It is important to go to where the action is taking place. I was taught this as a young officer in the Navy, where, as in other areas of the military, we emphasized “leading from the front.” In warfare the reason is obvious: It is difficult to assess a complex situation from a distance. The further you are from the action, the more your view is obscured by what the great military writer Carl von Clausewitz called “the fog of war.”

So, you would correctly guess that I support the idea of “going to gemba.” For those unfamiliar with this Japanese term, gemba refers to the location where an activity takes place, for example, the factory floor. Going to gemba is revered in lean manufacturing, where one is told how Taiichi Ohno taught observation to new engineers. (Ohno was Toyota’s vice president of manufacturing and the genius behind the Toyota Production System.) He would make an engineer stand in the middle of a chalk circle and tell him to observe and take notes. Later he would return to see if the engineer had observed enough. Ohno believed that observation was the best way to understand what is happening on the factory floor.

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