Gemba Academy

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

How Would Taiichi Ohno Leverage Bezosism?

By Jon Miller - October 11th, 2021

An article in the Wall Street Journal titled The Way Amazon Uses Tech to Squeeze Performance Out of Workers Deserves Its Own Name: Bezosism argues that the way the company manages its warehouse workers is not people-friendly. Safety in

Continuous Improvement Storyboards

By Jon Miller - October 4th, 2021

Lean management has a positive bias for making things visible. This ranges from large and abstract things like performance, progress toward strategic goals, and problem-solving projects down to smaller concrete things like the correct

The Power of Neutral Thinking

By Ron Pereira - October 1st, 2021

“It’s okay to have emotions… just don’t be emotional.” – Russell Wilson One of the great joys of my life has been the ability to coach many of my children’s youth sports teams. It all started b

The Current State of Grasping the Current Condition

By Jon Miller - September 27th, 2021

During a conversation the other day with my friend and colleague Ron Pereira, he mentioned an interesting point. This was in regards to the current state of the continuous improvement community’s understanding of the term current

Visual Management of Our Readiness

By Jon Miller - September 20th, 2021

One of the most accessible and basic continuous improvement tools is a workplace organization and visualization practice known as 5S. It has roots that go back perhaps 100 years. The 5S as we know it today seems to have roots in the CA

How Important Is Physical Presence on the Gemba?

By Jon Miller - September 13th, 2021

Nearly thirty years ago when I first ventured into the field of kaizen, continuous improvement, and what’s come to be known as lean management, there was no commercial internet. This meant that if you wanted to talk to someone, y

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

GA 387 | The Anatomy of a Lean Leader with Rick Foreman

By Jessica Bush - September 2nd, 2021

This week’s guest is Rick Foreman. Rick shared a powerful anecdote and explained what he’s been up to. Ron and Rick also broke down the ten essential traits of a lean leader. An MP3 audio version of this episode is availa

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

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