Jon Miller

Consultant, trainer, author

Jon Miller is co-founder of Gemba Research LLC where he leads development efforts including consulting solutions, training materials, and establishing internal consulting standards. Miller was born in Japan and lived there for 18 years. In 1993 Miller was fortunate to start his career working with consultants who were students of Taiichi Ohno. Since 1998 he has led dozens of lean transformation projects in a wide range of industries. Miller has taught kaizen in 15 countries for more than 15 years. He is a frequent contributor of articles to a variety of publications and written more than 800 articles on lean manufacturing, kaizen, and the Toyota Production System on Gemba’s blog.

Fri, 11/22/2013 - 10:56
What Culture Supports a Lean Startup Approach? It depends. Are they adaptive or nonadaptive?
Fri, 11/22/2013 - 10:56
Today I was fortunate to have the opportunity to sit in on a webinar titled “Bringing Lean to Established Companies” by lean startup gurus Eric Ries, Brant Cooper, and Patrick Vlaskovits. The webinar was not about bringing lean per se but rather…
The Meta-Conversation We Aren’t Having Thoughts on Craig Weber’s Conversational Capacity
Mon, 07/15/2013 - 09:51
My latest recommended reading for people who care about getting things done is Craig Weber’s Conversational Capacity: The Secret to Building Successful Teams That Perform When the Pressure Is On (McGraw-Hill, 2013). The awareness and ability to…
Challenging ‘Challenge’ Within the Toyota Way How can we tell whether a challenge’s obstacles are surmountable?
Mon, 11/19/2012 - 09:28
At the heart of the Toyota Way are two pillars, continuous improvement and respect for people. These are supported by five values: challenge, improvement (kaizen), seeing for yourself (genchi genbutsu), respect, and teamwork. The word “challenge”…
Book: Total Flow Management Achieving excellence with kaizen and lean supply chains
Wed, 05/04/2011 - 09:23
Total Flow Management: Achieving Excellence with Kaizen and Lean Supply Chains, by Euclides A. Coimbra (Kaizen Institute, 2009), has been distributed only within Kaizen Institute and among its customers. Now this book is available to all and…
Why Don’t We See More QC Circles? A methodology due for rediscovery
Wed, 02/23/2011 - 04:30
During the early 1990s, I recall my Japanese sensei were absolutely appalled at the dearth of industrial and production engineers hired as kaizen consultants within major U.S. manufacturers. The cycles of downsizing in aerospace and defense…
The Importance of Metering the Smallest Losses A drip here, a drop there, pretty soon we're talking real money
Tue, 02/15/2011 - 05:00
There is an expression in Japanese, “Dust accumulates to form a mountain.” (Chiri mo tsumoreba yama to naru.) While this may not be geologically correct, it carries a deep truth that lean practitioners will recognize through experience. Taken…
The Four Pillars of Built-In Quality A good foundation is essential to an effective quality system
Mon, 11/29/2010 - 15:49
The Toyota Production System (TPS) house diagram is often drawn with a triangular roof, a rectangular foundation, and two rectangular columns between the foundation and roof. The space between the columns is filled with one’s choice of the systems…
10 Common Mistakes When Starting a Lean Transformation Having too much or too little information, overplanning, and shirking difficult conversations
Thu, 10/21/2010 - 15:32
People can make plenty of mistakes when launching a lean enterprise transformation. Interestingly, many of these mistakes are similar if not identical to those made by entrepreneurs when starting a business. Perhaps these mistakes are generic…
How to Sustain a Lean Culture After 10 Years At no time is it safe to put the program on cruise control
Thu, 09/23/2010 - 16:28
I am in Japan helping to lead one of our lean manufacturing benchmarking trips. What I took away from the debriefing from yesterday’s lean benchmarking visit was a series of lessons on how to sustain a lean culture after 10 years. The company we…
Leaders Pull People who enable flow by creating pull are leaders
Tue, 09/14/2010 - 08:29
Leaders lead. Or do they? There is not always a cause-and-effect relationship between leadership actions and follower behavior. Not all leaders succeed at pulling people along in the same direction. If a leader needs to drive people in a direction…