"Go to the actual place" — the practice of observing work where it happens rather than relying on reports, dashboards, or second-hand accounts. taiichi-ohno was famous for drawing a chalk circle on the factory floor and having new managers stand in it for hours, observing — a practice vividly recounted by teruyuki-minoura. The gemba walk (visiting the workplace to observe and learn, not to inspect or criticize) is the foundational management practice in TPS. Ohno's gemba orientation reflects a deep epistemological commitment: you cannot understand a process without observing it directly. This parallels w-edwards-deming's insistence on "operational definitions" — knowledge grounded in observable operations, not abstractions. In Steve Blank's Customer Development methodology, "get out of the building" is the gemba principle applied to startups: go observe customers in their actual environment. Described in workplace-management.