Most Lean webinars are about operations. This one is about the operator -- the leader doing the work, in their own life, before any of it shows up at the office.
Kevin Meyer spent thirty years in executive operations roles across automotive lighting, telecom electronics, contract manufacturing, and medical devices, including eight years as president of Specialty Silicone Fabricators. Along the way, he co-founded Gemba Academy and started writing about Lean leadership at what eventually became one of the most-read blogs in the field. The session here is the distilled version of what he's been working out in public for fourteen years: the surprising overlap between Lean and Zen, and what that overlap looks like when applied not to a value stream but to a person's actual day.
The framing is worth pausing on, because it cuts against the way most Lean conversations are pitched. Lean and Zen are usually treated as separate categories -- one operational, one spiritual. Kevin's argument is that both are operating philosophies (not toolkits), both depend on awareness of the present moment, both demand deep understanding of current state before changing it, both treat reflection as the highest-leverage practice available, and both insist that humility and intention matter more than technique. The overlap is not metaphorical. It's structural.
That structural overlap is what makes the personal application possible. If Lean is an operating philosophy and Zen is an operating philosophy, then the same practices that make a hospital or a factory function well can make a person function well. Daily reflection. Standard work for the routine parts of life. A personal hoshin plan. Decluttering and minimizing what doesn't serve the purpose. Identifying the most productive hour of the day and protecting it from distraction. These are not metaphorical applications of Lean. They are Lean, scaled down to one person.
The session also functions as an honest description of what one practitioner's life looks like when these principles are taken seriously over a long time. Kevin's daily routine, his journaling habit, the way he structures his year around reflection at end-of-year retreats, and the deliberate practice of doing something new each year are all worked examples. They don't constitute a prescription. They constitute evidence that the approach works for someone who has stuck with it long enough to learn what's load-bearing and what isn't.
Kevin Meyer is co-founder and partner at Gemba Academy, which provides over 1,300 online Lean and Six Sigma training videos to more than 2,000 organizations worldwide. He has over 30 years of manufacturing leadership experience in the automotive lighting, telecom electronics, and medical device industries, including executive roles at Sylvania, Abbott Laboratories, Newport Corporation, and most recently as president of Specialty Silicone Fabricators. He guest-lectures on business, manufacturing, and leadership topics at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (his alma mater) and CalPoly. He started the blog Evolving Excellence in November 2004 and now writes at kevinmeyer.com. He is the author of "The Simple Leader."
Zen is a form of Buddhism. Buddhism originated in the sixth century BC with Siddhartha Gautama, who spent years meditating under a bodhi tree in search of meaning and came to understand what Buddhists call enlightenment -- knowing your true self. Zen is one small branch of one of three main traditions within Buddhism, distinctive for returning to the original core of the teaching: focus on the here and now, awareness of what is actually happening in the present, acting and thinking with intention, the search for truth, and meditation as the discipline that creates the awareness underneath all of it.
A note Kevin raised early and worth keeping: even though the word "Kaizen" contains "Zen," there's no etymological connection. Kaizen combines "kai" (change) and "zen" (good) in Japanese -- change for the good. The "zen" in Zen Buddhism is a Japanese pronunciation of a Chinese word derived from a Sanskrit term meaning meditative state. Same syllable, different roots.
The visual symbol most often associated with Zen is the enso -- an open circle indicating both the opportunity for improvement and the striving toward perfection. The parallel to Lean is direct. Lean is the discipline of always trying to improve while measuring against an ideal that you never quite reach.
The section that drove most of the session was a walk through specific points of overlap. None of them are forced. Each one shows up independently in both traditions, with different vocabulary but the same underlying principle.
Neither is about the tools. Lean isn't 5S, value stream mapping, and kanban. Those are tools serving a deeper operating philosophy. Zen isn't meditation, simplicity, and minimalism. Those are tools serving an awareness of self and present. Treating either as a toolkit misses what makes it work.
Both demand testing against experience. Kevin quoted the Buddha -- "be a lamp unto yourselves" -- pointing to the unusual pliability of Buddhism compared to other traditions. The teaching is: don't just accept, test everything against experience, keep what works, discard what doesn't. That's the Lean discipline of PDSA cycles applied to belief. It's also the reason benchmarking goes wrong so often. Comparing your organization or yourself to another without understanding circumstance produces shallow conclusions and the wrong target. Kevin's specific example came later: the medical device company he ran was owned by Catholics, and there were lucrative segments of the silicone medical device market they declined to enter on principle. Anyone benchmarking against them on profitability would have found a number distorted by an invisible constraint. Benchmarks without circumstances are noise.
Both require a beginner's mind. Taiichi Ohno: "Observe without preconceptions and with a blank mind." The Zen master Shunryu Suzuki: "In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities. In the expert's mind there are few." Different traditions, same principle. The expert who walks onto the floor already knowing what they'll find sees less than the apprentice who arrives without assumptions.
Both value minimalism with intention. Kevin showed the well-known photograph of Steve Jobs sitting in his nearly empty living room. Jobs was a practicing Buddhist for many years and believed in minimalism not as aesthetic but as discipline -- intentionally owning only what was necessary and being aware of the value of what you owned. In Lean, the same principle drives inventory reduction and the elimination of non-value-added activity. Both are doing the same work in different rooms.
Both demand observation of true reality. Kevin's example was Thomas Mueller, the general manager of the Sheraton Hongqiao in Shanghai when Kevin visited several years earlier. Mueller's office was on the lobby floor of the hotel. Not adjacent to the lobby. On it. Open desk, no cubicle walls, in the room where guests came through. His reasoning was simple: this is where I can take the pulse of my hotel. He worked from that desk all day. When he traveled, his assistant sat there to observe. That's gemba practice as a permanent operating arrangement, not as an occasional walk.
Both require deeply understanding the current state before changing it. The word "deeply" is doing most of the work in that sentence. Kevin admitted he doesn't think the Lean world does this well enough. Value stream mapping events allocate time to current state, but the time is often surface-level. The discipline of really seeing what is happening -- before proposing improvements, before forming hypotheses, before reaching for tools -- is the discipline that connects Lean's gemba practice to Zen's awareness of the present.
Both treat reflection as the highest-leverage practice. Hansei, the Lean term for reflection, is the most powerful yet most underutilized tool in the methodology. Kevin's framing in his own life is similar: reflection daily, monthly, quarterly, and annually. The cadence is what makes it durable. A leader who only reflects when something goes wrong reflects too late.
Both insist on balance, harmony, and humility. The Lean concepts of just-in-time and flow translate the principle into operational practice. The Buddhist tradition of monks being fed by the community translates it into social practice. Lean's respect for people is the operating expression of humility in a workplace.
Most of the session was about transferring these principles from organizational life to personal life. The structure was straightforward: reflection, your why, principles, a personal hoshin plan, intentional routines, decluttering, and a series of specific practices Kevin uses himself.
Reflection at multiple cadences. Daily: what happened today, what did I accomplish, what barriers did I encounter, what can I change tomorrow. Monthly: a longer look at the patterns. Quarterly: deeper. Annually: at the end of each year, Kevin spends a couple of weeks away, partly devoted to reflection on the year, on whether his personal why and values still align, on what to change for the year ahead. The cadence matters because each level catches what the level above and below misses. Daily reflection catches the friction of yesterday. Annual reflection catches the slow drift of direction.
What is your why. Kevin is skeptical of vision and mission statements as organizational tools and is more skeptical at the personal level. Most of them are words on a wall. What works better is articulating, in plain language, what you actually care about and why. The personal why is the anchor that prevents the rest of life from becoming a sequence of unrelated decisions.
Principles as constraints. Once the why is articulated, principles provide the framework around it -- what won't you cross, what won't you compromise on. The example Kevin used was the silicone medical device company that declined certain market segments on religious grounds. The decision cost them money. Everyone in the company knew it and accepted it because the principle was clear. Principles operate the same way at the personal level. They define what you would be willing to sacrifice an opportunity to maintain.
A personal hoshin plan. If you're working hoshin kanri at the organizational level, you can run the same discipline on yourself. Deeply understand the current state. Identify a future state -- where do you want to retire, what knowledge do you want, what changes do you want to make. Work backward into three-year objectives, this year's goals, the next experimental step, and identify a coach or mentor who can travel that journey with you.
The hard part isn't building the plan. The hard part is shedding what doesn't align with it. Kevin recommended Greg McKeown's "Essentialism" as the practical companion for this. The book is about saying no -- to others, and more importantly to yourself -- with dignity and respect. Kevin admitted he's the kind of person who chases a lot of shiny balls, and that learning to stop doing things was harder than learning to start them. Most people are in the same situation. Time gets freed up not by being more efficient but by ruthlessly subtracting what doesn't align with the plan.
Intentional routines, not just routines. Kevin showed Benjamin Franklin's daily journal page -- the famous one with the schedule of activities running down the right side and the morning question ("What good shall I do this day?") and the evening question ("What good have I done today?") on the left. That's standard work for a person. The schedule provides the baseline. The morning and evening questions turn the routine into reflection. A routine without intention is habit. A routine with intention is improvement.
Declutter and minimize. Kevin had been wrapping up a house remodel at the time of the session, and the choices were instructive. To his real estate agent's horror, they had ripped out a lot of the existing cabinets. Less storage meant less stuff would accumulate. Doors that swung were replaced with barn doors to recover the swing space. Horizontal surfaces were reduced wherever possible -- his observation being that any flat surface eventually becomes a place to set things down, which is how clutter starts. He noted that some people apply kanban-style restocking to their pantries and refrigerators. He thought that was probably too far. The principle is the point.
This section had the most immediately portable content. Kevin uses three specific practices and walked through each.
The big three. Each day, identify three tasks to actually complete. Not a long list. Three. People have long task lists. The discipline is to identify the three that matter most for the day and finish them. At the evening reflection, look back: did I finish my three, what got in the way, what can I change tomorrow to make sure I finish them next time. The cumulative effect is significant. Three meaningful tasks per day, finished, every day, adds up to fifteen per workweek and roughly 750 per year. Most people don't operate that way. Most days end with a sense of having been busy without having finished anything.
The hour of power. Everyone has a part of the day when they're most productive. Find yours. Protect it. Tackle the hardest of the big three during it. Kevin is a morning person -- up by 4:30 or 5:00 without an alarm, breakfast and a workout, and then by 6:30 his most productive hour begins. He works on the hardest project from 6:30 to 7:30. The rest of the morning is also productive, so he works on the other two big-three items then. Afternoon is for phone calls and lower-creativity work. The point isn't to mimic his schedule. The point is to find your own and design around it.
The Pomodoro discipline, modified. To stay focused during the hour of power, Kevin clears his desk, closes every application, and sets an alarm for 45 minutes. For 45 minutes, he works only on the one task. Then a 15-minute break. Then another 45 minutes on the same task until it's done. The original Pomodoro Technique uses 25-minute intervals; he extended his. Either works. The mechanism is the same: a defined block of attention, ruthless removal of distraction, and a forced break afterward.
The candor about distraction was useful. Kevin admitted that he's the kind of person who can start with a web search on a Lean concept and find himself watching YouTube cat videos. Most people are. The defense against that pattern is not willpower. It's structural -- close the apps, clear the desk, set the timer.
The case for journaling came with research behind it. Kevin keeps a paper journal (Moleskine, the 5x8 blank version) and uses it for the big three each day, daily reflections, monthly and quarterly and annual reflections, and notes during the day. He has tried digital journaling and it doesn't stick for him -- the extra steps of opening an iPad and finding the app create just enough friction that he stops writing. The paper journal is always open on his desk.
The research point matters. Kevin cited studies on university students where note-takers by hand showed higher retention and understanding -- even weeks later, even when they didn't refer back to their notes -- than students who took notes on laptops. Something about the physical act of writing engages cognition differently. He quoted the writer Carl Sandburg: "Writing is simply thinking through my fingers." The same principle shows up in factory huddle boards where metrics written by hand are understood more deeply than metrics typed into a system. The medium is part of the message.
Three practices closed the session.
Continue to learn. The best leaders are the best learners. Kevin learned this during executive recruiting: the strongest candidates were voracious learners who could not only describe what they had learned recently but had distilled it, applied it, and -- critically -- taught it to someone else. He started asking the question in interviews and using it as a primary signal. The pattern held across roles. The leaders who taught what they learned were the ones who developed the most over time. Steve Kane (who took over from Kevin at Specialty Silicone Fabricators) used a version of this even at the operator interview level: tell me about something you've learned recently and teach it to me. One candidate gave a presentation on beekeeping that connected to organizational structures. The point isn't that beekeeping is relevant to the job. The point is that the candidate had learned, distilled, and could teach.
Do something different every year. Kevin has been doing this for about twenty years, increasingly formally. Some years it's physical: scuba diving, windsurfing, running a marathon. Some years it's intellectual: a deep dive into Buddhism, a year studying biblical history, rebuilding a 1973 Triumph Spitfire (which he said was like working on a lawnmower because every wire in the harness is yellow), learning HTML and then learning to blog -- which eventually led to the precursors of Gemba Academy. The principle is intentional stretching. The skill is in the discomfort of starting something you don't know how to do.
Explore the world. Kevin and his wife had visited over 65 countries by the time of this session. He grew up overseas, so the habit started early. The point is that exposure to other cultures widens perception in a way nothing else quite matches. His favorite recent visits were Cuba, Bhutan, and Laos -- the last because of the strangeness of seeing a satellite TV playing American reality shows inside a grass hut in a communist country, which prompted questions about what people watching that show thought America actually was.
He closed with a quote from Thomas Merton, the Catholic priest who took a serious interest in Buddhism late in his life: "Living is the constant adjustment of thought to life and life to thought in such a way that we are always growing, always experiencing new things in the old and old things in the new. This life is always new."
The integration of the two traditions Merton represents is the integration the session as a whole was making.
A question came in during Q&A about whether someone could become more humble over time. Kevin's answer was unambiguous: yes, but rarely from inside. Life tends to do the work for you. You start your career as a hard-charging person, you get knocked down a few times, you learn you're not all that, and you become more compassionate and more aware of the circumstances behind why other people behave the way they do. That awareness is the foundation of respect for people in the Lean sense -- understanding that the process is usually what's wrong, not the person.
Mark followed up with an observation worth keeping: humility tends to be something that's done to you, not something you wake up one morning and decide to acquire. The person who already lacks humility is the least likely to notice the gap and the most likely to need a hit from the universe to recognize it. The phrase "I'm humbled by this award" is rarely accurate. Being humbled is closer to being knocked sideways than being honored.
The most honest framing of this session's relationship to operational software is that the relationship is loose and indirect. Personal practice -- daily reflection, journaling, the big three, the hour of power, protecting attention -- is the kind of work no platform performs on a leader's behalf. The leader has to do it themselves, with whatever tools they prefer (paper for Kevin, the various journaling apps that work for others).
Where the connection does land is in how the personal practices feed the operational ones. A leader who practices daily reflection at home is more likely to reflect meaningfully at the team huddle in the morning. A leader who has done their own hoshin plan understands what a real strategy deployment conversation requires from their direct reports. A leader who has shed activities from their personal schedule that don't align with their plan is more credible when they ask their organization to shed projects that don't align with strategic priorities. The discipline is fractal. It looks the same at the level of a person, a team, a department, and an organization, and it tends to be present at all four levels or none of them.
What infrastructure can do, at the organizational level, is remove the friction that prevents leaders from practicing the same discipline at work that they practice at home. Visibility into what is actually happening across the organization -- the equivalent of the gemba awareness Mueller built into the Shanghai hotel lobby -- doesn't require sitting in the lobby in person at every site. The aggregated tracking of improvements, the surfacing of stalled work, the daily routines of leader standard work, the cadence of huddles and reviews are the operational expression of the awareness Kevin was describing at the personal level.
The connection isn't that the software produces awareness. The connection is that the leader who values awareness uses whatever tools support it -- paper journal for the personal practice, organizational systems for the team-level practice -- with the same underlying intent.
What is the connection between Lean and Zen? Both are operating philosophies rather than toolkits. Both require deep awareness of the present and the current state before changing anything. Both treat reflection as the most powerful underused practice. Both insist on humility and respect for people as foundational. Both share visual symbols of opportunity for improvement against an ideal -- the Lean PDCA cycle and the Zen enso both signal continuous striving without ever quite reaching perfection. The overlap is structural, not metaphorical, which is why the principles of one transfer cleanly to the other and to personal practice as well.
Is there an etymological connection between "Kaizen" and "Zen"? No. Kaizen combines the Japanese characters for "change" (kai) and "good" (zen) -- change for the good. The "Zen" in Zen Buddhism is the Japanese pronunciation of a Chinese word derived from a Sanskrit term meaning meditative state. Same syllable, different roots. The conceptual overlap between Lean (which uses Kaizen as a core practice) and Zen Buddhism is real, but the word similarity is a coincidence.
What is the most underused practice in Lean? Reflection. Hansei is built into the Toyota Production System as a core practice, but most organizations practicing Lean treat it as optional or save it for the end of large projects. The leaders who reflect daily, monthly, quarterly, and annually -- at each level catching what the level above and below misses -- compound learning in a way that occasional reflection cannot match. The same applies at the personal level.
What is "the big three" practice? Each day, identify three tasks you actually intend to complete. Not a long task list -- three. The discipline forces prioritization and protects against the trap of feeling busy without finishing anything. At the end of the day, reflect on what got done, what got in the way, and what to change tomorrow. Compounded over a year, three completed tasks per day adds up to roughly 750 meaningful completions -- more than most people achieve with much longer lists.
How do you identify your "hour of power"? By paying attention to when you're naturally most focused and productive. Kevin is a morning person and his hour of power runs from about 6:30 to 7:30 AM, when he tackles the hardest item from his big three. Some people peak in the late morning, some in the evening. The point isn't the specific hour. The point is to identify yours, protect it from meetings and distractions, and use it for the work that genuinely requires your best attention.
What does Pomodoro discipline look like in practice? The traditional Pomodoro Technique uses 25-minute focused intervals separated by short breaks. Kevin extends his to 45 minutes followed by a 15-minute break, then another 45-minute interval on the same task. During the interval, the desk is clear, all applications are closed, and attention stays on one task. The mechanism works because it removes the discretion of "should I stop now" -- the timer decides, not the willpower.
Why does journaling by hand outperform digital journaling? Research on university students taking notes shows higher retention and understanding among hand-writers compared to laptop note-takers, even weeks later, even when notes are never reviewed. Something about the physical act of writing engages cognition differently. The same principle shows up in factory huddle boards where metrics written by hand are understood more deeply than metrics typed into a system. Digital journals are more searchable; paper journals produce deeper engagement. For most practitioners, the paper wins for daily use even if it's harder to search later.
What's the difference between a routine and an intentional routine? A routine is habit -- the things you do without thinking. An intentional routine is the same activity performed with awareness of why you're doing it. Benjamin Franklin's daily schedule looked like a routine on paper. The morning question ("What good shall I do this day?") and the evening question ("What good have I done today?") turned it into an intentional routine. The schedule provides the baseline. The questions turn the baseline into a platform for improvement.
What is a personal hoshin plan? The same discipline of strategy deployment applied at the individual level. Deeply understand your current state. Identify a future state -- where you want to be in five or ten years, what you want to know, what you want to have changed. Work backward into three-year objectives, this year's goals, and the next experimental step. Identify a coach or mentor. Then shed activities and projects that don't align with the plan. Greg McKeown's book "Essentialism" is the most useful companion for this practice, particularly for the shedding part.
What's the principle behind decluttering and minimizing at home? The same principle that drives inventory reduction in Lean. Storage attracts stuff. Stuff is non-value-added. Less storage forces decisions about what is actually worth keeping. Kevin's renovation choices -- ripping out cabinets, swapping swing doors for barn doors, reducing horizontal surfaces that become clutter magnets -- reflect this. The point isn't austerity. The point is intention: keeping only what serves the purpose you've identified.
How do you grow as a person and as a leader? Three practices. Keep learning, with the test being whether you can distill what you've learned and teach it to someone else. Do something genuinely different every year that stretches your perception -- some physical, some intellectual. Explore the world, by which Kevin means actually traveling outside familiar contexts, not for tourism but for the widening of perspective that comes from being somewhere you don't fully understand.
Can people become more humble on their own initiative? Rarely, in Kevin's experience. Humility tends to be something life delivers rather than something you decide to cultivate. The leader who already lacks humility is the least likely to recognize the gap. What does work is reflection on circumstances -- understanding that the process is usually what's wrong, not the person, and that people around you are dealing with conditions you don't see. That awareness is the operational expression of respect for people in the Lean sense.
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