2006 | Page 4 of 21 | Gemba Academy

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

Undivided Wholeness in Flowing Movement

By Jon Miller - October 31st, 2006

Scientist, philosopher and author David Bohm presents challenging ideas on the nature of reality. They are challenging not in that they are difficult (if you are patient with the Calculus) but in that they challenge how we perceive, th

Reflection (Hansei) is the Noblest Teacher

By Jon Miller - October 30th, 2006

Hansei is a Japanese word meaning “reflection” as in reflecting on ideas or experiences in order to learn from successes or failures to improve oneself in the future. It is a key step in kaizen, both personal improvement an

Don’t Talk to Us About Toyota

By Jon Miller - October 28th, 2006

“Don’t talk to us about Toyota” demanded a new customer recently. Their reasoning was that Toyota’s level was unachievable for them. This client does not build cars. But they were asking for world class benchmar

Year: 2006