Louisiana-Pacific Corp. and the Tennessee Titans have agreed on a stadium naming rights sponsorship. The NFL Titans stadium in Nashville will now be called LP Field and LP will have stadium naming rights for 10 years at a cost of $3 million per year. “This is a rare opportunity for LP to align with a great organization, the Tennessee Titans, as well as the National Football League,” says LP CEO Rick Frost.

For the past year Pollard Lumber Co. has been operating a direct-fired triple-length continuous dry kiln at its 50MMBF (single shift) southern pine operation here. Pollard Lumber’s kiln drying history goes back to 1984 when, after years of air drying southern yellow pine, it started up a direct-fired dry kiln with an Energy Systems green sawdust burner.

Many organizations within the lumber industry have similar business strategies, fiber access, and assets, yet some consistently outperform others. Why? There are many reasons, but at the core, the better mills simply execute better. This issue is not limited to sawmilling. According to Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan in their #1 New York Times Bestselling book titled “Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done”: “Execution is the great unaddressed issue in the business world today…it is the ‘Gap Nobody Knows.’”

The Hampton Affiliates sawmill in Willamina, Ore. again tops the list for output by a single U.S. mill for 2005. Its 486MMBF not only outdid some 660 other significant U.S. sawmills, but also its own production of 473 million in 2004. Only a few mills in British Columbia and Germany are in this volume range. This marks the fourth consecutive year that Hampton’s Willamina mill has won the “national title.”

Progressive Solutions Inc., Richmond, BC, is acquiring ODS Software LLC of Federal Way, Wash. Progressive Solutions will retain the ODS staff, which comprises many industry veterans, and maintain the Federal Way office, operating under the name Progressive Solutions USA, Inc. ODS Software is a leading provider of supply chain management software solutions for wholesale distributors of lumber and building materials.

I was extremely disappointed by the editorial in the June 2006 issue of Timber Processing entitled “The Bigger Issue” by senior associate editor Jennifer McCary. It is a disservice to your readers to present myths and off-hand remarks as facts and then to use that fiction to support your position on the free flow of immigrant Hispanic workers.