Changing quality of life through the personal kaizen approach: A qualitative study

Purpose. Imai (1989, p. 23) defined Kaizen as: "a means of continuing improvement in personal life, home life, social life, and working life. At the workplace, Kaizen means continuing improvement involving everyone-managers and workers alike". According to Imai, Kaizen can take at least three forms: 1) Kaizen management, 2) Group Kaizen, and 3) Individual Kaizen. In this last form, the strength of the continuous improvement of this Japanese management approach is focused on the work of each person as an individual. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to explore how some people have applied Personal Kaizen to their personal lives in order to improve their quality of life. The research question that drives the study is: How do some people apply Personal Kaizen in order to improve their quality of life? Design/methodology/approach. An exploratory qualitative study was conducted. Using theoretical sampling we identified and interviewed three persons who have implemented Personal Kaizen in their daily lives in order to change their quality of life. Similarly, we used documentary references of the three cases cited to generate a cross-case analysis of the methodological techniques uses. This paper analyses the cases of three persons who have implemented Personal Kaizen in their lives in order to change their quality of life. We cross the empirical data with the theoretical framework of Kaizen and quality of life.