After 50 stunningly disastrous years, Detroit is seeing the spark of revival that comes when things get so bad that only the truly visionary can see through the rubble. I’m not talking about autos. Making cars comes and goes. At the moment, auto is back with a vengeance; maybe 18,000,000 sleds this year! This is no surprise to anyone selling parts, turning metal, or molding polymers. That revival has been going on since two of the “big three” dumped their debt (and shareholders) in bankruptcy to improve their balance sheets, and the third hired a manager who actually understood that it…
Author: Lloyd Graff
Someone asked me the other day why I like to travel. Of course, there are a lot of reasons. Vacations are nice to get away from the office and chill out, but I didn’t need to fly 20 hours to Thailand like I did this March just to find entertainment and relaxation. Traveling to new places refreshes me. It’s not always easy, but it energizes me to arrive in a country with a different language, different money, different looking people and a different way of life. I’m excited to explore places, get lost and ask myself, “Where the heck am…
I got an email from an old friend in Florida, Bob Ducanis, asking me to write a column explaining what is going on in my Chicago. I immediately heard the refrain, “My kind of town, Chicago is my kind of town,” the old song. And then I paused to ask myself, is it still my kind of town? Is it a place I am happy to call my home? Do I want my kids and grandchildren, to call it home for a lifetime like I have? These are my feelings for Chicago, 2016. It changes slightly with the headlines, but…
In Chicago this week the big story (even bigger than the Illinois primaries) has been the retirement of Adam LaRoche, a designated hitter, first baseman for the Chicago White Sox. He walked away from a $13 million contract because the Sox management objected to the frequent presence of his 14-year-old son, Drake, at the team’s practices and games. Drake is being homeschooled so he has a lot of time to be with his Dad. He went to 120 Sox games last year, often traveling on the team charter plane. He has an official White Sox uniform and spent a lot…
Usually I live my business life talking to people who are extremely skilled at cutting bars of metal into a lot of useful widgets and selling them for a modest profit to a company that assembles them into useful industrial products. But a few days ago I had a lengthy chat with Mitch Free, who is playing the game somewhat differently than most of the folks in the machining business. Mitch Free’s name is appropriate because he has freed himself from the conventional wisdom of the business, even though he happily runs a nice assortment of CNC lathes and mills…
I once had a cousin named Don. Don was a couple months older than me. We played softball together and a lot of ping pong. That was until we were 16. Then I lost track of Don. I never saw him again. Donnie and I were first cousins. My Uncle Jerry, my father’s elder brother, was his Dad. He lived a few miles from us on the southside of Chicago. Jerry made a lot of money in the plumbing supply business, but he was too cheap to buy a home in a nice neighborhood. He rented a stuffy apartment in…
I must admit I am totally into the 2016 election. The ascent of Donald Trump is so stunning, so horrifying, but also so wonderfully amazing that I cannot get enough of it. Trump is narcissistic, incredibly egotistical, yet instinctively brilliant in his ability to connect with the American psyche. Somehow Trump gets it. This rich, womanizing boor, vain to the nth degree, has figured out America and the dissatisfaction and anger that rightfully fills the country. Frankly, I didn’t get it until very recently when I read an absolutely brilliant op-ed article called Why Trump Now? by Thomas Edsall in…
Just got back from a trip to Germany last week. While we Americans are spending our energy hootin and hollerin about the 5000 Syrian refugees we let into the United States in 2015, who we vetted for a year, Europe, Germany in particular, is letting in an ongoing stream of refugees (and many non-refugees) from the Middle East. Germany alone allowed in around 1.1 million immigrants from the Middle East in 2015. Pretty significant when you consider that the entire country is around the size of Montana. I queried a few people in Munich on their views of the immigrants…
One of the major challenges for people in business is to define and understand what they are selling and what their clients believe they are buying. For employees the challenge is similar. What are you being paid for? How are you adding value? What could you do that would enhance that value either for your present employer or a future employer? On the face of it, these questions may seem simple and obvious. For a machining company the answer might seem as straightforward as “I sell brass fittings that meet the price and quality standards of my customers.” That probably…
My critics have often said my Swarf (British for scrap) was rubbish. I doubt that, but your swarf, those chips that are conveyed out of the machines you run, spun clean of oil and dumped in a bin awaiting the scrap recycler, may have reached the price point of nil. Steel chips today are worth almost nothing, and if the trend continues you will soon be paying the scrap company to take them away. Very soon it may get even worse. I was talking to the guru of metal minutiae, Miles Free of the PMPA (Precision Machined Products Association), and…