There's an interesting quote from Taiichi Ohno in "Taiichi Ohno's Workplace Management," which I was re-reading today...

"You are a fool if you do what I say. You are a greater fool if you don't do as I say. You should think for yourself and come up with better ideas than mine."

The best examples of Lean in healthcare are examples where leaders and organizations learned, but did not blindly copy. Sami Bahri DDS (the "lean dentist") read Deming, Shingo, Ohno, etc. and had to figure this out himself, rather than copying some other dentist.

ThedaCare is the first to say "don't directly copy what we do."

We can learn from others, run our own experiments to see what works, and keep improving to make it better than even Ohno or Shingo would have imagined.

I also wrote about this... in 2010, in my blog post: 

Don’t Copy: There Is No “Instant Pudding”

We "see" the Sun is up but it's not astronomically so. It's just the same with many perspectives: temptations to copy demigods are always very strong, including a possibly shameful counterstream swimming. It goes back to school days, when copying appeared to be the easiest way to get rid of heavy burdens: if school means the word applicable to fish, let's then copy up and down, right and left. If schooling means instead to teach and learn, copying is simply out of the question.  

Good article Tripp.  You make some excellent points.

I particularly like your position that we "owe it to ourselves, and the broader community, to be life-long learners rather than gurus and experts".  Yes indeed!

There surely are good reasons why copying Toyota is a bad idea. Data from Toyota’s annual reports show that the company’s production days of inventory have doubled in the past 20 years—from 17 to 36 days’ supply. In more detail: Toyota’s finished goods and work in process have nearly doubled, and purchased materials have more than tripled. Once hailed as the world’s paragon of lean, Toyota looks in that regard to have slipped to about average among car-makers.

That kind of slippage can have devastating effects on a company’s quality efforts, because a lean-management system is at the same time a quality-management system: The primary beneficial result of lean is reducing waiting times all along the value chains. When wait times plunge, defects and nonconformities show up quickly, before (1) they can multiply into quality disasters, such as massive recalls, and (2) while the root causes may still be active and traceable by the quality-engineering sleuths.

Looking at this linkage in reverse, a quality-management system serves at the same time as a lean-management system: Lean is intolerant of wait-time-consuming interruptions, scrap, and rework, and of the high variability in response times that accompany quality incidents and disasters. As Mr. Babbitt alludes to, the works of Dr. Deming had to be woven into the other lean practices.

That knife-and-fork linkage between quality and lean—aka, TPS and JIT—has long been well known and appreciated, and was explained well in the 1982 book, Japanese Manufacturing Techniques. For most of the 1980s it was common in related writings and presentation to find that linkage in the acronym, JIT/TQC (just-in-time/total quality control).