November 2006 | Page 2 of 2

Top 5 Things I Learned in China Last Week

By Jon Miller - November 19th, 2006

Here are the top five things learned after a productive week in China: 1. You can’t overstate the value of respecting another’s culture I gave my rudimentary Chinese a workout this time and the results were interesting. Doo

Why Six Sigma is Essential for Kaizen Success

By Jon Miller - November 18th, 2006

Genchi gembutsu means that in a Lean organization improvement must be done at the closest point to the value-adding workplace (gemba) following the scientific method based on facts. I’ve liked genchi gembutsu and management by fa

Seeing the Lean in Milton Friedman’s Ideas

By Jon Miller - November 17th, 2006

Nobel prize winner and Chicago school free market economist and author Milton Friedman has just passed away. The impact of his ideas are huge. It ranks with the impact of the ideas of Henry Ford and Taiichi Ohno. Like Ohno and Ford, Fr

Believing You Can Get Lean Makes You Leaner

By Jon Miller - November 16th, 2006

If Lean for Toyota is “kaizen and respect for people” we need to spend some time understanding what makes people work as well as what makes kaizen work. To that end, there are some very interesting findings at the Psycholog

Kaizen of the Month at Gemba, November 2006

By Jon Miller - November 13th, 2006

Like many companies, we make a lot of improvements each month at Gemba. We don’t always think to write them down or celebrate them. We will “kaizen the kaizen” by writing them down in an effort to be more mindful of t

The Toyota Preparation System or the “Bank of Preparation”

By Jon Miller - November 9th, 2006

Toyota is great at doing what appear to be common sense things extraordinarily well. They take the time to do preparation, then execute quickly. There is a reference to this in Jeffrey Liker’s The Toyota Way where (I am paraphrasing)

Applying Lean Manufacturing to University Libraries

By Jon Miller - November 6th, 2006

Nancy Kress is the Head of Bookstacks at the University of Chicago. Nancy says in her libraryassessment.info posting on November 5, 2006: I like to tell people that what I really do is line operations management. My challenge is to man

Kaizen vs. Kaikaku

By Jon Miller - November 5th, 2006

While “kaizen” has been a familiar term in English management vocabulary for decades, “kaikaku” is more recent. Though kaizen has been widely embraced by Japanese companies for years, kaikaku was less common. Ho

Things They Say at Toyota: Being Busy is Shameful

By Jon Miller - November 2nd, 2006

Being busy is shameful. What an odd thought. It goes against the workaholic nature of most Americans and our Puritan work ethic. I can’t recall exactly where I heard this but it was definitely from one of my sensei who came from

Taiichi Ohno’s Book “Workplace Management” Returns to Print in 2007

By Jon Miller - November 1st, 2006

Almost two years ago I set out to read Taiichi Ohno’s recently reissued book Gemba Keiei (Workplace Management) in Japanese and summarize one chapter per week. My goal was to have all 37 chapters posted here by September 2005. We

Month: November 2006