‘Ghanaians must adopt Japanese principles of life’

A motivational speaker and author Michael Effah has admonished Ghanaians to adopt the four productivity lessons from the Japanese for their personal development.

Speaking on the ‘Start Your Year Right’ segment on the Morning Starr Wednesday, Mr. Effah said despite the Asian country having more than 70 percent of its land being mountainous and experiencing over 1,500 earthquakes yearly, it is now the world's third-largest economy by nominal GDP and the world's fourth-largest economy by purchasing power parity.

Mr. Effah outlined Kaizen, Muda, Gemba, and Poka-Yoke as the four cardinal points that one must use to define his life in 2016.

Below is the full explanation of the four principles:

Kaizen

The Japanese word “Kaizen” means improvement.

The Japanese thinking about life and work encourages small improvements day after day, continuously.

The key feature of Kaizen is that it is an on-going, never-ending enhancement process. It’s a soft and gradual method that allows you to improve in every facet of your life and work.

In this highly competitive economy, Kaizen requires of you to innovate, keep costs to the barest minimum, improve quality at all levels and deliver efficiently.

Kaizen is a popular word in industry worldwide, to claim practicing innovative management methods.

You can conduct Kaizen activities in several ways. First and most importantly is to change your operations to make your job more productive, less tiring, more efficient and much safer. You must re-engineer yourself continuously.

Secondly, to work smarter, you must improve equipments and tools you work with, like installing higher performing machines and/or changing the machine layout.

Improving procedures can also go a long way to increase overall productivity.

All these alternatives can be combined in a broad improvement plan.

Never be satisfied with your success.