A3's are Awesome

Got this A3 from the Lean Enterprise Institute:

I'm a big fan of the A3 methodology.  I loved Pascal Dennis' book "Getting the Right Things Done" and John Shook's new book "Managing to Learn."  If there's a single mistake that sticks out among all the mistakes I've made in attempting to implement Lean at my company, it's that I didn't introduce A3 and Hoshin Planning earlier.  By not having these systems in place, we failed to show how improvement activities were linked in with business results.  This led to our Lean initiative being viewed as an ancillary activity not critical to the mission in times of desperation (like we're facing now in the homebuilding industry).

What about you, you lean genius?  Did you have the knowledge and foresight to introduce the A3 approach early and often?  Was it effective as they portray it in the books?  What would you have done differently?  By the way, I hate you because your were either smarter or more experienced than me (just kidding ya'll).