Tips for Lean Managers Archives | Page 2 of 9

The 20 Words Most Often Spoken in a Lean Organization

By Jon Miller - August 19th, 2015

Customer Value Problem Why Standard Process See Cause Team How Experiment When Data Check Result Learn Better Sustainable Purpose Thanks

Retail Values for Lean Leadership

By Jon Miller - October 17th, 2012

Here is a photo of an excellent visual control and reminder to the staff of a local independent bookstore. It says Talk to everyone. Greet everyone who comes through the door. Be out on the floor. Get to know the books!! There are stro

The Global Food Waste Scandal

By Jon Miller - September 28th, 2012

“Stop wasting food. Thank you very much.” So ends the TED talk by Tristram Stuart titled The global food waste scandal. Pictured above, Tristram stands behind a mound of perfectly edible but imperfectly shaped bananas, one

Hoshin Kanri as Both Strategy and Meta-strategy

By Jon Miller - August 3rd, 2012

Meta is one of my favorite four-letter words. People don’t use it often enough. Being meta is what makes ideas curl back upon themselves, thereby enriching our understanding of them. For example there is meta-emotion (our feeling

The Neglected Art and Science of Organization (re)Design

By Jon Miller - July 3rd, 2012

I follow three simple rules whenever looking at an organization chart with a view to improving its effectiveness. First, remove structural causes of delay or loss in information and decision flow wherever possible. Second, decrease spa

Go to Gembanana

By Jon Miller - June 2nd, 2012

The Wall Street Journal article titled Five Lessons From the Banana Man introduces us to the practical business wisdom of Samuel Zemurray, the former head of the United Fruit Company. The article is a good reminder that so-called Lean

Building Excellent Systems: Top-down or Bottom-up?

By Jon Miller - February 27th, 2012

“We have to take these pockets of excellence, these islands of excellence and make them systems of excellence.” These could be words of an executive in encouragement of a kaizen team, spoken in any number of languages, at a

10 Rules for Good Gemba Walks

By Jon Miller - January 12th, 2012

Elmore Leonard is an American novelist who has written lean and taut crime novels for a half-century. He is the Toyota of crime novels if that’s a compliment. Reliable, not flashy, always delivering on the promise of a hard-boile

Leaning Into 2012

By Jon Miller - January 1st, 2012

Many years ago when I was first learning how to drive a car, my dear young aunt Ruth rode with me on an Illinois country road. She taught me the importance of accelerating when going into a curve. This was deeply counter-intuitive to m

The 5th Myth about the Respect for People Principle

By Jon Miller - December 7th, 2011

In an excellent blog post by Jamie Flinchbaugh today he introduces 4 myths about the principle of “Respect for People”, saying: But respect for people means different things to different people. To some it means avoiding la

Monitoring Agency Revises Date for Peak Lean

By Jon Miller - October 19th, 2011

October 19, 2011 Brussels (AP) One of the world’s leading efficiency trends monitoring agency, the Organization of Practitioners in Lean Enterprise Advancement and Sustainability (OPLEAS) issued a statement today revising the exp

13 Questions to Assess Lean Competence in an Organization

By Jon Miller - October 5th, 2011

In a comment to an article about the four stages of competence, Mo asked: Can this model be introduced to organisation who have not heard of lean, it is pretty obvious they will be considered as stage one “Unconscious Incompetenc

Snowflakes, Structural Collapse and the Simplification of Lean

By Jon Miller - September 19th, 2011

A snowflake is a delightfully complex object when rotated in the three spatial dimensions. Collapsed into two dimensions, it is a pattern of jagged lines. Reduced to a single dimension a snowflake becomes merely a connected series of p

Lean: A Life of Mistakes by Cynical, Unreasonable People

By Jon Miller - August 8th, 2011

The more I try to get away from work by reading anything but books on kaizen, lean and continuous improvement, the more it seems I find examples of these anyway. An occupational hazard perhaps. Here are three important lessons from Iri

Respect for Humanity, Now in 3D!

By Jon Miller - July 31st, 2011

Films in 3D have become briefly popular again recently. For someone who has been immersed in thinking about lean and the Toyota Production System, the term 3D is a call to arms for kaizen. Called 3K in Japanese, a workplace or job that

7 Amish Habits to Make You Lean and Wealthy

By Jon Miller - July 17th, 2011

An article ran one week ago in the Seattle Times, titled “The frugal Amish know about wealth”. The Amish Mennonites are a subgroup of Protestant Christians mostly living in rural communities in parts of USA and Canda. They

The Importance of Being Columbo

By Jon Miller - June 26th, 2011

During the 1970s I shared one experience in common with Taiichi Ohno. We both watched Colombo on television, dubbed in Japanese. In fact this is something I share with possibly a hundred million Japanese people, so it only goes to show

Dunbar’s Number, Span of Control and Lean Organization Design

By Jon Miller - June 21st, 2011

A few weeks ago I learned about something called Dunbar’s Number while listening to the radio. The relevance of Dunbar’s number to lean organization design struck me immediately. There are such things as magic numbers. Some

Lean Maturity and the Four Stages of Competence

By Jon Miller - May 27th, 2011

People often ask how good or bad they are compared to best in class lean organizations. Not satisfied with answers of “there is no end on the journey”, they want to know how far along they are. This is a fair question, and

Three Requirements for Managing by Fact

By Jon Miller - May 20th, 2011

Management by fact is a pillar principle of kaizen and lean thinking. We must go see, observe without prejudice, approach problems rationally and with data, finally take the logical actions that will result in a better outcome. Yet the

Leader Standard Work Overview Video

By Jon Miller - March 18th, 2011

We have released the Leader Standard Work online training course at Gemba Academy. Currently there are seven modules in which Mike Wroblewski teaches how leaders at all levels can incorporate lean principles into their daily management

Don’t Hate the Player, Hate the Game

By Jon Miller - March 14th, 2011

A Harvard Business Review article titled The Gamer Disposition makes a case for the players of multi-player online games as good candidates within the dynamic and flexible modern organization. Specifically the authors John Seely Brown

The Importance of Metering the Smallest Losses

By Jon Miller - January 26th, 2011

There is an expression in Japanese, 　「ちりも積もれば山となる」　”Dust accumulates to form a mountain.” (chiri mo tsumoreba yama to naru). While this may not be geologically correct, it carries a deep truth

We Need Less FAKE Lean, More FAIL Lean

By Jon Miller - January 18th, 2011

This week in Bob Emiliani’s e-newlsetter Lean Leadership News, he addresses two interesting questions: “Does an organization need to start with Fake Lean?” “Is that a key part of the learning process on the way

Who is Responsible?

By Jon Miller - December 6th, 2010

“Who is responsible?” This is a phrase I used to translate all of the time when walking around with one of my Japanese sensei during a consultation. Other interpreters would use the English phrase “Who’s in char

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