This is the second in a three-part series of articles based on insights provided by speakers at VMA’s 2011 Manufacturing Workshop & Tour, held May 4-6 in Atlanta.

The most common reason companies start a lean program is because everyone else is doing it—it’s the “program of the month,” said Jamie Flinchbaugh, co-founder and partner of the Lean Learning Center.

People in industry tend to think in terms of the popular definition for lean, which is doing more with less. However, “I’ve never seen a company cut its way to prosperity,” Flinchbaugh pointed out.

This is the first in a three-part series of articles based on insights provided by speakers at VMA’s 2011 Manufacturing Workshop & Tour, held May 4-6 in Atlanta.

People in manufacturing often talk about lean “as if it is a program—something we ought to be doing” simply to eliminate waste, John Smith, president and CEO of Ross Controls, told the audience at the 2011 Manufacturing Workshop. Smith (pictured) spoke following a tour by attendees of the Ross Controls’ facility in nearby Lavonia, GA. He said “lean” is not finding new tools within the company; rather, “it’s the culture of the company that drives lean,” he said.

The spring 2011 edition of Valve Magazine contained a short article about international expert José Luis Vittor. Here’s a longer version of that article, in which Vittor discusses business conditions in Latin America and advises where the most fruitful opportunities exist.

At almost any event that executives with global interests have attended in the last couple of years, one of the hot topics of discussion has been Latin America. Such was the case at a VMA leadership meeting held earlier in 2011 when international expert José Luis Vittor took the podium to explain opportunities in that area of the world to attendees.

The precipitating event in the 1986 Tom Clancy novel Red Storm Rising is a massive fire in a Soviet petroleum installation caused by an infiltrator in the control room. But that attack could be done from thousands of miles away, without a person on site — and in fact there have been persistent reports that a “logic bomb” planted by the CIA in supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) software subsequently stolen by the KGB caused a massive explosion at a pipeline in Siberia in 1982. And there is increasing evidence that attacks aimed at industrial and civil infrastructure in countries around the world are no longer a remote possibility, but a serious real-world threat.