Jon Miller - Creating a Kaizen Culture: Align the Organization, Achieve Breakthrough Results, and Sustain the Gains

About the Authors

Jon Miller has 20 years of experience in the field of kaizen. He is the CEO of the Kaizen Institute Consulting Group. Born in Japan and living there for 18 years, he is fluent in its language and culture, allowing him to work closely with Japanese kaizen gurus. He was co-founder and CEO of Gemba Research, at which he spent 15 years as a senior consultant and trainer, growing the firm to over 40 people before merging it with the Kaizen Institute in 2011. Jon has traveled to more than 30 countries and has wide experience designing global Lean deployment programs for many organizations. He is the author of numerous articles, and translated and edited Taiichi Ohnos Workplace Management as well as contributing to other McGraw-Hill Professional books, including Gemba Kaizen, Second Edition, and Kaizen in Logistics and Supply Chains.

Mike Wroblewski has more than 25 years of experience in industrial engineering, manufacturing management, and kaizen. He is a Director of the Kaizen Institute USA. He has also served as an internal consultant and Lean Sensei with Batesville Casket Company, with three factories winning the IndustryWeek Top 10 Best Plants award a total of nine times and one facility awarded Assembly Magazines North American Plant of the Year. Mike is a Certified Six Sigma Black Belt from the Milwaukee School of Engineering. He is a popular keynote speaker at national conferences, sharing his insights and experiences leading kaizen.

Jaime Villafuerte has 20 years of experience in the strategic and tactical deployment of continuous improvement. He is a Lean Six Sigma Director at Jabil, Inc., where he leads the development and deployment of Lean Six Sigma transformation, reaching 165,000+ employees in 33 countries. This includes designing learning solutions, developing the competencies of kaizen regional and site Lean managers, and authoring new training courses. Jaime is an ASQ Certified Six Sigma Master Black Belt and Lean Gold Certified by SME, AME, and the Shingo Prize. He served as a Baldrige National Award Examiner in 2010. He is the author of The Lean 6 Sigma Deployment Memory Jogger.

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My personal journey with kaizen culture began when I first became chief medical officer at ThedaCare. My big concern was that we seemed to be unable to deliver reliable care to our patients. I had read the standard management books, but the problem that really frustrated me was that while we could make improvements, we couldnt sustain them. The metaphor I like to use is wed shine the flashlight into one corner and improve that area, but as soon as we took the flashlight and shone it in the other corner, the results went right back to baseline.

I had visited a number of healthcare facilities, and although some were better than others, they werent much better. I was searching for a method that could deliver zero defects. Was there an operating system or a process that could give us the consistent quality that manufacturers had achieved in the auto and aerospace industries? Could we apply those principles to healthcare to get to zero defects?

These questions led me to lean manufacturing and to study Toyota, Boeing, and finally Ariens, where we spent a day watching the workers build a snowblower. Thats when I realized its about the culture. The staff on the snowblower floor were working together in teams, and identifying problems and solving them. They didnt have some manager telling them what to do. They simply were in charge of managing the quality of that product. And they were able to be in charge because they had the knowledge and tools to identify and solve problems. That was a culture that didnt exist in our healthcare organization.