Kaizen Archives | Page 21 of 28

5 Why? vs. Why Not?

By Jon Miller - January 24th, 2009

The Toyota Why Not website came my way via Twitter. It’s an interesting distraction. The best part is the birds chirping. I actually looked for an open window until I realized that birds don’t chirp in January in Seattle. T

What Did You Improve Today? If Not, Why?

By Jon Miller - January 19th, 2009

This past Saturday afternoon Mark Graban from the Lean Blog twittered the following to the world: What did you do to make your job easier or. more interesting last week? What action did you take? If nothing, why not? 4:25 PM Jan 17th f

Further Reflections on Standard Work

By Jon Miller - January 16th, 2009

The topic of standards is really an interesting and deep one with great importance to not only how we do our work but how we do it more effectively. I thank lean healthcare practitioner Brian Buck for giving us an opportunity to explor

The Essential Lean Blogosphere of 2008

By Jon Miller - January 8th, 2009

Welcoming A New Voice As one of the elder statesmen of the lean community, John Shook is an important new voice to join the lean blogosphere in 2008. In this weekly post he takes a deep look at what give Toyota strength and flexibility

5 Ways to Boost Kaizen Consciousness in 2009

By Jon Miller - January 1st, 2009

Improved quality, reduced cost, better teamwork, faster response to customer needs – there are as many reasons for practicing kaizen as there are tools, templates and skills to help you do so. But ultimately we practice kaizen be

Act Small, Think Big

By Jon Miller - October 29th, 2008

Act small, think big: this is a borrowed phrase from a recent post on Seth Godin’s blog article titled Too Small to Fail. In this article he shares a profound common sense insight on the effect of size of thoughts and actions on

The Seven Grand Challenges for Supply and Spend Management in the Next 25 Years

By Jon Miller - September 17th, 2008

Our friends at Sourcing Innovation are running a cross-blogging series on the Seven Grand Challenges for Supply & Spend Management (thus the grand title above), and below is my contribution. What will be the seven grand challenges

The 7 Creativity Tools for When You are Stuck

By Jon Miller - September 2nd, 2008

There is a lot written about creativity. What is it? How can we develop it? Can it be measured and managed? An increasing amount of discussion in the business community is directed towards the topic of creativity. Many a blogger or spe

Small Teams Enable Kaizen and TPS

By Jon Miller - August 24th, 2008

Earlier this month Pete Abilla wrote about effective team sizes in his newly redesigned Shmula blog. The idea is that generally small teams are more effective because communication is essential to team success and beyond a certain size

Learning from Things that Didn’t Work

By Jon Miller - August 5th, 2008

One of the common objections we hear to doing kaizen is that “We’ve tried it before and it didn’t work,” as if past failures were ever a reason for not trying again. Experience is a good teacher only if we step

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