Gemba Academy

Most kaizen practitioners know the moment when a skeptic turns. It can take a day, a week, or nine months, but something clicks and the person who crossed their arms at the start is now telling the VP what their line...

A worn gym weight stack reveals a surprising lesson about habits, progress, and kaizen. Sometimes the smallest step is the one that matters most. The post Skipping the 95 appeared first on Gemba Academy .

Most people who feel overwhelmed blame their schedule. Peggy Sullivan argues the diagnosis itself is wrong. Time poverty has nothing to do with time management and everything to do with capacity, and until you start...

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the present moment. It’s an interesting thing, really. We spend so much of our lives thinking about what’s already happened or what could happen. We replay...

Value stream mapping is one of the most familiar tools in lean practice. Christian Wolcott has spent 25 years using it with clients from Toyota suppliers to NASA, and he arrived at a question that most practitioners...

Building trust among team members may be one of the hardest parts of a leader’s job. It takes time, consistency, and intentional effort. We know great breakthroughs rarely happen when people don’t trust one...

Most lean practitioners know the theory of constraints. Fewer apply it before they start fixing things. Hessam Vali, a manufacturing consultant and MES software founder based in Wichita, argues that most improvement...

Every few years, I like to work my way through James Allen’s short book, As a Man Thinketh. This time, I listened to it as an audiobook. Each time I work through this classic, I come away with lots of thoughts and...

Most resistance to lean is blamed on the wrong thing. Ben Morley, an Air Force pilot turned Lean Six Sigma consultant, argues the tools are never really the problem. The breakdown almost always lives somewhere between...

I recently read a story I can’t stop thinking about. In 1903 a young boy in central Illinois was serving as an altar server at St. Mary’s Cathedral in Peoria, Illinois. And this wasn’t any ordinary...

Defining the PROBLEM I recently came across an article that confirmed what I’ve learned from my past experiences. Throughout my career reporting to leaders at various levels, criticism seemed to come far more...

Most organizations have a strategy. Far fewer can actually execute one. Michael Caito built and sold a food delivery business decades before DoorDash existed, then spent years helping other companies close the gap...

If you’re in a safe space and physically able…I’d like you to try something. Stand up, tilt your head back, and stand on your non-dominant foot (with your other foot off the ground). Easy enough...

Most lean practitioners spend their careers trying to change the minds of adults who have been doing things the same way for decades. Ted Pendergrass decided to start earlier. Over 20 years coordinating a career...

I recently listened to a sermon by Fr. Mike Schmitz where he brought up something called the Region Beta Paradox. I had never heard of it before…but haven’t stopped thinking about it since! Here’s the...