What is Kaizen?

According to Masaaki Imai, who introduced it in his book  "The Key to Japan’s Competitive Success" (1986). Kaizen is the practice of a continuous improvement process inside an organization. 

Today kaizen is recognized worldwide as an important pillar of an organization’s long-term competitive strategy. Kaizen is continuous improvement that is based on certain guiding principles:

• Good processes bring good results

• Go see for yourself to grasp the current situation

• Speak with data, manage by facts

• Take action to contain and correct root causes of problems

• Work as a team

• Kaizen is everybody’s business

• And much more!

One of the most notable features of kaizen is that big results come from many small changes accumulated over time. However this has been misunderstood to mean that kaizen equals small changes. In fact, kaizen means everyone involved in making improvements. While the majority of changes may be small, the greatest impact may be kaizens that are led by senior management as transformational projects, or by cross-functional teams as kaizen events.

Reference: Kaizen Institute.  http://ca.kaizen.com/about-us/definition-of-kaizen.html