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…
Author: Lloyd Graff
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…
In August of 2008, I was in a state of catastrophic heart failure when I reached St. Francis Hospital in Evanston. A brave and talented heart surgeon was working at the hospital that morning named Mohammad Akbar. I required a stent in my 99% occluded lateral descending artery, also called the “Widow Maker.” Dr. Akbar somehow managed to insert the stent, which bought me enough time to get stronger so I could endure a quadruple bypass operation three days later. When asked afterward how he was able to do the stent insertion, which seemed almost impossible because of the complete…
I am writing this blog from home on Tuesday. My brain surgery to remove a benign tumor on my pituitary gland, which had grown from the size of a pea to that of a tangerine, was successful. The threat of blindness from its encroachment on my optic nerve has been removed. I am enormously grateful to the neurosurgery team at the University of Chicago, especially Dr. Issam Awad, who removed the ominous growth by channeling through my nose to get to the extremely enlarged gland. It seems incredible to me that brain surgery to remove a “tangerine sized” tumor can…
Every day I talk to myself. Some days it’s a happy soliloquy of self congratulations for a task accomplished or a relationship strengthened. Other days it’s just wallowing in failure, doubting my talent, feeling old and decrepit. The monologue in my brain is ever shifting, which is a good thing for somebody whose body chemistry is a bit screwed up. In a few days I “get to” have brain surgery. Yes, I “get to” because I need it quite badly and there is a very good chance it will make my life a lot better on the other side. I…