Tips for Lean Managers Archives | Page 4 of 22

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

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