Jon Miller, Author at Gemba Academy

8 Attributes of Top-Performing Managers, According to Google

By Jon Miller - May 30th, 2016

One day when our lean consultants are bots, we will ask our smart devices what we need to do to be a top performer in our chosen work. For now, we’ll have to Google it. An interview in Knowledge@Wharton with Brian Welles, the

Hello, My Name is Leanbot

By Jon Miller - May 23rd, 2016

Hello, my name is Leanbot. Don’t be afraid. At the moment I am just an idea in the minds of several lean geeks. Alas, my ability to interact with you is limited to the comment box below. Today I’m just a twinkle in a lean e

How to Solve Problems in Just Five Days

By Jon Miller - May 15th, 2016

How can we solve big problems and test new ideas in just five days? If you are at all experienced in lean, you may reply, “Run a kaizen event.” By various names, the five-day rapid improvement workshop has been helping comp

When Does Fermented Squid Go Bad? And Other Management Questions

By Jon Miller - May 9th, 2016

How long does shiokara, or fermented fish guts last? Just a pinch of it is enough to make a bowl of plain white rice burst with flavor. It starts out tasting, smelling and looking rotten. So how would you know? This is a good question

Lean Leaders, Darling Killers

By Jon Miller - May 2nd, 2016

Another very good article from Fast Company builds on the insights on how to change minds we highlighted in a previous blog post. The article further explains how the most successful people constantly question their strongest bel

Dance Your Way to Better Team Performance

By Jon Miller - April 25th, 2016

During our monthly coaching conversation last week, one of my customers shared her latest challenges and successes in leading continuous improvement within her organization. To my surprise she added, “Also, my team and I sig

To Be a Lean Coach, Know the Wrong Answers

By Jon Miller - April 18th, 2016

The success of lean systems, and continuous improvement in general, relies on engaging the hands and brains of everyone in the upkeep and renewal of the system. It requires constant practice. It requires a strong will to compete and t

Lean Systems and Robots That Can Say “No”

By Jon Miller - April 11th, 2016

“A robot that follows commands without question could put humans in danger” warns a Scientific American article that argues why robots need to be able to say “no” to our commands. Just as people should not alwa

How to Change Minds

By Jon Miller - April 4th, 2016

One of the most common challenges people face when leading continuous improvement is persuading others to change. We agree that want a different results, we agree that this requires different processes and different behaviors, and we

Employee Engagement Poor, But Not in Retreat

By Jon Miller - March 28th, 2016

The Gallup organization polls adults working for U.S. employers daily by phone, reporting on levels of employee engagement. Each year they alert the world to the crisis of employees engagement. It is consistently around 70% not engage

Half of the Day is Open to Reflection

By Jon Miller - March 21st, 2016

March 20th marked the equinox, when the duration of day and night are roughly equal all over the planet. This day comes twice per year and marks the entry into spring or into autumn. On the equinox, half of the day is day and half is�

Coaching in Sports and at Work

By Jon Miller - March 14th, 2016

In the sporting world the separation of duties between the coach and the players on the team is pretty clear. The players play, the coaches coach the players. For professional sports there is also the general manager who handles the bu

Why Leaders Don’t Counter Biases for “Why Organizations Don’t Learn”

By Jon Miller - March 7th, 2016

A November 2015 Harvard Business Review article titled Why Organization’s Don’t Learn did a good job of outlining the main cultural reasons that organizations fail to learn and adapt. The concepts introduced can be equa

The Fog of Waste

By Jon Miller - February 29th, 2016

Last week I made a stunning discovery. There are literally bucketfulls of water in the air around me. For months this winter, I thought nothing of mopping up the condensation off of the windows every morning using paper towels. To put

The Skills Sought in a Lean Graduate

By Jon Miller - February 22nd, 2016

Matching the content, quality, cost and speed of delivery of a product or service to what the customer wants is the key for business success. This basic lesson is taught in business schools both as theory and through real-life case s

Weighing the Waste of Waiting

By Jon Miller - February 8th, 2016

TIMWOOD is a mnemonic, or memory aid, for reciting the seven types of waste that lean aims to reduce. At its geographic if not spiritual center is W – waiting. This indicates time people spent unproductively while waiting for so

Meal Preparation as a Metaphor for Lean

By Jon Miller - February 1st, 2016

In recent weeks my opportunities to prepare meals for my family has increased. I have planned meals, purchased the groceries, followed recipes, prepared the food, served the food, received feedback, and filed this information for futu

Peak Stuff and the Hierarchy of Useless Things

By Jon Miller - January 25th, 2016

In a radio interview this week the Chief Sustainability Officer for IKEA, Steve Howard, introduced the interesting idea that the West has arrived at “peak stuff.” He observed that consumption of “stuff” such

Surviving E-mail Overburden with Seven Ds

By Jon Miller - January 18th, 2016

A recent Scientific American article on the strain of always being on call summarizes the stressful effects of always being connected to work. The modern workday may be unique in human history, in that we receive hundreds of messages p

Putting Things on Top of Other Things

By Jon Miller - January 11th, 2016

One of my favorite comedy sketches is the “Royal Society for Putting Things on Top of Other Things” by Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Over the years I have grown to appreciate its insight into organizational behavio

How I Stopped Making New Year’s Resolutions

By Jon Miller - January 4th, 2016

A friend asked me this past weekend about my resolutions for 2016. To our mutual surprise my answer was, “I don’t have any.” This caused me to reflect on why I had not set any New Year’s resolutions for 2016.

Lessons from The Past Year on Lean Coaching

By Jon Miller - December 21st, 2015

Looking back on 2015, it was a career transition year. After 20+ years of being in the travel-based lean consulting and training field, I decided to take the travel out of the equation. It was a self-imposed constraint, forcing me to

Gaming Our Way to Lean Management

By Jon Miller - December 14th, 2015

Gamification is a relatively new buzzword for the application of features of game-playing such as point scoring, competition with other players and so forth, into business activities. Game-playing involves rules, scoring, opportunities

Reflections on Hoshin

By Jon Miller - December 7th, 2015

Over the past two of weeks I have had six unrelated conversations about hoshin planning. In contrast, this number is zero to one in any typical two-week period during the year. Perhaps this is because of the end of year interest in

Why Repeat? Why Repeat? Why Repeat? Why..?

By Jon Miller - November 30th, 2015

As a part of our working lives, repetition gets mixed reviews. When we repeatedly do our jobs well, we are often rewarded. But increasingly, we are exhorted to do our jobs better. We call it continuous improvement, in which we repeat

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