I’m looking forward to seeing how our new culture of liquidity will affect the industrial community, particularly its embrace of lean manufacturing.

The gruesome last year of papier-mâché investment banks and the current skepticism about the viability of commercial banks such as Citi and Bank of America has spurred a reassessment of liquidity, both for businesses and individuals. The concept of long-term borrowing as standard operating procedure has lost some of its luster. The new normal: Buy what you can afford.

Lean dovetails nicely with this frugality. That alone might earn it some converts in the coming months. An article in the latest Business Week (“Lean and Mean Gets Extreme,” not yet online) suggests that it already has. My fear is that manufacturers will reflexively adopt select lean practices without even realizing it, and without a unifying philosophy behind them, focusing instead on cost reduction. And cost reduction, as we know, does not a lean manufacturer make.

I spoke last week with Steve Huffman, who keeps a busy schedule as a VP of strategic accounts at Mead O’Brien, an instrumentation distributor, and in his spare time chairs the Automation Federation, which earned a Progressive Manufacturing 100 berth this year in the Education and Training category. Steve told me he was up on Capitol Hill recently, lobbying for more funding for the nation’s Manufacturing Extension Program, a vital link to progressive manufacturing practices, lean included. The MEP seems to be endangered during every budget-setting session.

Maybe a boost from the companies the MEP was meant to serve would help save it – even expand it. See what the organization can do for you, and if you’ve benefited from its services, spread the word.

While I don’t like the mess we’ve landed in as a global economy, I like that it has created an aversion to overborrowing and overproducing, and encourages manufacturers to truly align with customer demand. I just hope the companies that are newly steeped in this mind-set understand the history and entirety of it.