Furthermore, Kaizen emphasises the importance of going to the source, also known as "Gemba." This principle encourages individuals to directly observe and engage with the actual place where work is done, enabling a deeper understanding of processes and identifying opportunities for improvement. In addition, it advocates for standardisation and standard work, promoting the establishment of clear processes and procedures that can be continuously refined. Kaizen in practice The philosophy of Kaizen is just as easy to apply to individual change as to change in a business; it is about setting long-term, medium-term and short-term goals, then thinking of small, incremental adjustments you can make to work towards these goals. I got starry eyed as I continued reading about how to apply Kaizen to work. It's so detailed yet practical and so calming to read. The amazing pictures do help a lot in reading such a book. As it's a nonfiction, self-help kind of read, the pace of the book is maintained so well with the right division of pictures and actual practical tips. I just want to quote, 'Kaizen is a noun in Japanese and is used to mean improvement, whether that is big or small, one-time or continuous.'

Business leaders can use Kaizen to improve customer and staff satisfaction. If you listen to the needs of both the people who work for you and those who buy your products then you’ll have happier staff and customers. This can also lower some business costs as you won’t waste time on things that aren’t important – and time is money! When your inventory feels complete, you should choose a goal – or several. Find out what you really want by digging deep. After you’re done with that, write down your biggest aspirations in each category. 2. Your first change should be so small you barely notice it.Hanebuth, D. (2002). Rethinking Kaizen: An empirical approach to the employee perspective. In J. Felfe (Ed.), Organizational Development and Leadership (Vol. 11, pp. 59-85). Frankfurt a. M.: Peter Lang. ISBN 978-3-631-38624-8. Rooted in the two-thousand-year-old wisdom of the Tao Te Ching—“The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step”—here is the way to change your life without fear, without failure, and start on a new path of comfortable, continuous improvement. Another company that uses Kaizen is Nestle. In this case, it was implemented to help reduce factory waste – by using value stream mapping (VSM), which we’ll look at later – and to change the company culture by asking employees what they valued and making improvement a responsibility for all. Advantages and disadvantages of using Kaizen

Kaizen is perhaps the most widely misunderstood concept in the practice of Lean thinking today. Much of the confusion centers around the very important distinctions between the true spirit of kaizen (everyone in the organization engaged in making continual improvements to the way their work is done) and the kaizen event (informal, temporary teams performing discontinuous improvement planning for the larger organization). Cube kaizen describes the situation where all the points of the planes are connected to each other and no point is disjointed from any other. This would resemble a situation where Lean has spread across the entire organization. Improvements are made up and down through the plane, or upstream or downstream, including the complete organization, suppliers and customers. This might require some changes in the standard business processes as well.A gorgeously illustrated introduction to the Japanese method of Kaizen – meaning 'change' 'good' – showing you how to make small, step-by-step changes to transform your life.