"At this point in a story, everyone wants 'The Big Aha!.' 'Just tell me what things I need to do like Danaher / Wiremold / that small company in Ohio… so I can copy them and get the same results!' Of course that never works or else we’d only have one book about Toyota, but I digress. The Aha for this company was not something they did, but rather something they stopped doing. They stopped striving to “do Lean” by following everyone else’s models of what a Lean company should look like. Instead, they inadvertently ran a series of experiments on how to take good business practices and apply them in ways that meshed with their current culture. This last point is hugely important and addresses a major reason for why Lean fails. People and the organizations they create change incrementally. If we ask too much, too soon, or even ask them too think too deeply, they will not change because the human brain doesn’t know how to make the mental leap."
