the presentations and tours from the Lean Municipal Government Forum recently held in Grand Rapids, M

How do you walk the gemba?

By Ron Pereira - May 4th, 2018

Later this year we’re going to produce a course focused on the gemba walk. We have lots of ideas of how to approach this course but, like many aspects of lean, if you ask 10 “experts” how to go about the gemba walk

Lean Leadership is Teaching Learned Helpfulness

By Jon Miller - April 30th, 2018

When we use the expression “three-ring circus” we mean that the situation is chaotic and full of activity, not that it is entertaining. Chaotic or not, it takes effort to train animals to perform. Three-ring circuses and d

Where Do I Start with Lean?

By Steve Kane - April 27th, 2018

Where should I start with Lean? is a common question we receive at Gemba Academy. Some say starting with 5S is a must. Others favor eliminating the seven deadly wastes. Others still suggest value stream mapping. A great question

Too Good to Be True? Sustaining Kaizen for 20 Years

By Jon Miller - April 23rd, 2018

In podcast #211 we caught up with Jeff Kaas, the President of Kaas Tailored. When we first met, Jeff was 30 and I was 27 years old. He had just taken over the family business. Jeff suspected that he didn’t know what he was doin

Lean Lessons from a Do-Nothing Scholar-Bureaucrat

By Jon Miller - April 16th, 2018

The words of the fourth century Taoist philosopher Zhuanzi led to a previous article about Lean thinking and respect for humanity. Another piece of writing attributed to him is titled Geng Sang Chu. It tells the story of a disciple of

The Importance of Respect for People in Problem-Solving

By Kevin Meyer - April 13th, 2018

Respect for people is one of the two core pillars of lean, if not the most important. We talk and write about it a lot, and it is a significant component of Gemba Academy’s online lean training programs. When respect for people i

The Three Key Metrics for Continuous Improvement

By Jon Miller - April 9th, 2018

There are three key metrics to track our progress when striving for the ideal of continuous improvement. What we call continuous improvement (CI) is in fact unattainable. Something that is continuous is uninterrupted and never rests. E

The Thinking Rat Race

By Ron Pereira - April 6th, 2018

We’ve recently had some really fun podcast conversations centered around the whole “respect for people” topic. My friend and colleague, Jon Miller, challenged the idea of whether lean is really all about people. Fel

How Lean Transformations Achieve a Fast Takeoff, Part 2 of 2

By Jon Miller - April 2nd, 2018

In part 1, we learned about recalcitrance and how it could prevent a fast takeoff of a superintelligence. We then drew a comparison to organizations investing effort into becoming smarter by learning and improving on a continual basis.

How Lean Transformations Achieve a Fast Takeoff, Part 1 of 2

By Jon Miller - March 26th, 2018

Superintelligence, as defined in the book Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies by Nick Bostrom, is “any intellect that greatly exceeds the cognitive performance of humans in virtually all domains of interest.” Hum

Lean is All About People – Or is It? 2 of 2

By Jon Miller - March 19th, 2018

In Part 1, we asked whether it was true that lean was “all about the people” and saw that lean was at least as much about flow, batch size reduction, and the various lean methods that enable this. What are the other two mai

Lean is All About People – Or is It? 1 of 2

By Jon Miller - March 12th, 2018

Lean is all about people. Few get very far arguing against this proposition because, when you do, you lose the people. As with any socio-technical system, engaging the people plays a large part in the success of lean. It feels good to

Will the Smart City be a Lean City?

By Jon Miller - March 5th, 2018

Today we live in an era in which our phones, watches, household appliances and our homes themselves are getting smart. At the moment, all “smart” means is “internet connected”. This is a bit ironic as when humans connect to tod

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