However, being lean has fundamental limits. Costs can only be cut so far. The current drive to combine already lean operations with aggressive cost cutting is making U.S. organizations increasingly fragile. At a time when future success means choosing and controlling the playing field, American enterprises are cutting into the muscle needed to create the future. Despite previous failures such as Honda's experience with an overly lean organization, most organizations fail to grasp the twenty-first century will belong to the agile, not the fragile.
Cost cutting is a short term focus.
It can only be done for the current situation and is not future-oriented. Lean organizations already risk treating people as problems, rather than as a solution source. When cost cutting affects infrastructure and reengineering buy-in, organizations slide into a death spiral. A new approach, called agility, takes advantage of change by forcing growth strategically. It aims to preempt competition by continuously giving customers both what they will need in the future, as well as what they currently want.