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NEVER FINISHED Two Hours a Day in the "Gemba" Spending time on the shop foor can save your job and your business. Apprehensively I admit that for a time my image of the idyllic business leader was Gordon Gekko, the antagonist in the 1987 drama "Wall Street" — a brilliant, scheming, affluent high-roller doling out orders to minions from a posh Manhattan office suite. That's what being CEO is all about! So when I got my first shot at a CEO position, I modeled my behavior somewhat accordingly: on the phone with accountants, investors and attorneys (who were always happy to send me a bill regardless of whether we talked about my business or what we saw on SportsCenter); lunching with investment bankers as we chatted about potential acquisitions; holding meetings with my staff on efficiency projects, financial statements and customer satisfaction. I was The Man. Except … all the while my business was failing. Year-overyear performance was taking a dive. Over time, my regular discussions with investors morphed from dreaming about our future success to defending our poor performance. It got so bad that the board of directors assigned a boss to me. A "Group VP," as they called him. Since the only thing I wanted less than a boss was to be fired, I begrudgingly acquiesced. Then it started. Once a week my new boss would walk into my office and take me out to the shop When a client tells me his floor, peppering me with questions about the status business is struggling, the of orders, equipment frst thing I want to know performance and process is how much time he is control. After several weeks of my uninformed spending in the gemba, answers and promises to the place we go to reduce follow up on his quescost, improve quality, tions, he ordered me to spend at least two hours a create satisfed customers day "in the gemba." and build better teams. Gemba is a Japanese word meaning "real place." News reporters refer to the location of the story as the gemba. Detectives call the scene of the crime the gemba. In business, the gemba is the place where value is created. In manufacturing, the gemba is the shop floor. Immediately, I was put off by the group VP's use of the word gemba. Like many, I once cringed at the use of Japanese words in American manufacturing. Over the course of 15 years, however, after seeing examples such as the book "The Toyota Way" on the desk of the plant manager of one of the U.S.'s most iconic manufacturers and the announcement of a kaizen event posted on the wall in a Big Three 66 SEPTEMBER 2013 — pfonline.com automotive plant, I came to realize that I was fighting a losing battle. At any rate, not wanting to lose my job, I reluctantly began spending two hours a day in the gemba. It worked, and before long MATTHEW KIRCHNER, CEO I was amazed at American Finishing Resources, LLC what I learned about mkirchner@afrnow.com my business. When leaders spend time in the gemba, we: See our people. Shocking what we can learn about our shop from the people who actually do the work. This benefit is so significant that it consumed an entire edition of "Never Finished" almost four years ago. When we spend time in the gemba, we get closer to our team and the hurdles standing between them and our success. Let our people see us. And let them know we take a personal interest in them, their work and their role in the business. Identify the seven deadly wastes. Stand on the shop floor and look for examples of waiting, motion, inventory, rework, overproduction, overprocessing and transportation waste. Contrary to the belief of many, inefficiency generally doesn't manifest itself in team members standing around twiddling their thumbs or stretching out a job. We can't just eliminate cost by announcing a layoff. Instead, waste is buried in areas such as poor flow, work-in-process inventory and the absence of standard work. See equipment issues first-hand. What are the chronic equipment problems that come up over and over? Is the maintenance team busy performing preventive tasks or putting out fires? Improve our housekeeping. Most every shop has some version of the pre-customer visit scramble, where everything is tidied up just before the customer arrives. When the leader spends time in the gemba asking questions about tools that are out of place or product that isn't properly