Jon Miller, Author at Gemba Academy

Awareness of a Problem Does Not Mean Much

By Jon Miller - September 11th, 2007

Reading The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb has been thought provoking. It is a book about the impact of the highly improbable events on our lives and on history, and why humans do not forsee such Black Swan events. There are many

Hope for Chrysler

By Jon Miller - September 9th, 2007

My hope for Chrysler is that Jim Press can act as a consensus builder and not a heroic, problem solving executive. What Chrysler doesn’t need is a wave of Toyota Production System implementation in their factories or a dose of To

Job Breakdown Sheets for Teaching TPS

By Jon Miller - September 8th, 2007

Job Breakdown Sheets are used as part of Toyota’s approach to OJT (on the job training), called Job Instruction. A Job Breakdown Sheet details the Major Steps, Key Points and Reasons for the key points. Having a Job Breakdown She

The Secret Lives of Toyota Term Employees, Episode 2

By Jon Miller - September 6th, 2007

How to Pass the Term Employee Job Interview at Toyota The website “The New – Ask the Term Laborer Porsche” (新・期間工ポルシェに訊け) offers a fascinating glimpse into the secret lives of Toyota term emplo

Kaizen Song: It’s a Long Way to the Top (Teaching Takt, Flow, Pull)

By Jon Miller - September 5th, 2007

By Brad Schmidt Here’s a little back-to-school rock ‘n’ roll. It’s a Long Way to the Top (Teaching Takt, Flow, Pull) [To the tune of It’s a Long Way to the Top (If You Wanna Rock ‘n’ Roll) by A

Getting Started with Lean in the Office

By Jon Miller - September 3rd, 2007

One of the most common misconceptions about doing Lean in the office is that there is a different set of Lean tools for the office. We hear “What symbols should we use for value stream mapping in an engineering process?” or

Autonomous Maintenance in the Office

By Jon Miller - September 2nd, 2007

We are going through some design change tests at the Gemba blog as long-time readers may have noted. While testing the various functions and features to send back fix requests to our developer, I came across some reader comments and qu

Top 10 Books on Lean Thinking

By Jon Miller - August 30th, 2007

Here is a highly subjective list of the top 10 books on Lean thinking. Toyota Talent: Developing Your People the Toyota Way by Jeffrey Liker and David Meier This book has the benefit of being new, and providing very practical and relev

The Toyota Production System is Practice, Not Theory

By Jon Miller - August 29th, 2007

Pete Abilla from the Shmula blog, recently commented on one of our blog articles Is the Theory of Constraints (TOC) a Theory? He said: During my short time at Toyota, I learned this lesson well: we were always encouraged to “try

Why You Need A Tatakidai

By Jon Miller - August 28th, 2007

When people say to me “We don’t need no more stinkin’ Japanese words in our Lean vocabulary,” I don’t argue. Most of us aren’t using all of the ones we’ve got anyway. Why acquire knowledge you

The Secret Lives of Toyota Term Employees, Episode 1

By Jon Miller - August 26th, 2007

Kaizen and respect for people. These are the words under which Toyota presents itself as a company that builds cars by building people. Yet this is the ideal, and we know that there is always a gap between reality and the ideal. What i

Target, Actual, Please Explain

By Jon Miller - August 24th, 2007

I learned some important lessons today. One which I will share is to never compromise when it comes to placing visual status boards on the shop floor. Visual status boards promote problem solving and kaizen by exposing problems. There

Kaizen Song: We Demand Visual Controls

By Jon Miller - August 22nd, 2007

We Demand Visual Controls (to the music of David Bowie’s “The Man Who Sold the World”) A fax was on my desk, it spoke of promises “My order isn’t there, hey when was it sent?” Which came as some surprise, logged in and

Is Your Lean Deployment “Made to Stick?”

By Jon Miller - August 21st, 2007

Mark Rosenthal is The Lean Thinker who connects the ideas from the book Made to Stick to visual controls used on the shop floor in a Lean factory. Mark argues convincingly for having “Sticky” Visual Controls in an article posted ye

The Essence of Shop Floor Management

By Jon Miller - August 20th, 2007

Chris Schrandt is a Gemba guy from Toyota who has wealth of experience in quality management and TPS. He had several great quotes during a problem solving class today, and this one about exposing problems struck me as particularly wort

Is the Theory of Constraints (TOC) a Theory?

By Jon Miller - August 18th, 2007

The tagline Theory of Constraints Exposed in an IndustryWeek article from March of this year got me thinking about TOC. Not a bad article by the way, although I’m still waiting for the Lean-TOC software system sales pitch shoe to

45 Ways to Strengthen Kaizen Habits

By Jon Miller - August 16th, 2007

I have a suspicion that personal productivity bloggers are actually moonlighting Lean people. The 27 great tips to keep your life organized at Zen Habits contain advice familiar to us as one piece flow, bias for action, “zeroR

5S Know How from the Last Century

By Jon Miller - August 13th, 2007

We are going through a fairly thorough 5S exercise of our server. Just over 22GB of files were red tagged last week. Of the few items that were salvaged from the red tag folder was a series of notes by Brad Schmidt, President of Gemba

A Bureaucracy Which Enables Kaizen

By Jon Miller - August 12th, 2007

The organizational characteristics of the Toyota Production System have been described as the combination of rigid and scripted rules with a high degree of flexibility to respond and change as needed. Thesis. Antithesis. Synthesis. The

Newt Gingrich Wants to Kaizen the U.S.A.

By Jon Miller - August 10th, 2007

Newt Gingrich wants to kaizen the U.S.A. He talks of “a world that works, and a world that doesn’t” using the example of FedEx versus the U.S. Federal Government in this video clip on Youtube. In an August 7, 2007 spe

Toyota Production System Applied to Software Development

By Jon Miller - August 8th, 2007

Some of the most interesting insights into the Toyota Production System come from the experiences people have with implementing the TPS outside of manufacturing. Whether it is in schools, hospitals, or software development firms, the c

Three Key Points to Kaizen Your Communication

By Jon Miller - August 7th, 2007

How well do you communicate what is truly important to your peers and to the people you teach? How often do you say “These three points are important. Write them down”? Here are three key points to effective communication:

Tell Us Your Lean Failure Stories

By Jon Miller - August 6th, 2007

Recently one of our consultants came back from a sales call having received the question from our prospective client “When has your firm failed in consulting engagements? Tell us your Lean failure stories.” Not having serve

Chrysler’s (Lean?) Six Sigma Future

By Jon Miller - August 5th, 2007

The Chrysler Corporation has a new CEO, Bob Nardelli. Nardelli Picked to Run Chrysler in Industry Shift, the August 6th, Wall Street Journal reports. Mr. Nardelli was most recently in the news for bringing a controversial combativeness

Is IT the Key to Improving Healthcare Quality and Efficiency?

By Jon Miller - July 30th, 2007

Is IT the key to improving healthcare quality and efficiency? The majority of healthcare opinion leaders seem to think so. The findings from the Commonwealth Fund/Modern Healthcare Opinion Leaders Survey appeared in the July 30 edition

Jon Miller

Find Jon Elsewhere

Start your improvement training today.