Kaizen is about achieving continuous improvement through change in ongoing organizational culture. It is about building systems in the organization, which consistently question whether there is a better way. When applied to the workplace, Kaizen means continuous improvement involving everyone managers and workers alike. The aim of Kaizen is to eliminate waste in all systems and processes through combined team effort.

The two syllables of Kaizen are a conjunction of two Japanese words, `kai' and `zen.' Kai means "to change or modify" and Zen means "to improve, or make better." Simply put, Kaizen is about achieving continuous improvement. According to Dr. Masaaki Imai, Kaizen guru and author of Kaizen, The Key to Japan's Competitive Success: "Kaizen means improvement. Moreover, Kaizen means continuing improvement in personal life, home life, social life, and working life. When applied to the workplace Kaizen means continuing improvement involving everyonemanagers and workers alike." The Kaizen strategy in principle is to involve everyone in an organization working together to make improvements "without large capital investments." The aim of Kaizen is to focus on eliminating waste in all systems and processes of an organization through combined team effort. It encourages teams to stop and evaluate how they are working together as well as how they are performing against their own expectations. It encourages them to pause at the end of a shift to ask questions like: What went right? What went wrong? What did we learn? The underlying principle of Kaizen is to do it better, make it better, and keep improving even if everything is all right, as opposed to the famous "If it isn't broken.why fix it?"

Kaizen is not an initiative, it is an ongoing organizational culture, which is dedicated to, and active in the process of improvement. It is about building systems in the organization, which consistently question whether there is a better way. It is about creating internal systems that support and reward the results, in pursuit of incremental improvement. It relies on developing behaviors, which is honest, open and trusting. It encourages problems and difficulties to be brought to the surface so that they can be attended to. It probes for the clearest understanding of the customer's need, why it is important for the customer, and how best to deliver it.

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