It was time to change oceans. John and Julie King, retired and fed up with California taxes and congestion, needed an experienced crew to take their 44-foot sailboat Myla from the Pacific coast to a new home in Maryland’s Chesapeake Bay. The Panama Canal was on the route, and I got the call to assist since John and I have been sailing together since childhood. It was an offer I couldn’t refuse. When else was I going to see one of the most remarkable products of human endeavor? A non-stop flight from any number of cities deposits you in Panama…
Author: Lloyd Graff
I have been struggling to write this blog for over a year now, but it is a topic I really want to discuss, because it is so tough. It’s also about baseball – sort of. Luke Heimlich is the best player on the best college baseball team in the country, Oregon State. He is a left-handed pitcher with impeccable stuff. He has lost only once all season. He is 22 and a Senior. He would easily be a first round draft pick at next week’s Major League Baseball draft. He would have been a first round pick in 2017 as…
I read Matthew Stewart’s long, insufferable guilt laden essay last night, “The Birth of a New Aristocracy,” which is the cover story of the June Atlantic. Stewart recounts his own background, he descended from a grandfather who was the president of Standard Oil of Indiana way back in the 1930s. He grew up well off and has the guilt of an academic liberal tattooed on his arm. His mission in the article is to make Americans who manage to live in a comfortable home, educate their kids well and take care of their health feel like they are doing it at the expense…
Is retirement a curse or a blessing? Obviously, there is no single answer to the question. I have answered the question for myself without a lot of soul searching. I enjoy the challenge of working, of pushing myself, interacting with people and creating new stuff. If I can be productive I would like to work for the rest of my life. I am 73 years old. I find the number scary, but doing the mundane of “showing up” everyday still stimulates me like nothing else that I have discovered. I am very conscious of having the enormous asset of working…
The Precision Machined Products Association (PMPA) Tech Conference just ended, and I had a chance to talk to many of the stalwarts in the machining business. I was hoping to get a feel for the hiring situation that was more nuanced than “you just can’t find good people,” which I know is the fall-back cliché of folks who are going through the motions of building their businesses. The feedback I received was insightful. Victor DaCruz of DaCruz Manufacturing Inc. in Connecticut told me that he thinks the hiring issues are resolving themselves even in one of the most expensive locations…
I’m writing this blog in my new favorite Starbucks in Flossmoor, Illinois. All of the employees are African American women. I am one of three white people in the shop. If there was ever a company whose culture frowned on racial profiling it is Starbucks, with its Jewish founder, Howard Schultz, son of a New York cabbie. Yet at one of its shops in an upscale neighborhood in Philly, a couple of well-dressed black men ended up in handcuffs because an employee of Starbucks freaked out and called the cops when the guys wanted to use the bathroom and hadn’t…
I’ve always thought space travel was cool and interesting, particularly as a kid, but I seldom romanticized it like so many other people do. I think it’s a generational thing. The Space Shuttles of the ‘80s and ‘90s were neat but those didn’t travel very far and they seemed too practical and utilitarian to me. Working on the Hubble Telescope and taking photos of earth and other planets was cool, but most of the news I heard about the Shuttles came when they blew up. The moon landing was amazing, but it was 49 years ago! So that has generally…
How do you deal with change? I’m talking BIG CHANGE. Existential change in the way you do business. We are witnessing it being played out every week now in the drug sales world. CVS is buying Aetna Insurance, Express Scripts is combining with Cigna Insurance, and Wal-Mart is exploring a deal with Humana. These mergers are defensive moves because the health care delivery business is living in mortal fear of Amazon making a big move into the industry, which most people see as ripe low hanging fruit waiting to be plucked. Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway and Chase are combining efforts to…
Today I get to do my twenty-first straight day of radiation treatment. Don’t feel sorry for me at all, this is my fortunate opportunity to save my sight by deactivating a slow growing benign tumor in my brain which is dangerously close to my optic nerve. The proximity to the nerve is the reason that the surgeon who operated on me two years ago left the remnant of the tumor. It was just too close, even for the most skilled surgeon, to remove the whole thing. I have been doing the radiation at around noon, which is the ideal time…
The tariffs being imposed by the Trump administration on foreign steel and aluminum are an intriguing bargaining chip from a macro economic standpoint, but a pain in the ass for most shops trying to turn metal into profit versus competitors across the globe. For nimble companies with the skill and patience to file the paperwork for exclusions, the tariffs may become a competitive advantage against the folks who just call Central Steel and grit their teeth. For those firms whose primary added value comes from intellectual property the added raw material cost will be immaterial. This is a situation where…