Here is a short video clip captured during the taping of a kaizen event for Gemba Academy’s “The Kaizen Way” course.

In this clip Mike Wroblewski, of Gemba Consulting and Got Boondoggle, explains how a simple board is used to track maintenance activities on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis.

What do you think of this visual control?  Can you see something like this working for your organization?

Note: If you are reading this via RSS or email you’ll likely need to click through to the website.  Once there, click the arrow in the middle of the video player to start the video.

I absolutely love this.  Enjoy.  Oh, and if you’re reading this on an iPhone or via RSS reader/email you’ll likely need to click through to the site.

Have you ever been forced to listen to a monotone, boring, and oh so irritating instructor teach a class? I’m guessing most of you are nodding your head up and down.

Well I have and can tell you one thing… it hurts. A lot!

But it doesn’t have to be like this. Over the years I have learned some tricks and tips that have helped me immensely. And while I don’t claim to be the world’s best instructor… I can hold the attention of a room no matter the topic – even descriptive statistics!

1. Know Your Stuff

This one may sound obvious. But you’d be amazed how many times I have seen instructors attempt to “teach” a class by reading the slides back to me.

If you don’t have a deep understanding of the content you’re about to present I suggest you take the time to gain a deep understanding of the material.

In other words, you should have some real life, practical experiences to share with the students.

2. Work the Room

I am not 100% sure what the “presentation police” teach in presentation school… but standing in one spot doesn’t work for me.

I need to move about the room in a fluid manner. I especially like to “work the U” when the students are sitting in a U shaped manner. This allows me to connect with students and make the training more personal and less sterile.

3. Lighten Up

Life is too short to not laugh a bit… so be sure to have some fun.

I mean if I can find ways to make people laugh and smile while teaching them how to calculate sample standard deviation by hand anything is possible!

While not an exact science, I try to find a way to make people smile and preferably laugh every 12 minutes. Research shows that adults need some sort of stimulation every 10 to 15 minutes so do your best to keep them smiling.

4. Speak with Confidence and Passion

This tip is related to tip 1. You see if you really know the material you’re far more likely to speak with confidence and passion. If, however, you’re up there faking it there is little hope you can pull this off.

Speaking with confidence means you NEVER say things like “I believe the answer is…” or “I think you’re right…” or any other wishy washy phrase.

As soon as you use a wishy washy phrase you’ll lose half the room since they’ll believe you don’t know what you’re talking about… which won’t be true if you listen to step 1.

5. Memorize the First Sentence of Each Slide

When I was first learning to teach I would often write out what I wanted to say for each slide. Of course I rarely said these exact words… but the simple fact I at least had a plan gave me a lot of confidence.

So while I don’t propose you “memorize” every word you plan to say it can never hurt to have at least the first sentence or two for each slide on the tip of your tongue.

What do you think?

Do you agree with my list? If you’ve ever done any teaching what techniques have you found to be useful?

As a frequent traveler to the UK I can definitely appreciate this device.  It’s simple, yet profound.  I am not sure if it is available for purchase yet… but if it is I plan to buy one next time I fly across the pond. What do you think of this device? Thumbs up?

I would really appreciate your thoughts on this simple, 2 question survey that should take less than 30 seconds to complete. A big thanks in advance for your time and valuable insight!

Click Here to take survey

John Hunter recently commented that he owns some Toyota stock. And since I value John’s wisdom I decided to take a look at the TM chart to see what it looked like.

Now, before I go any further, let me be crystal clear… I am not offering any financial advice and, at least for now, I am not an owner of Toyota stock. I do own two Toyota vehicles though… and LOVE them but I digress. Oh, and Toyota also has a rocking production system but, again, I’m digressing!

Fun with Technical Analysis

Anyhow, I used to mess around trading stocks. And since I’ve studied things like technical analysis I thought it might be kind of fun to track Toyota’s stock from a technical perspective.

Let me also say that I am far from an expert at this and would love nothing more than to hear your opinions of what you see and what you think will happen.

My Take on the TM Stock

Anyhow, here is my first take on what I see… keeping it real simple for now. In the future I may pull out some fun stuff like Fibonacci retracements and MACD crossovers… but for today’s lesson we’ll look at some simple support and resistance lines.

If you click on the chart you’ll notice that this stock had been on a steady downward trend bouncing between a nice little “channel” that I’ve manually drawn in.

Then, the stock was crushed in early October of 2008 as Toyota failed to impress the street with their FY 2009 Guidance.

After this beating the stock gyrated sideways finding support around $60 (point A). It also, interestingly enough, found resistance at what used to be a support line (point B). Isn’t this stuff intriguing?

Anyhow, in April of this year the stock finally managed to bust back into the channel only to meet the same downward trending resistance (point C) which forced it back down.

What’s Next?

From a purely technical perspective the biggest question mark I have is whether or not the stock will find support at around $68 (point D). If it does, it could possibly see a bullish bounce up… but, AGAIN, I am not offering any financial advice here. I’m just a nerd who loves to look at charts.

What do you think?

What do you think? Are you bullish or bearish on Toyota’s stock? Do you see anything else on their chart I might be missing?

I used to check my website stats several times a day.  I’ll admit, I had a problem… but I’m guessing most bloggers have similar issues when first starting out.

Well, I’m happy to say that I now check my website stats about once a week.  And I check my “ebook stats” about once every two months since they’re found on another website.

Time to Check Some Stats

Well, it had been a few months since I had logged in to see how many people had downloaded the LSS Academy Guide to Lean ebook so I recently checked it out.

I logged into my Aweber account and started digging around.  After a few minutes I came upon some graphs I had never seen before.

After some more digging and clicking I came upon the graph to the left (click to enlarge it).

Upon first glance (the arrows weren’t there) I was fairly pleased with the nice slope.  But the more I looked at it the more I felt like something was unique about the slope.  It seemed like it intensified around November of last year.

Time for Minitab

Well, being the lean six sigma nerd that I am… I decided to export the data into Minitab for some serious data analysis.  I applied some formulas in order to graph the number of new ebook downloads per month.

With this data I then created the Individuals and Moving Range Chart to the left (click to enlarge).

Well, as you can clearly see something definitely “happened” around November of 2008.  And while our website traffic has consistently grown, month over month, it hasn’t grown this much in one month.

Something else had to be happening.  But what?  Then I remembered!

Design Changes Make an Impact!

Late last November I had my web design guy make a small tweak to the LSS Academy site.  The tweak had to do with the ebook sign-up form.  Basically I had him enlarge it.  I also paid a guy a few bucks to design a really slick cover for the ebook.

Well, it would seem that these small changes made a rather significant difference to the number of ebook downloads.

Data Analysis Lesson

Aside from being a good lesson on how important things like web design can be to a website’s performance, this experience also taught me how important it is to properly analyze data.

Some folks may have stopped after looking at the first graph… but it wasn’t until the second graph, with control limits in place, that we could be sure that something truly significant occured.

Free Control Chart Training

If you’d like to learn more about control charts, and don’t want to spend a dime, please check out these articles I’ve dusted off from the archives.

• Control Charts Part 1: In this article I explain what control charts are, their history, why control limits are +/- 3 standard deviations from the mean.
• Control Charts Part 2: Attribute data – p chart, c chart, u chart
• Control Charts Part 3: Variable data – I MR charts

What about you?

How else would you have looked at my data?  Have you used control charts successfully in your place of work?  And what about my fellow bloggers… have any of you thrown your data into Minitab for a little fun?