Gemba Academy Podcast: Lean Manufacturing | Lean Office | Six Sigma | Toyota Kata | Productivity | Leadership

Most continuous improvement practitioners are trained to prize logic and treat emotion as noise in the system. D. Earl Johnston spent nine years and thousands of research hours across twelve disciplines discovering that framing is backward. His book, “Choosing Emotions,” grew out of a father-daughter moment involving depression, post-it notes, and a single powerful text message. What came out of that work challenges something most leaders have never stopped to question. In this episode you’ll learn: What Winston Churchill’s 8 words reveal about how emotions work (3:14) How a father-daughter dinner became a 9-year research project on emotions (3:57) The three most common misunderstandings people have about emotions (11:40) Why doom scrolling is an emotionally driven navigation, not a bad habit (16:56) What ego actually is and why most high-performers misunderstand it (19:12) Why trauma persists until you find the words to describe it (22:00) How naming an emotion releases its grip on