But you are mixing up steps you can take... with the motivations behind them. And then misapplying the motivation elsewhere.
Lean is not about 'reducing cost and eliminate waste' per say. Lean is about agility and prioritizing the outcome over process-attachment. Lean is to embrace continual improvement in how you do things with the motivation of being willing and able to adjust to adapt to your market needs. To keep it very short.. instead of saying "this is how the book say its done" - you embrace "is this the way that works best for what we need now?". Instead of strict top down dictation of process, be willing to take the input and experience of all involved. Be critical if something is actually delivering value or not.. or is it just baggage?
The OUTCOME of Lean evaluations is often a reduction of waste... because that excess didn't provide value to your outcome or improved flexibility, but elimination of waste is not the principle you set out to implement.
When I talk about motivations... and how you and others use it to label Disney in these negative connotations you're confusing lean with 'cost cutting'. you've got the motivations wrong.
It's like the difference between a person who is skinny because they were trying to be thin... vs a person who is skinny because they are an competitive athlete.
Both have done things to cut weight.. and maybe done things like eliminate things from their diet. But the athlete did not get skinny because they desired to be skinny - they got skinny because they've they require flexibility in their movements, they require a diet to ensure their muscles perform and don't cramp, their body fat is down because their body needed that energy, they needed to train, etc. The athlete prioritized and valued their performance - the losing weight was a benefit and in some cases necessary to deliver on the performance they desired.
The athlete measures their success based on their resulting athletic performance. Their choices were driven by desiring that outcome. The losing weight is a beneficial consequence - not the motivation.
The skinny person measures success simply based on how much weight they dropped. They were motivated only by 'cutting'.
The misapplication of lean in this thread is trying to paint the skinny dieting person as applying Lean. That is inaccurate. Simply setting out to reduce cost or improve margin for the sake of better profits is NOT Lean thinking or management.
I am WAY too slammed at work to try to play guest speaker on Lean - but we've been implementing lean and agile development for nearly a decade now. I don't keep references handy to try to explain it to people so I tried to briefly find something to illustrate this. Now, as I said I'm in WAY too deep at work to qualify this material fully.. so I don't vouch for their content as a whole here.. (its massive).. plus I personally have a huge hatred for McKinsey... but this paper speaks towards Lean Management and had a simple diagram highlighting high level principles of significance when we are talking about motivation.
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http://www.mckinsey.com/client_service/operations/latest_thinking/lean_management
I have not gone through their material but a few pages worth.. and it didn't seem to go that far off the rails from what I saw so I don't squirm too much over linking it. But the illustration above is the part people need to think about. 'Delivering value efficiently' is not simply CUT COSTS. Efficency may actually require greater costs for the return of better value to the customer (like... building an Automated Distribution Center so you can better adapt to the variations in customer orders).
Efficiency is about waste - not necessarily MARGIN.
