Author: Lloyd Graff

How do you build a great team?  It could be a business, a hospital, or a sports franchise. It’s easier to discuss sports because the results are more recognizable, so we will start there. Two of the best current baseball teams are the New York Yankees and Los Angeles Dodgers. The Yankees number one star is outfielder Aaron Judge. Judge was offered a huge contract to stay with the Yanks before the season started, but chose to pass on it and bet on himself. He is having a terrific season with a chance to hit 60 home runs. He will…

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IMTS For me, the initials stood for I am Missing That Show. But as I started thinking more deeply about this piece, I began to change my mind.  The world has changed so much since the last show in 2018. COVID killed big exhibitions for two years and they are just beginning to reconfigure themselves for a lingering COVID world. Train stations near my home are half-filled these days. Downtown Chicago has lost its allure with the threat of violence looming every evening. The Chicago Police Department cannot fill its ranks, but the Bears opening game the Sunday before IMTS…

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This piece was supposed to be about the ridiculous show following Serena Williams’ opening match of her last tournament. Serena won against a weak, inexperienced opponent, but looked overweight, slow, and dressed in a costume. The announcers, particularly Chris Evert, a great champion who never had a farewell like this, fawned over Serena. They generally overlooked her being so out of shape and past her prime.  It was the show afterward that nauseated me. A video from Oprah, Gayle King of CBS falling over herself with grandiose praise. Billie Jean King was the only authentic person who appeared.  This piece…

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Companies in the machining world say they are begging to hire young people who want to work. The statistics from the government say unemployment is at a near record low, yet we all know a young person who says they can’t find a job. Why do we have this apparent mismatch? I see many reasons, and I am sure you know of others. The obvious one is that most young folks do not know manufacturing still exists in the United States. Unless they come from a family in the industry, they probably think all of those jobs left the country…

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The New Union Movement is sweeping the country.  At least you would think so reading or listening to the popular media.  But it isn’t. Some Starbucks stores have voted to unionize, and an Amazon fulfillment center on Long Island has voted to organize too, but to me the shocking fact is how few of America’s massive corporations, which have grown hugely over the last 30 years, have seen unions take root. I have been trying to figure out why the union movement has been so unsuccessful in recent years except in organizing school districts and government workers. Perhaps one of…

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Ping pong. Rowing. Surviving somehow in the ghetto.  After a life in Chicago, most of it on the Southside, I thought I knew a lot about black life in the city.  I didn’t know “nuthin.” Over the last few days, I listened to a long interview with Wally Green, who escaped gang life, drugs, death, and a jail cell, with a ping pong paddle in his hand. Today he is a $100 per hour ping pong coach. He has played around the world, is a TikTok celebrity, TEDx Speaker, Cofounder of SPiN New York, and just returned from the Maccabiah…

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Time, money, prospects, hope, and the allure of winning.  It all comes together in the next week of baseball season.  In every business we constantly weigh all of these factors in our daily decision making process.  Do we hire a person with a history of jumping from job to job, knowing he or she has attained skills that will make our business money in the short run? Do we take on a machining job that requires expensive new machines, knowing it may only last a short period? Should we dump a business that has made us a pretty good living…

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The Home Run Derby at the Major League All-Star Game ended up with two young Dominicans, Julio Rodriguez and Juan Soto, blasting 400-footers in a battle for the trophy.  The greatest young stars in the NBA, Nikola Jokić, Giannis Antetokounmpo, and Luka Dončić, headed for the Basketball League in their early 20s. Perhaps the best pitcher and greatest hitter in baseball is the same guy, Shohei Ohtani, of Japan. If you have talents, if you have ideas, if you have ambition to have a full life where you can reach your potential, you head for America –still. On the other…

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When I was a young man and we moved into our new warehouse in Oak Forest, IL, one of the first things I did was plant an apple tree.  The soil next to the building had been scraped off to accommodate our parking lot, but I planted it anyway. I love apples, and I wanted to watch the tree grow and bear fruit, along with the business it was close to.  This was almost 40 years ago. I was no farmer. I only planted one tree, and I expected it to magically bear fruit. But it was moribund. It had…

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My son Ari was going to Peru on an adventure vacation a month ago. I thought it would be useful for him (and me, too) if he had a person in the country who he could call as a resource in case of a problem or perhaps just to meet up with for an hour in a cafe. I know exactly one person in Lima, Peru, Marco. We had sold a Wickman screw machine to him 10 years ago. We reconnected last year because he was looking for an INDEX CNC multi-spindle. He came to the US and looked at…

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