Gemba Academy Podcast: Lean Six Sigma | Toyota Kata | Productivity | Leadership

Something fundamental has shifted in how people relate to work, and most leaders are still operating from a story that the workforce has already left behind. Jonathan David Lewis, president of brand strategy firm McKee Wallwork and author of The Rebuilders, makes the case that the old shared narrative of careers, retirement, and institutional trust has fractured. What comes next depends entirely on whether leaders choose to rebuild it.

In this episode you'll learn:

What forgetting obvious things costs a leader over time (2:34)

Why Jonathan wrote a daily reader instead of a conventional leadership book (5:05)

How the shared story of work collapsed and what replaced it (8:14)

What TFS reveals about the current workforce's relationship to the future (11:41)

Why counter-trends in the trades and faith communities signal a rebuilding moment (16:29)

How the shift from print-first to digital-first thinking is reshaping the workforce (19:30)

What inside-out leadership means when the burden gets heavy (24:41)

Whether optimism is a feeling or a daily choice (28:30)

Why the era of postmodernism is over and what younger generations are seeking instead (30:41)

"When you see the crack, look for the light that's being let in." - Jonathan David Lewis

Keep Learning

If Jonathan's argument about inside-out leadership resonated, the School of Leadership offers a structured way to develop the character and practices that sustain that kind of work over time.

Learn More About School of Leadership at https://www.gembaacademy.com/leadership

Podcast Resources

Jonathan on LinkedIn

McKee Wallwork

"The Rebuilders"

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What Do You Think?

In your organization, which part of the old story of work is your team still holding onto, and what would it look like to rebuild something more honest in its place?

Most organizations spend enormous energy developing leaders and almost none developing teammates. Stanford Associate Head Men's Basketball Coach Eric Reveno has spent 30 years watching what actually determines whether a team wins or collapses, and his answer is not the coach. The conversation moves from college basketball to NIL compensation to Michael Jordan to what you should do first when you walk into a struggling team. The thread running through all of it is the same uncomfortable idea: the people in the room are more responsible for the culture than anyone standing at the front of it.

In this episode you'll learn:

The quote that reframes what culture actually is (3:19)

Why leadership is overtaught and teammate behavior is undertaught (6:07)

What NIL is and why it changed the dynamics of building a team (13:52)

What showing up as a great teammate actually looks like day to day (18:35)

Whether a player like Michael Jordan was truly a good teammate (21:55)

Why talent alone does not produce connection on a team (27:24)

How to identify and address the real problems when a team is struggling (30:15)

Why every person's ability to change their future depends on being a great teammate (33:49)

"Everyone's true agency and true ability to change their future and create the world they want, it lies in their ability to be a great teammate." - Eric Reveno

Keep Learning

If Eric's point about teammate behavior being undertaught resonated, the School of Leadership is a direct next step for practitioners who want to build the kind of team culture he describes rather than just study it.

Learn More About School of Leadership at https://www.gembaacademy.com/leadership

Podcast Resources

Eric on LinkedIn

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What Do You Think?

In your organization, who carries more responsibility for the team's culture: the leader at the front of the room, or the teammates deciding what they will and will not tolerate?

Most leaders think their biggest risk is making the wrong call. Cornelia Choe argues the real danger comes earlier, when a leader stops questioning the mental map they're using to make calls in the first place. In her book The Panoramic Leader, co-authored with Marshall Goldsmith, Cornelia builds a case that continuous change has made the old leadership playbook obsolete. The world stopped being a predictable highway, and too many leaders are still staring at the rearview mirror.

In this episode you'll learn:

What the quote "Achievement is all about me, but leadership is all about them" really means (3:33)

Why continuous change broke the old model of leadership (6:49)

How the GEM method helps leaders navigate constant change (9:52)

Why G must come before E in the GEM sequence (11:31)

How panoramic leadership builds on go-and-see (13:15)

What mapping your evolving perspective actually looks like in practice (17:44)

Why success is the most dangerous place to stop learning (23:25)

What optimistic fear is and why courage alone is not enough (26:25)

Three questions that pull leaders out of autopilot (29:40)

"One of the greatest dangers we can have is to stop mapping." - Cornelia Choe

Keep Learning

If Cornelia's point about seeing the system from multiple angles resonated, the School of Leadership can help you build the habits that turn that awareness into consistent practice.

Learn More About School of Leadership at https://www.gembaacademy.com/leadership

Podcast Resources

Cornelia's Website

Cornelia on LinkedIn

"The Panoramic Leader"

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What Do You Think?

When did you last seriously question whether the mental map guiding your decisions still reflects the reality around you?

A suppressor manufacturer in Utah started its lean transformation about a year ago. Twelve months later, inventory turns had doubled, changeover time dropped from 3.5 hours to 9 minutes, and a rollout planned for a year got compressed to three months. Slaytor Baldwin, Director of Operations at SilencerCo, joined Ron Pereira to walk through exactly how that happened, including the five years of failed starts that preceded it and what finally changed.

In this episode you'll learn:

How a single cell pilot compressed a year-long rollout into three months (0:00)

What starting a career inside a lean company teaches you without knowing it (3:17)

Why measuring resource utilization instead of customer demand creates invisible dysfunction (6:04)

How one leadership change unlocked five years of stalled momentum (10:08)

What the first two moves of a real lean commitment look like in practice (12:46)

Why starting with your hardest product family creates conviction no training can replicate (14:51)

What happened to inventory turns when the entire factory went cellular (17:43)

Why lean is not an operations game and what that costs you when you treat it like one (19:59)

Why picking the right first project matters more than having the right toolkit (24:22)

How failure functions as data when you build a learning culture around it (28:43)

Why most transformation decisions are a two-way door and what changes when leaders believe that (29:17)

"Lean is not a template. It is a culture." - Slaytor Baldwin

Keep Learning

If the shift from departmental batch production to cellular flow described in this episode has you thinking about your own factory layout, the School of Lean covers value stream design, SMED, and cellular manufacturing in depth.

Learn More About School of Lean at https://www.gembaacademy.com/school-of-lean

Podcast Resources

Slaytor on LinkedIn

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What Do You Think?

When you look at your own organization, is the resistance to lean transformation coming from the shop floor or from the layer above it?

Confidence and arrogance can look identical from the outside. George Barrios has spent a career in rooms where the difference mattered, from running a semiconductor division at 29 to co-leading a $20 billion merger between WWE and UFC. His book, Sometimes Wrong, But Never in Doubt, started as a phrase buried in a performance review and grew into a full operating philosophy about where real conviction comes from. The answer is less inspiring than most people want to hear, and more actionable than most people expect.

In this episode you'll learn:

What "chip on shoulder equals chips in pocket" means to founders (2:29)

How early circumstances shape a lifelong drive to prove something (3:38)

How a career spanning Praxair, WWE, and global sports investment came together (5:45)

Where the title "Sometimes Wrong, But Never in Doubt" actually came from (8:47)

The difference between confidence earned through deep work and false bravado (13:18)

What conviction looks like in practice when pressure hits (17:09)

How to treat failure as a signal rather than a verdict (20:27)

What separates smart risk from recklessness (24:24)

Why doing work you are naturally good at changes everything (27:31)

"To get through that, you need to do the work that drives the conviction to push through." - George Barrios

Keep Learning

If George's point about deep work as the foundation of leadership conviction resonated, the School of Leadership offers structured ways to build that same discipline in yourself and your team.

Learn More About School of Leadership at https://www.gembaacademy.com/leadership

Podcast Resources

George's Website

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What Do You Think?

When you look at the leaders around you who project strong conviction, can you tell whether it comes from deep preparation or from something else entirely?

Most organizations have the systems. They have the processes, the KPIs, the structured meetings, the strategic plans. And they are still stuck. Norman Wolfe has spent decades helping leadership teams understand why, and the answer keeps coming back to something the org chart cannot capture. The beliefs, priorities, and unspoken assumptions that shape how departments actually behave are running the show, often invisibly.

In this episode you'll learn:

Why a quote about paradigms became the lens for Norman's entire career (3:03)

Why strong systems alone are not enough to fix execution problems (11:39)

How departments behave like people and why that changes everything (15:00)

What it actually looks like to surface and resolve a context conflict between departments (19:21)

Three lenses leaders can use to see what is really blocking performance (24:50)

What Norman would tell his younger self about building a lasting career (28:19)

Why developing organizational maturity matters as much as optimizing processes (30:33)

"Change the paradigm and what was difficult and almost impossible in one becomes easy and simple in another." - Norman Wolfe

Keep Learning

If the gap between your organization's systems and its actual execution sounds familiar, the School of Leadership can help you build the skills to work on both the visible and invisible forces shaping your team's behavior.

Learn More About School of Leadership at gembaacademy.com/leadership

Podcast Resources

Norman on LinkedIn

Norman's Website

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Stay current on new courses, podcast episodes, and continuous improvement resources. Sign up for the Gemba Academy newsletter at gembaacademy.com/news

What Do You Think?

When you look at the persistent friction between departments in your organization, does it look more like a process problem or a context problem?

Most people trying to improve their lives are doing it without a clear picture of what they are building toward. For Joel Steele, a near-miss with prison forced him to start making different choices. His book "Life Switch" grows out of that turning point, and the framework he describes maps surprisingly well onto the tools that continuous improvement professionals use every day.

In this episode you'll learn:

Why progress builds momentum faster than motivation alone (0:02)

The quote Joel likes (3:19)

How focus shapes the direction of everything you do (4:09)

What a near-death experience reveals about wasted potential (6:06)

How the puzzle analogy reframes goal-setting for real life (8:58)

Why believing in the process separates progress from stagnation (13:22)

How failure functions as fuel rather than a stop sign (14:47)

The difference between living on and merely surviving each day (18:46)

How understanding your wiring unlocks the right role for you (21:27)

Why fulfillment is the only scorecard that actually matters (24:13)

How buying one book becomes part of a million-dollar donation (27:27)

"It's simple in theory, but it's hard to execute. But when you understand that, hey, this is going to work and you believe in that process and you don't have doubt in yourself, you make so much more progress." - Joel Steele

Keep Learning

If Joel's point about believing in the process resonated, the School of Leadership is a natural next step for anyone who wants to build the kind of clarity and conviction that sustains continuous improvement over time. Learn More About the Gemba Academy School of Leadership.

Podcast Resources

Joel on LinkedIn

Joel's Website

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What Do You Think?

When you think about your own work in continuous improvement, do you have a clear enough picture of the finished puzzle to know where the next piece belongs?

Most continuous improvement practitioners are trained to prize logic and treat emotion as noise in the system. D. Earl Johnston spent nine years and thousands of research hours across twelve disciplines discovering that framing is backward. His book, "Choosing Emotions," grew out of a father-daughter moment involving depression, post-it notes, and a single powerful text message. What came out of that work challenges something most leaders have never stopped to question.

In this episode you'll learn:

What Winston Churchill's 8 words reveal about how emotions work (3:14)

How a father-daughter dinner became a 9-year research project on emotions (3:57)

The three most common misunderstandings people have about emotions (11:40)

Why doom scrolling is an emotionally driven navigation, not a bad habit (16:56)

What ego actually is and why most high-performers misunderstand it (19:12)

Why trauma persists until you find the words to describe it (22:00)

How naming an emotion releases its grip on your behavior (26:11)

What neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett says about emotional vocabulary (28:05)

How an emotionary differs from an ordinary dictionary (31:13)

Why making friends with your emotions makes life easier (32:13)

Keep Learning

If the idea that naming an emotion is the first step to solving a problem resonates with how you think about coaching and people development, the School of Leadership builds on exactly that kind of human-centered foundation.

Podcast Resources

"Choosing Emotions"

Choosing Emotions Website

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What Do You Think?

Where in your work do you see emotional vocabulary, or the lack of it, affecting how problems get solved?

This week's guest is Ben Hansen. Ron and Ben discussed how Ben helps companies improve their profit margins, dealing with "profititis," shifting your focus from revenue to profitability, and more. An MP3 audio version of this episode is available for download here.

In this episode you'll learn:

Ben's quote (2:23)

His background (3:59)

How Ben helps companies double their profits (6:57)

The most common "profit leaks" (9:28)

An example using a manufacturing facility (20:17)

About "profititis" (23:29)

How you address it (26:05)

Shifting the focus from revenue to profitability (27:38)

Ben's thoughts on accounting (32:05)

Separating the signal from the noise (36:09)

Ben's parting thoughts (37:24)

Podcast Resources

Right Click to Download this Podcast as an MP3

Ben on LinkedIn

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What Do You Think?

Has your business ever suffered from profit leaks or profititis? How did you know?

This week's guest is Andy Olrich. Ron and Andy discussed the roles of people and tools in continuous improvement, what NOT to do when building a lean culture, teaching younger generations, and more. An MP3 audio version of this episode is available for download here.

In this episode you'll learn:

The quote Andy likes (3:40)

His background (4:25)

Andy's "Aha" moment when it comes to lean (13:33)

How his perspective has changed (16:58)

What not to do when building a culture of lean (22:47)

Andy's work with younger generations (29:28)

His advice for those just getting started (39:08)

Podcast Resources

Right Click to Download this Podcast as an MP3

Andy on LinkedIn

The Lean Solutions Podcast

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What Do You Think?

What was your lean "Aha" moment?