Go to Gemba

I was facilitating a workshop in a large automobile assembly plant in Great Britain. The factory was a part of a large, western, multinational auto manufacturer. In my group, one of three or four, there were participants from several other parts of Europe and the United States.  This was to be a big learning experience for the entire corporation.

Everyone had gone through a day of lecture and discussion about the principles, concepts and some of the methodologies used in kaizen. Finally, on day two, all of the participants were sent out to the factory to find ways to improve parts of the assembly line. 

Each of the workshop groups was facilitatied by a consultant.  My group was to focus on the installation of the headliners in cars that came down the line.

Every group was given a meeting room.  Our group had about ten people. We gathered in our assigned meeting room and sat around a round table on which were piled a number of drawings of the shop floor and the section in which we would be working, as well as several stacks of printouts with data on throughput time, defect rates, line down-time, and probably several other trends which I do not remember.

Getting these managers out of the meeting room proved to be difficult.  They wanted to “study the data.”  I had to become more and more insistent that we go out to the section of the line we had been assigned to us. We needed to go to gemba (gemba means the “real place,” used in kaizen to refer to the place where value is added) to  Identify waste, which we had learned about the day before. I told the team that after that, we could get away from the noise for a bit, back in the conference room and discuss possible improvements.

The Undercover Boss

The premier of Undercover Boss took place last night, immediately after the Super Bowl. In this latest version of a “reality show,” Larry O’Donnell, President and Chief Operating Officer of Waste Management strips off his suit and tie and goes to work in several jobs in his company, as a guy named Randy, making a “documentary” about seeking entry level work. He sorts recycling, cleans portable toilets, attempts to pick up flying debris at a landfill and (for the first time in his life) is fired for not having what it takes.

He spends a day helping collect residential trash, where he discovers that his female boss for the day has to pee in a tin can while at work, because her schedule does not permit her to take the time to do it any other way. She also feels resentful of the inspectors who sometime follow her in unmarked white pickup trucks. Jaclyn, an administrative assistant to the a landfill manager on an administrative assistant’s hourly wage, is also the scale operator, the scale supervisor and handles all accounts payable and accounts receivable. She’s had cancer five times by the age of 25 (she is now 29) and supports a household that includes, in Larry’s words, three families. She has her house up for sale, because she cannot afford it.