Kaizen Archives | Page 18 of 28

Seven Sayings for Successful Continuous Improvement

By Jon Miller - January 27th, 2010

Getting started with continuous improvement is easy but keeping it going is hard. Even though we speak of long-term thinking as one of the central tenets of continuous improvement and kaizen, many of us opt for the short-term actions,

The Dirty Secret of Science

By Jon Miller - January 17th, 2010

There is an interesting article in Wired magazine titled The Neuroscience of Screwing Up. The main lesson from the article is that humans innately ignore inputs that contradict or don’t fit within their world views. As such, we n

Knowing When to Stop: More TPS & the Tao

By Jon Miller - January 2nd, 2010

There is no set path to a successful change. Although once we understand it, we see that the lean path is the simplest of things, nobody can grasp it. If our leaders could gain control of a surefire approach change management everythin

Top 7 Behaviors to Change in 2010

By Jon Miller - January 2nd, 2010

Connected to the second step of writing resolutions for arbitrary dividing points in time, we need to address one of the biggest obstacles to success which all of us face: ourselves. The human mind is an incredibly powerful thing, the

Looking for Evidence of PDCA

By Jon Miller - November 21st, 2009

Lately I’ve been more mindful about looking for evidence of PDCA. The Plan, Do, Check, Act cycle is the essence of continuous improvement and about half of what makes a lean management system possible. The other part has somethin

Skitt’s Law Applied to Kaizen

By Jon Miller - October 26th, 2009

I became aware of a truth about lean problem solving and kaizen yesterday while reading an article about ten internet rules and laws. 4. Skitt’s Law Expressed as “any post correcting an error in another post will contain at

Words of Taiichi Ohno Sensei: Kaizen by Inspiration is Not Kaizen

By Jon Miller - October 13th, 2009

I was flipping through some Japanese books on sayings and speeches given by Taiichi Ohno looking for inspiration for a quick blog post when I found this passage: “Within the Toyota Production System, a lack of ability to do kaize

How to Use 5S to Manage Kaizen

By Jon Miller - September 29th, 2009

Ronak asked: What should be ideal process flow for kaizen? What I mean is who can give their suggestions, how to evaluate kaizen event, should we plan an event on monthly basis? This is a good question and one that reveals how common i

Toyota-style Problem Solving, Step 7: Check Both Process and Results

By Jon Miller - September 20th, 2009

The eight step description of the PDCA cycle of problem solving called Toyota Business Practice (TBP for short) or practical problem solving continues to top my list of important things everyone should know. I’m finding it surpri

What is Kaizen? The Little Gear

By Jon Miller - September 3rd, 2009

What is kaizen? A reader reminded me that a lot of terms used in articles on this blog go unexplained. Although it’s one of our favorite topics, kaizen is one such term that is often used but seldom explained in enough detail for

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