Jon Miller, Author at Gemba Academy

Upgrading Our Value Stream Infrastructure

By Jon Miller - August 16th, 2021

I recently visited family in the Midwest section of the United States. We could tell exactly when we crossed the county line from the wealthier, more urban, and industrialized county with a much higher tax base into the rural, sparsely

Live Virtual Online Lean Experiences with the Kaas Pass

By Jon Miller - August 9th, 2021

Kaas Tailored has been on their continuous improvement journey for over twenty years. For the past ten years, they have been generous in sharing both the successes and struggles of their journey. More than forty thousand people have wa

How to Lead Without Subject Matter Expertise

By Jon Miller - August 2nd, 2021

This week, while reading a Wall Street Journal article, I was reminded of something James Womack said at a lean conference about a decade ago. It was during a speech about value stream management. He pointed out a main key difference b

Piloting Continuous Improvement

By Jon Miller - July 26th, 2021

During several recent conversations with customers, I found myself discussing the pilot as an effective way to roll out continuous improvement. Like many terms that have settled into common usage in the business world, this can mean di

What Is a Milk Run?

By Jon Miller - July 19th, 2021

The milk run is a method for connecting material movement between multiple sources and a storage location nearer to the point of use or processing. The name comes from a practice in the dairy industry. A tanker truck makes rounds to

Hypotheses from Hansei in Odd Times

By Jon Miller - July 12th, 2021

The Independence Day weekend has turned into sort of a second holiday of thanksgiving for me. It’s a chance to appreciate improving weather, fresh produce, and a moment to reflect on the last half-year. For the past decade or

The Five Steps to Getting Better at Anything

By Jon Miller - June 28th, 2021

Jerry Seinfeld is an immensely successful comedian. He has achieved fame and fortune through his skill at making funny observations about everyday things. An Inc. magazine article asks him why he still works so hard and receives a simp

Learning from a Blogging Experiment Failure

By Jon Miller - June 21st, 2021

We’re about ten weeks into running an experiment in blog post writing. The purpose is to be less deadline-driven, allow time for quality checks and make the writing process less of a weekly struggle. It was going well until this week

Respect for Soft Skills

By Jon Miller - June 14th, 2021

In lean circles we talk a lot about respect for people. Along with continuous improvement, it’s one of two core elements of the Toyota Way brand of lean thinking. In contrast to the tools and techniques of continuous improvement,

How to Think Long Term

By Jon Miller - June 7th, 2021

One of the 14 Toyota Way principles is to think long term. In fact, it’s the first on the list. What does it mean exactly to base decisions on the long term, in the context of lean management? Reading carefully, we can see that n

The Surprisingly Positive Power of Deception

By Jon Miller - May 31st, 2021

Recently I wanted to persuade an acquaintance to try something. It was a simple solution that I was pretty sure would work for them. There was very little practical downside. And yet as anyone who has ever tried to present a solution t

Roundabout Lessons on Scaling Lean Solutions

By Jon Miller - May 24th, 2021

Traffic roundabouts are one of my favorite flow management devices. There is a physical WIP limit. They’re visual. Look to the left for oncoming traffic, if there is a gap, this is the “pull signal.” No oncoming car in the ci

How to Solve Hard Problems with Kaizen Events

By Jon Miller - May 17th, 2021

Many people are familiar with kaizen as a philosophy and practice of continuous improvement based on making many small changes repeatedly towards a long-term ideal. Often this takes the form of a creative idea suggestion scheme, a simp

Lessons from Twelve Years in Pursuit of Zero

By Jon Miller - May 10th, 2021

We often see a visual display of the safety performance metric “days since lost time incident” in workplaces. It’s common where the job requires physical labor or where there is injury risk. The more days, or the long

How to Save the World Using Gantt Charts

By Jon Miller - May 3rd, 2021

There are many tools available to project managers for coordinating work and keeping their projects on schedule. Small and simple projects may use task lists or spreadsheets to track the status of work items. Teams working on longer te

How to Avoid Zoom Fatigue

By Jon Miller - April 26th, 2021

Academics, executives, and mental health professionals are growing aware of something called Zoom fatigue. Zoom is a popular brand of online video chat, but the phenomena is not limited to that platform. People are reporting tiredness,

Going Out of Our Minds with Lean Thinking

By Jon Miller - April 19th, 2021

The expression, “walk a mile in their shoes before judging them,” means gaining understanding or empathy for another person’s experience or point of view. It’s mainly a mental exercise. But there are many practical

The Coaching Cycle Is Not a Judgement-Free Zone

By Jon Miller - April 12th, 2021

Planet Fitness famously calls itself a judgement-free zone. This is an effort to combat the image of gyms as aggressive, competitive spaces. Beginners or casual users may not feel as comfortable. We are all beginners at one time, and w

Addressing Toyota Kata’s Counting Problem

By Jon Miller - April 5th, 2021

Toyota Kata is the name Mike Rother gave to the set of routines used at the company to teach and practice scientific thinking. There are two practice patterns, the improvement kata for the learner and the coaching kata for the coach.

Blog Writing Experiment

By Jon Miller - March 29th, 2021

Since 2003, I’ve been putting my thoughts on kaizen, lean, continuous improvement, and related topics down in blog posts. For the past five years it’s been on a weekly cadence. My deadline is Monday at 4:59 AM Pacific Time.

Seven Policy Questions for Shaping a Lean Future

By Jon Miller - March 22nd, 2021

A Scientific American article from November 2020 looked ahead to how the election would shape the future of the U.S. and the world. The article asked seven questions related to how the election’s outcome would affect policies in

When to Stop the Coaching Conversation

By Jon Miller - March 15th, 2021

One of the challenges of being an effective coach is knowing when to stop coaching. After sharing some insight or giving a piece of advice that lands well, it’s natural for a coach to feel good. If we’re not careful, this f

How to Shape Lean Leadership Culture Through Daily Management

By Jon Miller - March 8th, 2021

At the most basic level, a daily management system enables us to know each day whether we are on-track or off-track to meeting our goals. It provides a structure to expose problems and take corrective action. The system includes medium

Better Lean Leadership through Novice Learning

By Jon Miller - March 1st, 2021

I read an interesting article in the Wall Street Journal titled, How to Teach Professors Humility? Hand Them a Rubik’s Cube. Professors at Furman and Denison Universities took on a challenge over a six-week winter break. They had to

Three Things to Stop and Start Doing for Better Lean Coaching

By Jon Miller - February 22nd, 2021

The act of lean coaching covers a broad range of formal and informal roles. We see lean coaching between managers on a gemba walk, a consultant overseeing kaizen teams, a kata coach and an IK learner, a black belt mentoring a green bel

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