Just as online shopping has transformed U.S. retail sales, the Internet has also remade the newspaper industry, but in a manner less obvious to most people. The old print newspaper business and revenue model has been seriously broken by young upstarts—young both in age and in technology. In Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts, Jill Abramson, a former senior editorial executive at both The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, has provided an insider account of an industry fighting for its life. She examines four competitors—the traditional New York Times and Washington Post,…
Author: Lloyd Graff
For many years, I have wavered between being judgmental or agnostic about who I do business with. I felt twinges of discomfort twice this past week. I had a request for a quote on a Wickman multi-spindle screw machine from a customer who, among many other products, makes accessories for AR-15 semi-automatic weapons. He told me business is robust and they have tripled in size in recent years. He could buy a Wickman multi from someone else (it won’t be as good), but it is in my economic interest to sell him one if he will pay my price and meet…
Dear Lloyd – I read all of the issues of Today’s Machining World and really enjoy the insight and information. I’m a 62 year old journeyman tool and die maker who morphed into a scientific instrument maker, designer, manager over the last forty years. In my current position, I am running a CNC department for a 100 year old family business. I’m helping the fourth generation to go another 100 years. The company started as a tool and die shop, moved into manufacturing (almost a captive shop for Western Electric Hawthorne Works), stamping, forming, laser, waterjet, and is now working…
In the machining world, plumbing products are a sweet spot again because even though new home sales are drifting, the rehab/refurb market is thriving. Faucets are fun again. Hot tubs are hot. India is big in plumbing brass, but a lot of its product goes to Asia, Africa, and South America. If you want quality at an affordable price, you buy American. For me, this brings up many memories of Price Pfister. They used to make a million faucets in Los Angeles and had a name for quality in California. That was until they shut down all of the American production…
I’ve been listening to Michelle Obama’s wonderful autobiography, Becoming, with rapt attention. She is a brilliant writer and a terrific storyteller. What makes the book especially fascinating for me is her references to her birthplace and longtime home at 74th and Euclid in Chicago, 7 short blocks from my home growing up at 67th and Euclid. I’m 19 years older than Michelle, but we share similar memories of growing up on the South Side of Chicago. Yet many of our memories are quite different because of race, ethnicity, and the times. Michelle Robinson came from a lower middle-class family, but…
I took a quarterly seminar many years ago taught by Dan Sullivan. It was aimed at entrepreneurs and focused on how you could grow your business and enhance your life through planning and simplification. One of Dan’s catchphrases that I go back to frequently was, “reaching your ceiling of complexity.” As I entered the library this morning to write this piece, that line struck me between the eyes. I realized that I was bumping my head against that “ceiling” that felt five feet high at that moment. I had attempted to write this blog three times in three days and…
A tiny gecko can literally climb up sheer glass. A team of robotics geeks in Denmark thought, wouldn’t it be cool if we could mimic the gecko in a robot’s gripper? Wouldn’t that be a great product? They accomplished just that and started a company in Odense, Denmark to sell their gecko gripper, called OnRobot. Odense, home of Universal Robots, is the robotics incubator of the world. Poetically enough, it is also where Hans Christian Andersen wrote his fairy tales. The gecko gripper concept grew from a research paper written at Stanford University in Palo Alto, which was picked up…
The big push is on all over the country to legalize recreational marijuana. My gut reaction is that I am appalled, but I’ve been reading up on the topic to see if I am just an old fuddy-duddy teetotaler or if there is a good reason to oppose and fear it. It also has real ramifications in the machining industry with hiring decisions. Will drug testing for cannabis become obsolete or forbidden? Since Canada has legalized the sale of marijuana, as have states like Washington and Colorado, pot has become hot. Canadian pot companies like Tilray have gone public and…
I am not a big stock trader, but I have a portfolio of stocks in my IRA, which is a backstop for the volatility of the used machinery business. Or at least I used to think so. I know stocks go up and down. I know that when stocks go up a lot, I break up my day to check them. It is usually a reliable sell signal. When they are trending down and I don’t want to look, it is a reliable buy signal. Of course, being a sheep like most people, I rarely do that. I am in…
I’ve loved pro football since the days of Johnny Unitas. Dropback quarterbacks have dominated the game, but in recent years defense has become more prominent. Now the sport is swinging toward a more elusive running quarterback. With this swing, another interesting trend has been evolving. The quarterback position has become more “athletic,” and the players coming to dominate it are primarily young and African American. I’ve always regarded the National Football League as the most racist of the major sports. Yes, about 80% of the players are African American, but traditionally the quarterbacks have been White. The recent dust-up with…