I’ve been enjoying Piney Ridge in Pennsylvania, where my wife’s brother hired an Amish company to put a new roof on his home.

The crew arrived at 7:15 in a couple of trucks — they have a Mennonite partner who handles transportation and power tools.

There were about a dozen young men in collared shirts, their black trousers held up by suspenders. They pretty much swarmed the roof, working almost silently beneath straw hats.

By 8:30, the old shingles and felt were stripped and loaded on the back of a truck.

I wandered off to town to the Fedex drop and the Day’s Inn, then sat in my rental car outside, enjoying their open wireless internet connection (thanks Days Inn!).

When I got back to the ridge, about 11:30, a kid — dressed just like the others — was pushing a wide magnet on wheels around the house, collecting dropped nails.

The new roof was on and the crew was beginning to suck back enormous quantitites of Mountain Dew.

This company is bonded, their work guaranteed, and their quote was a thousand dollars lower than the nearest bid from an English roofer.

This reminds me of the contest a while back when the Building Industry Association of San Diego County asked the question: How fast can you build a home?

The winning team put up a three bedroom, two bath house from standard materials in two hours and 45 minutes. They did it with a team of 700 carpenters, plumbers, electricians and and other skilled workers. They did it by roughing the plumbing in eight minutes and setting the main roof in a little more than nine. They did it by suspending everything they knew about conventional best practices.

I’m just thinking out loud here, wondering: What are we doing that we could do better, faster, with greater margins (and no loss of quality!) — if we rethought our best practices? Are those best practices, in fact, mediocre habits we inherited without question from those who came before?

"This is the way we’ve always done it," easily becomes "This is the way it’s done," which becomes, "This is the best way to do it," which calcifies into, "This is the only way to do it."

Not long after that, some guys in suspenders show up at our customers door offering to do what we do faster, cheaper and just as well. And that’s what we in the industry call, "A Problem."