Leadership Commitment and Workforce Communication in Kaizen Management
Kaizen is a management philosophy with roots in both US and Japanese management practices. It comes from the Japanese words "Kai" meaning school and "Zen" meaning wisdom. Everyone is encouraged to come up with small improvement suggestions on a regular basis. Kaizen is a system of improvement that in Japan includes both home life as well as business improvements. Kaizen Management has important tool as Kaizen Events, which is also referred to as Kaizen Blitzes - are three to five days focused events during which a cross-functional team studies a process to identify waste and implements improvements to eliminate the root cause of the waste, generating rapid and often far more dramatic results than those typically obtained from traditional improvement methods. While originally embraced by manufacturing, Kaizen Events are now being used by industries of all types, and in organizations of all sizes to implement rapid change. A properly planned and executed event typica