I was surprised by some of the outraged comments on my blog about the sale of Doosan to a private equity firm and changes in the machinery market which have affected the company. I wrote stuff that was available on the street for the people in the machine tool industry. There was some inside info I gleaned from reliable sources which gave the piece a newsy flavor. I’m happy I wrote an article that was not all common knowledge. My blog also will never be a vehicle for public relations releases. Today’s Machining World has a space for official company…
Author: Lloyd Graff
Hiring good people for your business or organization is one of the most difficult tasks in management. I think a lot of the problem stems from not really knowing what we are looking for and the job candidate not knowing how to explain what he or she is providing. I recently read a brief blog by Seth Godin, one of the most insightful practical philosophers of our day. He made the argument that we should hire for “resilience.” How easily do you bounce back from a disappointment? He calls it a skill, one that is more valuable than most. I’m…
Doosan is a mess. The signs of Doosan’s current struggle are striking, even to a machinery dealer far from its Korean home. Beautiful 3 to 4-year-old machines are being auctioned off in Texas, Singapore and China with more to come. The word came down days ago that Doosan Machine Tools is being sold to private equity firm, Standard Chartered of England, which has a strong recent history of doing deals with the Doosan Group. The deal is for $1.2 billion, well under the $1.7 billion asking price. The machine tool division is one of the gems of the Doosan Group…
American football has had a fascinating evolution over its century-plus existence. The Real All Americans, by Sally Jenkins, illuminates the story of the game through the lens of Carlisle College, the school founded by Richard Henry Pratt in 1879 to assimilate American Indians into modern American society. Carlisle will always be associated with football for its legendary star player Jim Thorpe, considered one of the greatest all-around athletes ever, but there is much more to the school’s place in football history than Thorpe. American football was born in the late 1800s. The sport was mainly comprised of competitions between Ivy…
GM is buying a $500 million stake in car sharing service Lyft General Motors is making tons of money in an 18 million car year. The company has $25 billion socked away. And their stock price stinks – straight as a string for years as they coin money. On Monday, they announced they were investing $500 million in the distant #2 ride sharing firm, Lyft. With the funding Lyft has a valuation of less than 10% of the $62 billion of industry leader Uber, but with GM President Dan Ammann joining the board, and the former #3 entrant in the…
This piece is really two articles. The first is the one I ought to write—the politically correct, optimistic, let’s start the New Year off right and knock ‘em dead blog. The second blog is about what I’m really feeling at the moment as I get ready to embark on the year—my concerns about the known and unknown challenges that scare me more than I’d like to admit. The optimistic Lloyd sees a blank slate of opportunity in 2016. Last year is history. The export killing rise of the dollar is mostly behind us, oil has taken its hit and can’t…
Practical financial lessons are rare in school, and lately I’ve been noticing the lack of sophistication and street smarts that my fellow 30-something friends have about money. Many of my friends have given up hope that they can live any other way but in debt and paycheck to paycheck, and have accepted their situation as permanent. They don’t talk about it too much, but I see a heavy cloud hanging over them. These are my peers and my friends – some of America’s struggling and under-employed 33-year-olds, with $34,000 of student loan debt, an annual salary of $24,000, and a…
It looks like Paul Ryan, the new Speaker of the House of Representatives from Wisconsin, delivered the goods for manufacturers in the massive tax and spending bill released for public consumption on Tuesday. The vital Section 179 allowing the depreciation of capital equipment to offset profits in a given year, up to $500,000, is in the package. The provision, rather than being good for only 2015, now has no expiration date. This will enable owners and managers to plan with some certainty and not have to scramble at year’s end to buy a machine or vehicle, which improves the company’s…
Frank Sinatra was born 100 years ago this week and this anniversary has gotten a lot of play in the media. Sinatra has long fascinated me. Few entertainers of renown have been so obviously abrasive yet consistently popular. I still listen to Sinatra’s songs and I love his sense of phrasing, and his ability to sing a lyric so perfectly you think he’s singing straight to you. I have always loved to sing. Some of my happiest moments ever are of our family together around the piano at our home, my sister Susan playing flawlessly and us singing from the sheet music. We’d…
Being a longtime moderate Republican, I am dismayed by the shift of the party’s base to an extremely angry conservatism. Trump and Carson have tapped into this base, and most of the umpteen others have jumped in too. The base is angry. They are angry at terrorists, government, the banking system, immigration, the unequal economy, blue collar and white collar job loss, the rate of technological change, and at social issues like gay marriage, abortion and one-parent families. Finally, many are angry about any infringement of the Second Amendment. This anger is heightened by the 24/7 news media with mostly…