Masaaki Imai continues to travel around the world leading gemba walks and giving keynote speeches to inspire people to do kaizen.

Congratulations to the Kaizen Institute UK team for a successful week of customer visits, speeches and gemba walks.

In 2012 we are planning events in the USA, France, Netherlands, China and other countries. Contact us to learn more about kaizen congresses with Masaaki Imai.

The production of the 2nd edition Gemba Kaizen: A Commonsense, Low Cost Approach to Management is well underway. Scheduled to be published by McGraw-Hill in 2012, the 2nd edition of the classic book by Masaaki Imai will contain updates to most chapters, more than a dozen new kaizen case studies, and a brand new chapter titled "The CEO's Role in Kaizen."

This new chapter is based on an interview between Arthur Byrne and Masaaki Imai conducted in Tokyo in October of this year. Arthur Byrne is an exemplary leader in kaizen and the former CEO of Wiremold, a company featured in Gemba Kaizen 1st edition. This chapter features the wisdom and insights of Arthur Byrne, including key actions for a CEO to succeed in creating a kaizen culture. These include:

And more! Look for more updates on Gemba Kaizen 2nd edition soon!

At Kaizen Institute we believe that "change for good" must mean more than simply improving financial performance for companies. Kaizen must also improve the lives of people and contribute to fulfilling basic social responsibilities. A recent event in Romania demonstrates creative ways of using 5S, a tools of kaizen, to bring people together to do good work.

During one week in October, three cities in Romania benefited from a “5S Public Action”. This was a collaboration between the Kaizen Institute business units in Romania, Italy and Japan, citizens, employees of local companies and the local authorities. Through cleaning, volunteers learned about teamwork and kaizen.

There were 250 volunteers, most of them young people, participating in kaizen education followed by clean-up activities in the cities of Brasov, Timisoara and Alba Iulia. The Kaizen Institute volunteers were joined by Mr. Yoshihito Tanaka, President and Mr. Toshio Chigusa, Vicepresident of Clean Up Japan Association, a not-for-profit organization working worldwide.

"The purpose of this 5S action was to extend kaizen management beyond companies to the cities, in order to improve the environment and the relationships between the local authorities, private companies and citizens." Said Julien Bratu, Country Manager for Kaizen Institute Romania.

For more information:

Gemba Academy, a Kaizen Institute group company, develops and delivers high quality online training in kaizen, lean management and continuous improvement topics. As of November 2011 we have 212 video modules and 100 hours of learning.

We add new content each month. In 2012 we will add courses on Built-in Quality systems, Kanban and Pull Systems, Lean Accounting and more!

View our full list of online training courses.