I grew up in between. Eight blocks to the West were the people my parents called the “Schvartze,” and eight blocks to the East was the South Shore Country Club, where no Jews or dogs were allowed. It was also the time when school desegregation was taking hold in Charlotte, North Carolina, where my wife grew up, and Martin Luther King was leading a March in Selma, Alabama, with Bull Conner lined up against him. I was “in between” the races at the time when America was starting to change significantly. I think I’ve lived my whole life struggling with…
Author: Lloyd Graff
What makes a great team out of a group of good players? I’ve considered that question since I first started watching team sports on TV and playing on organized teams myself. I could almost feel when a team would fail, not just because they lacked the talent to win, but because they did not have the other elements it took. I’ve been searching a lifetime trying to define those elements and putting them into practice. Recently I’ve been watching a TV show that took the issue head on. Ted Lasso on Apple TV addresses teamwork with a light touch, flavored…
I had the privilege to listen to a series of interviews with Paul Simon by Malcolm Gladwell over the past week, in an audio book called Miracle and Wonder. I found it absolutely riveting, Paul Simon talking about the early days of Simon & Garfunkel and then giving us great insights into the development and fruition of his brilliant musical career. Simon is 80 years old now. His voice has lost a little of the energy of his youth, but his mind is sharp, his memory remarkable, and his ability to inform us through Malcolm Gladwell’s well-researched questions is magnetic.…
What a year I’ve been blessed to experience. First big thing for me is that I am alive, not suffering from dementia except for occasionally forgetting Cubs players’ first names, and I’m still writing this blog most weeks, which a few people evidently still read. When you see your peers dying and failing, these are major things to be grateful for every single day. Enough personal thought. This has been a huge year in a lot of ways. From a business standpoint this has been the best year Graff-Pinkert has ever had. We paid off all our debts, gave the…
When I think about it, which is not too often, I realize that people in business live in a fictional world. Many of the numbers that bankers base their lending decisions on are backward-looking constructs that follow accounting rules that are almost meaningless in the actual functioning of a business. Inventory, depreciation, and earnings are meaningful yet meaningless artifacts in the real world that are supposed to show value. As most business owners will admit, with inventory lingering on their shelves, and capital equipment aging ungracefully on the shop floor, the values on the year-end report have little to do…
A few years ago, I asked a pawnbroker acquaintance if he would sell me a little certified high-quality gold. It was not an investment. I was not betting on the appreciation of the precious metal. It was strictly a “what-if” purchase, contemplating the possibility Risa and I would have to flee our home. Currency might rapidly erode in the event of an invasion, a tyrant, or a natural catastrophe, “but gold would always be accepted as valuable” we reasoned. We had watched too many Holocaust documentaries, read too many books about refugees perhaps, but the images of gold sewn into…
Observations made while driving to work this morning. The roads are less traveled. This is an observation by Lloyd Graff in an Acura, not Robert Frost. The four-lane highway angling near my home is virtually empty at the stop sign where I enter. It is 10:45 in the morning. It is my new normal since COVID-19, since I shut the doors temporarily in April of 2020. It felt like half the country was on a ventilator then. I got used to working from home and realized I did not really add much value by being at the company at 9…
I lingered in the tourist bus while everybody else filed into the structure. Then I walked down the steps and began to deliberately strip off my layers of clothing. Warm coat, sweater, white shirt, under shirt. It was dark out, snow flurrying. I wanted to shiver before I went into the building. I looked around the fenced-in area and saw the small homes had Christmas lights. Lublin, Poland, was outside of the building. Peaceful. Then I put my shirt back on and walked into Majdanek Concentration Camp to inspect its gas chambers. It was 1999. *** Every day I take…
It’s the feeling that enables me to fall asleep. The kinesthetic memory of the dimpled leather, the seams spaced across the leather ball, feeling it roll up my fingertips toward the rim. And then the swish–the perfect swish, no rattling iron, 15 feet of perfection. It’s my meditation, the meditation of a kid who spent hour after hour developing his shot, my unique defining shot, similar to a million kids’ free throw motions, yet imprinted with my singular DNA. Winter, spring, summer, fall, it’s always basketball season when you have it in your blood like I do. I’ve been reminded…
I wrote a blog recently about an NBA referee, Mark Davis, who seems to love making the close calls. I don’t. I am confronted now with one of these annoying close calls, which will have an effect on how I feel, how I act, my decisions, and maybe everyday actions like driving. I have a mild seizure disorder, a form of epilepsy which I have been aware of most of my life. Most of my seizures express themselves as a magnification of sound, a feeling of electricity down my spine, and maybe a fogginess in my brain for 10 to…