Jon Miller, Author at Gemba Academy

Kitchen Jidoka: Low Cost Automation Example

By Jon Miller - November 19th, 2011

There are not two but three definitions of the Japanese word jidoka, which students of kaizen and the Toyota Production System are likely to encounter. In fact there are two different jidokas. Coined by Taiichi Ohno as a play on words

Visual Management and Glass Walls

By Jon Miller - November 8th, 2011

Transparency is a key word these days, especially when it comes to the mishandling of vast sums of other people’s money by smart people who already have lots of it and should know better. Governments, institutional investors, cor

Hoshin Planning – New Online Course from Gemba Academy

By Jon Miller - November 6th, 2011

The development team at Gemba Academy has been hard at work to bring you the latest online training course, Hoshin Planning. Currently the course includes 11 video modules, 1 quiz and 11 downloadable files. This brings the total number

Ambiguous Visual Controls: Ignage

By Jon Miller - October 26th, 2011

Imagine my disappointment, upon hauling my gardening implements across town after a long and difficult season of tilling the soil, to be informed by the store proprietor that they could not in fact help with the repair of my hoes. It&#

Monitoring Agency Revises Date for Peak Lean

By Jon Miller - October 19th, 2011

October 19, 2011 Brussels (AP) One of the world’s leading efficiency trends monitoring agency, the Organization of Practitioners in Lean Enterprise Advancement and Sustainability (OPLEAS) issued a statement today revising the exp

Blog Action Day: Food and a Lean Culture Change

By Jon Miller - October 16th, 2011

We in the West waste nothing so prodigiously as food. One could argue time, but it’s hard to say what purpose time serves and whether it’s possible to know the way in which we spend it is wasteful or meaningful. That quickl

Success Made Humble

By Jon Miller - October 8th, 2011

The book Success Made Simple by Erik Wesner was mistitled. While it’s true there are many examples of great simplicity in the book, simple is hard. There is no Amish formula for business success per se. They are as much seeker an

13 Questions to Assess Lean Competence in an Organization

By Jon Miller - October 5th, 2011

In a comment to an article about the four stages of competence, Mo asked: Can this model be introduced to organisation who have not heard of lean, it is pretty obvious they will be considered as stage one “Unconscious Incompetenc

U.S. Capitol Airport Namesake Rolls in Grave

By Jon Miller - October 3rd, 2011

Across all of my travels I have never encountered such an imbalance in supply and demand for airport taxis as at Reagan National last night. This is a bit shameful for an airport in the capitol of the world’s largest economy, the

Ambiguous Visual Controls: Airport Hotel Edition

By Jon Miller - September 30th, 2011

Airports are full of signs. Standing in queue gives ample time to reflect on their meaning and appreciate their ambiguity. This visual control at the check-in counter made me wonder why it was necessary to abandon the better part of va

Snowflakes, Structural Collapse and the Simplification of Lean

By Jon Miller - September 19th, 2011

A snowflake is a delightfully complex object when rotated in the three spatial dimensions. Collapsed into two dimensions, it is a pattern of jagged lines. Reduced to a single dimension a snowflake becomes merely a connected series of p

With New Technology, Where Should We Go?

By Jon Miller - September 15th, 2011

According to a Wall Street Journal article from September 15, 2011, With New Technology, Start-Ups Go Lean start-ups are purportedly adopting a lean approach with the aid of new technology. However, this claim can be deceptive if we in

The Importance of Thinking About the Box

By Jon Miller - September 12th, 2011

Leaders interested in innovation or breakthrough improvement often speak of the importance of “thinking outside the box”. By this we mean discarding existing limitations on our thinking (the box) to generate new ideas, prod

Designing Better Hospitals with 3P: Video

By Jon Miller - September 11th, 2011

The Production Preparation Process (3P) is a method for bringing together a team to evaluate the requirements of a design, apply lean principles and use low-cost rapid prototyping (a.k.a. cardboard engineering) to achieve breakthrough

Junaid’s Learning from a TPM Workshop

By Jon Miller - September 6th, 2011

Our friend S.M. Junaid sends us occasional dispatches from his experiences with applying lean and kaizen at his company in Pakistan. Recently he shared his learning from a TPM workshop. An Operator’s Relationship to a Machine is

Lean Government Example: Defect Display Board

By Jon Miller - September 3rd, 2011

Here is a photo I took while on a hike through a state park with some family members one summer. Whether through an individual initiative by a park ranger or as part of a lean government initiative by Washington State, it is a great ex

Knowledge Workers Stand Up for a Healthier Workplace

By Jon Miller - September 2nd, 2011

The use of standing desks by knowledge workers is starting to go mainstream, according to an article by the Wall Street Journal titled Standing Desks Are on the Rise. Focusing mainly on Silicon Valley firms such as Google and Facebook,

The 6T of Daily Kaizen from a Cafeteria in China

By Jon Miller - August 16th, 2011

On the 7th floor of the building that houses our office in Shanghai, China there is a cafeteria. As I queued today a large green board caught my eye. There were 6 clip boards next to a poster extolling something called the “6T pr

Lean: A Life of Mistakes by Cynical, Unreasonable People

By Jon Miller - August 8th, 2011

The more I try to get away from work by reading anything but books on kaizen, lean and continuous improvement, the more it seems I find examples of these anyway. An occupational hazard perhaps. Here are three important lessons from Iri

Respect for Humanity, Now in 3D!

By Jon Miller - July 31st, 2011

Films in 3D have become briefly popular again recently. For someone who has been immersed in thinking about lean and the Toyota Production System, the term 3D is a call to arms for kaizen. Called 3K in Japanese, a workplace or job that

Ambiguous Visual Controls in the Park

By Jon Miller - July 29th, 2011

Walking through a park near Frankfurt, Germany I saw this sign. Checking first to make sure I had not slipped back in time to the 1880s, I snapped this photo. What does it mean? Not reading German, the only way this visual control coul

Questioning the Value of the P-Value

By Jon Miller - July 25th, 2011

The p-value expresses the probability of obtaining a test statistic that is at least as extreme as the one result actually observed, assuming that the null hypothesis is true. The scientific method attempts to disprove the null hypothe

7 Amish Habits to Make You Lean and Wealthy

By Jon Miller - July 17th, 2011

An article ran one week ago in the Seattle Times, titled “The frugal Amish know about wealth”. The Amish Mennonites are a subgroup of Protestant Christians mostly living in rural communities in parts of USA and Canda. They

The New Math of Daily Kaizen

By Jon Miller - July 10th, 2011

The true meaning of kaizen, we like to say at our Institute, is to involve everyone everywhere in making improvements every day. Kaizen is not just about the 5-day rapid improvement events, although these can be great vehicles for brin

Children's Hospital of Saskatchewan – Getting Lean

By Jon Miller - June 28th, 2011

Here is a great 4-minute Youtube video showing how the Kaizen Institute teams in the USA and Canada applied the lean methodology of Production Preparation Process (3P) in designing a new facility at the Children’s Hospital of Sas

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