We’ve all done it. We’ve all done it and gotten away with it. We’ve all done it and suffered the consequences. Tuesday night in the potentially climactic game of the NBA Finals Kevin Durant, the seven-foot shooting star of the Golden State Warriors, played ball after sitting out 32 days with a calf injury. After 10 minutes of playing beautiful and surprisingly fluid basketball his leg buckled on a seemingly inconsequential move, and Durant crashed, all 84”, to the floor in Toronto. Some ignorant Raptors fans started cheering, but to their credit, Toronto players immediately shushed them to silence. They…
Author: Lloyd Graff
The scary, little, chubby chess piece sat in the old Scottish antiques dealer’s desk for 50 years. He bought it for a few pounds and stuck it in a drawer. After his death his heirs were checking out his belongings and discovered the elaborate carving made from a walrus tusk. One of them thought it might have some value. They guessed correctly. On July 2, it will be auctioned off by Sotheby’s. Its anticipated sale price is around $1 million. It is a piece from the collection of Lewis Chessmen, carved in the 12th century in the form of Norse…
If you are interested in women’s soccer, obscure foods, and the tortured lives of Congressional Medal of Honor winners, last weekend’s Wall Street Journal provided hours of Gatorade for your thirst for quality content. As a writer I appreciate a well-researched and written piece. As a former magazine editor, I know what it takes to put together a readable monthly publication. I can only applaud the editors of the Journal who produce a superb publication five days a week and an absolutely brilliant one on the weekend. As the supposed competition, The New York Times and Washington Post, have deteriorated…
In the world of professional sports “tanking” has become the trendy strategy for a losing team to turn a losing franchise into a contender. In baseball, the Chicago Cubs and Houston Astros both transformed themselves by becoming ultra-awful losers for several years in order to draft potential stars and develop them into the nucleus of a winning team over five years. Many teams try to “tank” and rebuild only to languish for years in the purgatory of sports. The Cleveland Browns and Buffalo Bills of pro football come to mind. The path seems pretty clear in pro sports, though not…
Around the world May 1 is May Day, a holiday celebrated by Labor as a demonstration of its power and determination. In the United States it is another work day and essentially forgotten as is the organized labor movement except by government workers and teachers. The industrial labor movement in America still has its vestiges in the United Auto Workers and Steelworkers and electricians, but it is a withering movement in the small- and medium-sized businesses I deal with. Retail is a wasteland for organized labor. UPS is organized, but FedEx is not. Uber and Lyft are totally nonunion. McDonald’s…
I am in the process of making a lot of changes in my surroundings. The axiom used to be that as you get older it gets harder to change, but I don’t find that to be true. Seeing friends and associates get sick and die makes it easier because I want to sandwich more stuff into my life while I still can. If I have the energy and the money to replace the old appliances in the house and sand the floors and paint the walls I want to do it now. The redo in my house has nothing to…
Francesco Molinari, the Italian professional golfer who has entered the top tier of pros who are factors in every major tournament, led by two strokes going into the final round of the Masters Sunday. I have followed Molinari with more than a casual interest of late because he has used a putter made by a 90-person job shop just down the road from Graff-Pinkert in Tinley Park, Illinois. I met the owner, Bob Bettinardi, at IMTS. We were both resting our bones for a few minutes next to the Universal Robots exhibit, and we talked a bit about CNC mills…
I attended PMTS, the exhibition put on by the Precision Products Association last week, not really to sell screw machines, but to learn and connect. Accomplishing this goal gave me a satisfaction and closure that I’ve never felt before at a show. Here’s the crux of what I learned. This was the happiest crowd I’ve ever seen at an event of this type. The endless mope of the last recession finally has drifted away. Nobody mentioned losing work to China which was a theme for so long. The prevailing vibe was that big companies are finding China a scary place…
I have just completed an indolent weekend of imbibing sports on TV: NCAA basketball winnowing 16 terrific college teams down to the Final Four and the Chicago Cubs opening the season with the Texas Rangers. Just for the added whipped cream I watched the Miami Pro Tennis Tournament that Roger Federer won, the 101st significant tournament victory of his career. I thought about business a bit, responded to emails, ruminated about blog topics, changed my travel plans to the Precision Machining Technology Show in Cleveland this week, and did a rigorous work out, but mostly I relished some superb basketball and…
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,…