Jon Miller, Author at Gemba Academy

Jon Miller

Jon has dedicated his 25+ year career to the field of kaizen, continuous improvement, and lean management. Jon spent the first eighteen years of his life in Japan, then graduated from McGill University with a bachelor’s in linguistics.

1485 Articles

Making Meetings Less Terrible

By Jon Miller - January 20th, 2020

Studies estimate that we spend an hour or more each day in meetings or preparing for them. On the one hand, it’s good that humans are communicating, making decisions and solving problems together. On the other hand, unproductive

Sustaining Gains with the Continuous Improvement Ratchet

By Jon Miller - January 13th, 2020

The PDCA wheel held in place on a slope by a wedge is a common representation of how standards are essential to sustains continuous improvement. On the one hand, this is intuitive and easy to demonstrate. On the other hand, it’s

The Word of the Year for 2019

By Jon Miller - January 6th, 2020

Looking back on the previous twelve months, there is one word that ties together my lessons learned and aspirations. The word is daily. It’s the humblest of words, suggesting commonplace, regular, routine, of no special note. In

Was the Standard Clear Enough?

By Jon Miller - December 23rd, 2019

While observing a morning huddle meeting last week, I heard a senior leader ask, “Was the standard clear enough?” several times as they discussed the previous day’s quality, safety and delivery problems. That’s

Go See, Show Respect, Ask “What Do You Need from Me?”

By Jon Miller - December 16th, 2019

Last week we took a day at the Gemba Academy office in Fort Worth to map and improve our content development process. It was a humbling reminder of the importance of going to the gemba, asking the internal customer what they need and m

How to be Tough on Process, Easy on People

By Jon Miller - December 9th, 2019

One of the guiding principles for practicing continuous improvement, or good leadership in general, is to be tough on the process but easy on the people. The idea is to create a blame-free but problem-aware environment. This removes fe

Practicing Gratitude within the Daily Accountability Process

By Jon Miller - December 2nd, 2019

One of the better ideas I saw this year was during a tour of a lean company. It saw that “Appreciation” was one of the items on the agenda for the tier 2 daily accountability meeting. Each morning the area team leaders and

Which Lean Behavior or Tool Should We Adopt?

By Jon Miller - November 25th, 2019

This week during an interview for a Lean newsletter I was asked a hypothetical question. If I had to choose one Lean behavior or tool for an organization to adopt, what would it be? Easy answers might be “5S because it’s fo

What Does It Mean to Huddle?

By Jon Miller - November 18th, 2019

One of the encouraging trends I’ve seen in the past decade with Lean management is the emerging acceptance of team huddles. While still far from universal, this one simple activity is becoming a core part of the daily practice of

How to Measure the M in SQDCM

By Jon Miller - November 11th, 2019

The giant letters SQDCM are common sights on visual display boards of teams on the gemba. They stand for the key performance indicator categories of safety, quality, delivery, cost and morale. Visualization of key performance indicator

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