Kaizen Archives | Page 17 of 28

The Power of Everyday Frontline Employee-Driven Innovation

By Jon Miller - June 23rd, 2010

By Andy Brophy The management of ideas is, in many organisations large and small, a huge untapped or poorly underutilised resource. Yet ideas are the prime source of improvement and innovation. Moreover, good Idea Management brings wit

The Will, the Willow and the Frog

By Jon Miller - May 2nd, 2010

Change is like the boughs of the willow in a breeze. We can seldom control more than the very leaves and tips of branches, never the whole tree itself. When faced with absolutely solvable problems going unaddressed or imaginable future

An Infinite Number of Solutions…

By Jon Miller - April 30th, 2010

…may seem like a good thing. After all, the more solutions we have to any particular problem, the more likely we are to solve it right? In actual practice when we are properly constrained we are more likely to spend our time and

My Suggestion to Improve Long Beach Airport

By Jon Miller - April 11th, 2010

Long Beach Airport is tiny, has oddly artistic lines and is blessed with palm trees set against a blue sky. The airport’s single terminal ends almost before it begins. Baggage claim is a short stretch of conveyor, outside of the

Five Most Terrifying Words for a Lean Thinker

By Jon Miller - April 2nd, 2010

The check was not performed. These words were spoken today during a meeting to review an ongoing and complex problem solving effort within Gemba. These words chilled me to the bone. The failure to perform a check is far more dangerous

How to Scold Like a Kaizen Sensei

By Jon Miller - March 28th, 2010

There must be people at Toyota waking up in a cold sweat these days from dreams in which they are being scolded by Taiichi Ohno, furious at the massive vehicle recalls caused ostensibly by the pursuit of scale and volume production at

10,999,950 More Reasons to Think “Yes We Can”

By Jon Miller - March 25th, 2010

Sooner or later everyone involved in leading change faces naysayers and passive resisters. With the power of their minds these people add friction to the PDCA improvement cycle, noise in the signal of root cause analysis, and turbulenc

Kaizen Goes Kaput? Not So Fast

By Jon Miller - February 13th, 2010

In recent weeks there have been many articles purporting to put the finger on the cause for Toyota’s quality troubles. Most of them are solution-jumping and not worthy of further exposure or response. I felt compelled to address

Gemba Research Office Layout Kaizen #11

By Jon Miller - February 11th, 2010

Over the past week we have been chipping away at some office kaizen at the Gemba Research office near Seattle. The major activities so far have included a layout change, some 5S and other small improvements. In the 6 years that we have

How to Make Time for Kaizen

By Jon Miller - February 9th, 2010

In the early stages of exploring kaizen and other formal continuous improvement systems people always ask, “Where will we find time for kaizen in addition to all of our other work?” Ideally kaizen should be something done n

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