The Men’s NCAA basketball tournament begins this week, an extravaganza of hoopla, gambling, and basketball. There are 68 teams, but only a few have a real chance of winning it. The eventual winner will likely come from one of the four No. 1 seeded teams in their regions. I don’t bet on sports. Machine tools are my game, but I love basketball and I find the four highest ranked teams and their coaches especially provocative this year. The No. 1 seed overall in the tournament is Gonzaga. If you do not follow college basketball, you probably have never even heard…
Author: Lloyd Graff
Amazon buys Central Steel and Wire. That’s an odd couple. Not really. What Jeff Bezos wants is the 70 acres of land on the southwest side of Chicago near the old stock yards. No bundles of half inch 12L14 bars in with the bananas for the moment. The Central Steel and Wire Company and its real estate in Chicago was sold to Ryerson Steel in 2018. The firm was an odd duck because it had no debt. It was 56% owned by the James Lowenstine Trust, which was dedicated to using 1,200 acres of natural beauty in Northern Wisconsin as…
Are schools that much different than factories? At this moment in America, virtually every factory is open and many are producing full out. Production is rising nicely. Confidence levels are high. The parking lots are full. Some steel may be a short delay and truckers seem flummoxed, but on the whole, business is jumping and the stock market is bouncing up and down off record highs. Yet in many places, kids are still on Zoom if they own computers, and teachers unions and administrators are growling at each other. Parents are reaching their boiling point as they see their kids’…
Yesterday, I started my workday by returning a phone call to customer in Italy as soon as I finished my home workout. I had read their email to try to distract myself while doing wall squats. Later I spoke with people in Czech Republic, Germany, California, Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin, and New York, and emailed others in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Albania, and probably other places. Most of the people were making parts or peddling iron like myself. Customers often ask me how Graff-Pinkert’s used machinery business is doing, and they ask me how I think the manufacturing economy is doing. After…
I spent several hours working at the Graff-Pinkert office today for the first time since last April. I am beginning the process of coming out of my fear induced hibernation, three weeks after my first COVID-19 vaccine shot. The statistics say I have 80% immunity after one Moderna vaccine hit. I sort of trust the number, but not enough to do without the mask, which is my constant annoyance when I leave my home. I hate the COVID necessitated hibernation. At my age, with a heart attack and heart surgery in my past, I am still COVID’s emotional captive. I…
(The comments section on our website is live again so please give me your thoughts.) My wife, Risa, will celebrate a big birthday next week, and I do not know what to give her. I have considered the usual presents–jewelry, clothes, a trip. None seem right. This brings back a conversation that I had with my father a couple of years after my mother had died. We often talked about business, and he told me many stories about his family and his youth but very little about his relationship with his wife. A few years before he died, about five…
Rosalind Brewer took the helm at Walgreens this week, becoming one of only a few African American woman CEOs to ever lead a large American corporation. She had been #2 at Starbucks before being recruited by Walgreens. I wasn’t surprised to see a black woman get a top job with a company like Walgreens. It would have been more shocking if a black woman’s small machining firm applied for membership in the Precision Machined Products Association (PMPA), an organization I belong to as a technical member. This is not a putdown of the PMPA, which I am happy to be…
Can you give me a good reason to write about the machining business with the Super Bowl approaching? Tom Brady, the greatest NFL quarterback ever, against Patrick Mahomes II, who may become the greatest quarterback ever. Yet the life-changing business decision both guys had to make before they turned 21 was whether they wanted to play Major League Baseball or pursue football. Patrick Mahomes, son of a Major League pitcher with the same name, grew up around the game. His dad played for Minnesota, Detroit, even my Chicago Cubs over an 11-year Major League career. Young Patrick was recruited by…
Every few months it’s fun to write a piece that asks, “what if most of the smart people are wrong?” I just read a fascinating article in the Wall Street Journal discussing the $50 billion bet Volkswagen has placed on developing an electric car that is better than a Tesla. Should we be surprised that the best German Engineers, who built the diesel that nobody bought (at least in America) and then lied about its numbers, would build an electric car that wouldn’t work? VW has now brought in new people, shoved the boss aside except for window dressing, and…
What is winning? We saw one of its faces Monday night when Nick Saban’s Alabama football team annihilated a solid Ohio State squad for Saban’s seventh National Championship. Saban seemed joyful and relieved. He knew he had the superior team and they showed it from the first snap. He acted truly happy for his players, who carried him off the field after they gatoraded him. In business, winning supposedly comes when you meet a sales goal, move into a new building, or get a promotion. But I find those are rarely moments of elation for me. Instead they usually feel…