I wish companies could go lean. I had tremendous growth when working for Netflix partly because engineers there got to build meaningful systems with huge ownership and very small teams. Case in point, my coworker and I owned four or five high-traffic systems and carried a pager 24x7. It didn't bother us at all as our we got alerts maybe once or twice a month.

That said, a lean company requires strong leadership, technical depth in management, and specific types of cultures. I don't believe that most companies are up to such challenge.