[patio11]

Your customers/clients don't care how much you work

This is one of the most important parts of this discussion, and I regret not mentioning it in the post. Your company is a black box which exposes a limited interface to the rest of the world, namely "What you make and what you say." If it doesn't impact making or saying, nothing matters.

The vast majority of efforts in most companies don't matter. It is painful to contemplate how much total waste goes on, and changing even a wee bit of it (like, say, the Lean Startup movement is doing with regards to waste building things that no one actually wants) is a mammoth undertaking.