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.…
Author: Lloyd Graff
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…
Last Friday, I visited George Breiwa at his company DynaVap, in Deforest, Wisconsin, right next to my alma mater, University of Wisconsin Madison. I had interviewed George on Swarfcast twice already, and he had invited me to visit his company for a tour several times in the past. It took an opportunity to broker a very interesting machine to finally get me off my butt and take the three hour drive. I know some people might be wondering what that machine is, but I’m not at liberty to say at the moment. I’ll just say it’s what I’d call a…
It is hard to run an airline, much less make any money doing it. On the other hand, it is hard to be as inept as American Airlines and still manage to be in business. My wife Risa and I had a firsthand view of American’s chaos over these past couple of days, trying to get home from a family get-together in Charlotte, North Carolina. We had flown down from Chicago on Thursday, our first visit in two years because of COVID-19. That trip went smoothly despite my vision and hearing issues, which make every plane trip a challenge. We…