Kaizen Cookbook

After years of writing out the same forms and instructions, making procedures for other companies with the same charts and instructions (in their template, of course), I have spent the time to just put it together one last time in a format everyone can get their hands around. A book.

It is available on Amazon as of today.

This is not an encyclopedia of Kaizen techniques, nor is it a history of Kaizen. This is the boiled-down version of the best, most straight-forward approach I know to running a Kaizen. The idea was to make a tool my new engineers could read in about and hour or so and understand what a Kaizen is about. If one of those folks spends a whole day thinking about the information in this little book they should be able to lead a Kaizen. It won’t be perfect, it won’t go smoothly, but it will work and it will give the folks who use it the keys to running more Kaizen.

I did a lot of background research while I was finishing this book. I know the tools and techniques I like to use, I know how to introduce new folks to the ideas and tools, but there were a lot of questions I didn’t have an answer to. Masaaki Imai, a name rarely found in all the literature I have accumulated on Kaizen, was the fellow who wrote the book and brought the term to the West. His book covers a lot of other related material and it covers the idea of Kaizen, but the book doesn’t tell a westerner how to do Kaizen. Six Sigma books aren’t a whole lot better – they discuss Kaizen and then often get distracted by the many tools needed – 5S, spaghetti diagrams, etc. The catch many of these books trip over is the detail each of these tools needs, and it distracts from the idea of a Kaizen. Robert Maurer, in his book “One small step can change your life: the Kaizen Way”, does an awesome job of covering the “small step” approach and why Kaizen can be so effective – stepping small and patiently in the direction of success, and he never once dropped into the gory details of a fishbone diagram or a 5S. This explanation Dr. Maurer details is awesome and a great thing for a Kaizen practitioner to know – but it won’t tell you how to setup and run a Kaizen. As far as I can tell, there is no other book out there yet that says “To do a Kaizen, follow these steps. Number one…”

Something interesting I learned while digging into questions I hadn’t thought of before – I have had several folk tell me Kaizen are DMAIC (Define, Measure, Analyze, Implement, Control). I had never given this any thought at all until I built a timeline and thought things through. Kaizen cannot be DMAIC. DMAIC is a construct of Six Sigma, PDCA is the structure from Shewhart and Deming to Japan. Since Kaizen comes from Japan, and the book trying to explain it was written in 1985 (Six Sigma was launched in 1986) Kaizen cannot be DMAIC. Trivial, but interesting.

Like any writer I am very interested in what my peers think of this book. If you grab a copy please send me a review. I promise to post it, good or bad, as long as the language doesn’t need deleting.