Jon Miller, Author at Gemba Academy

How to Motivate People to Change, Part 3

By Jon Miller - February 1st, 2007

How do you motivate the people on the trailing edge of the bell curve? The so-called “anchor draggers” or CAVE people tend to attract the most attention or concern during the process of change. I wish we had time to bring e

How to Motivate People to Change, Part 2

By Jon Miller - January 31st, 2007

How to motivate people to change? A day later and I still don’t know, but Taiichi Ohno’s “game of wits” comes to mind (see chapter 25 of Workplace Management). A game is something that is fun. Most of us are mot

How to Motivate People to Change, Part 1

By Jon Miller - January 30th, 2007

How to motivate people to change? That question was asked recently. It’s a good question and one that we should not assume we know the answer to. It is not a question that should be addressed in your organizations by professional

Toyota Production System Implementation at Japan Post, Year 4

By Jon Miller - January 29th, 2007

Here is an update to the story of Toyota instructors teaching TPS to the Japan Post and a partial answer to the question Toyota Botches Lean Implementation at Japan Post? posted earlier in this blog. The following is a summary from the

Kaizen of the Month at Gemba, December 2006

By Jon Miller - January 26th, 2007

By Marcie MacRae Going into the holidays and having the majority of the staff out of the office can be a good time to implement a big kaizen in the office. This year while the staff was on winter holidays, the admin team and two consul

Lean Manufacturing: A Five-Year Fix?

By Jon Miller - January 24th, 2007

On the way to the gemba this morning I heard the NPR report on American suit manufacturer Joseph Abboud on the rental car radio. Here is the transcript on the NPR website, titled Suit Maker Goes ‘Lean’ to Keep Jobs in U.S.

Japan Kaikaku Experience Field Report, January 2007

By Jon Miller - January 22nd, 2007

Recap of Our Recent Japan Kaikaku Experience-By Brad Schmidt Toyota’s Innovation: Toyota showcased an impressive update. They’ve introduced full kitting on specific sections of their assembly line. Kit carts follow the car

TPS Kids

By Jon Miller - January 20th, 2007

Modern marketing gurus will tell you that in order to build customer loyalty you need customers to develop a deep, emotional attachment to the brand. One of the ways this is done is by telling engaging stories about the brand. Toyota s

Toyota Owes Grandpa Ford

By Jon Miller - January 19th, 2007

Earlier this month the Lean Insider attempted to answer the question Which Lean Book is Right for My Boss? These folks ought to have the answer, since Productivity Press has published the lion’s share of important books on what w

Why Not Chase the Rabbit?

By Jon Miller - January 17th, 2007

This is a question I have most often heard from European engineers, or from people in other countries who are working with extremely high volume light assembly operations, usually following some teaching about just in time production o

Does Lean Manufacturing = The Toyota Production System?

By Jon Miller - January 15th, 2007

There is a very interesting discussion over at the Lean blog today in the post To Merge or Not To Merge…Lean & TPS. There were nine reader comments as of tonight, with many good viewpoints on the question of whether the arti

Giving A Shout Out to a Few Gemba Bloggers

By Jon Miller - January 11th, 2007

I would like to recognize a few fellow bloggers who consistently share genuine events and lessons from Lean manufacturing experiences on their gemba. Mike Wroblewski has promised to return to more active blogging with a post last week.

Words of Taiichi Ohno Sensei, Part 4: It’s a Race to Get People to Think

By Jon Miller - January 10th, 2007

I came across a new quote from Taiichi Ohno recently. It was in Japanese, and may not be new to the world, but I can’t recall seeing it in English before. I think it nicely captures the idea of kaizen and respect for people, whic

When Times Are Tough, Do You Make Better Decisions?

By Jon Miller - January 8th, 2007

I heard this in a meeting today “When times are tough you make better decisions.” I wonder if this is true. They say that necessity is the mother of invention and this means something similar. A common Toyota saying is 「�

Top 5 Lean Manufacturing Books for Beginners

By Jon Miller - January 5th, 2007

From time to time we get e-mails asking for recommendations on books or articles to read for people who are just starting out learning about Lean manufacturing and how the Toyota Production System applies to their business. The reading

Endless Creativity, Inquisitiveness and Pursuit of Improvement

By Jon Miller - January 2nd, 2007

In his New Year’s address Toyota President Katsuaki Watanabe positions 2007 as a foundation building year. He acknowledges both that Toyota sees not only strong growth in demand for their products but also fierce competition. He

Selecting a Management and Improvement System

By Jon Miller - December 28th, 2006

Lean manufacturing is a system for managing and improving production operations. More broadly, Lean manufacturing principles can be applied to manage and improve any type of operation from healthcare to service and distribution, as we

Being an Improvement Agnostic

By Jon Miller - December 27th, 2006

A while ago my colleague and I were doing our best imitations of slick salesmen in front of a group of leaders from a small, local manufacturing firm. We were fired up after a tour of their factory, confident that space could be cut to

Holiday Shopping is Wasteful

By Jon Miller - December 26th, 2006

It’s time for my second annual Boxing Day railing against the waste caused by holiday spending at the year end. This year we find a December 23, 2006 Wall Street Journal article titled How Christmas Brings Out the Grinch in Econo

Note to Toyota: Top Five Things to Do in 2007 as World’s #1 Automobile Manufacturer

By Jon Miller - December 23rd, 2006

According to a Wall Street Journal article today Toyota Is Poised to Surpass GM As the Top Car Maker Next Year. That would be 9.04 million vehicles, just ahead of General Motors. Congratulations are premature, but it’s not too ea

Ford CEO Mullaly’s First Impressions

By Jon Miller - December 22nd, 2006

In the December 22, 2006 Wall Street Journal article titled Mulally’s ‘First Impressions’ published the letter from the former Lean leader of Boeing and now CEO of the Ford Motor to the employees of the company. He st

Gemba Keiei by Taiichi Ohno, Chapter 37: The Standard Time Should be the Shortest Time

By Jon Miller - December 21st, 2006

“Speaking of standards, time study is another thing everyone gets wrong.” The typical time study is based on taking 10 times and setting an average time as the standard. Ohno says this is very bad because if you are watchin

When is Point Kaizen OK?

By Jon Miller - December 19th, 2006

Point kaizen refers to small, isolated improvements that are easy to implement quickly. The impact of point kaizens are typically small but they can have a large impact. Point kaizen are in contrast to line kaizen, plane kaizen, cube k

The Starfish, the Spider and the Span of Five

By Jon Miller - December 17th, 2006

I just finished reading The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations by Ori Brafman nd Rod A. Beckstrom. It is a quick read with some interesting ideas. I have a number of issues with the book, and by

Gemba Keiei by Taiichi Ohno, Chapter 36: Only the Gemba Can Do Cost Reduction

By Jon Miller - December 15th, 2006

Taiichi Ohno begins the chapter by demonstrating the Toyota philosophy of “aim for 10X improvement, not 10% improvement”. He instructed Human Resources to give the shop floor 10 people even though they had asked for 100 peo

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