Patek Philippe makes very expensive time pieces, mainly watches. It is a Swiss manufacturer of beautiful pieces of mechanical jewelry that start at $10,000 per instrument and escalate from there. The company has a loyal following in America and a thriving business. What they do not have is enough watch repair people. There are interesting similarities with the machine tool world which sells beautiful, complicated expensive things that occasionally break down. Patek Philippe is making a determined effort to solve their repair problem. They are training their own talent. They advertised widely looking for candidates to learn the watch repair…
Author: Lloyd Graff
I was talking to a client recently about his company’s business strategy. I loved his transparency and clarity about his approach. He said that he and his management team had chosen to be an automotive supplier. He was only interested in quoting on long run, high volume work in which his company could add real value. He did not want to run a little of this and a little of that. He did not want to really diversify to even out the shifting sands of automotive demand. He would take his chances with market swings. He is riding high now…
My Chicago Cubs have been berry berry good to me. I know many of you are not baseball fans, but bear with me for awhile as I write about my baseball season rooting for the Chicago Cubs and how I feel today after my team was swept in four games by the New York Mets on Wednesday. I have loved baseball since I was 5 years old. My Mom was a fan. She grew up near Wrigley Field and could easily walk to games, though I think she seldom went even though her father was an avid follower of the…
I have been listening periodically to a brilliant book by Andrew Solomon entitled Far From the Tree. It is ridiculously long, 40 hours on audio, but every time I hear it I learn something. Solomon writes about the lives of people who are born “different” from their parents and most other people in the world. He sympathetically tells their stories and the stories of the people who are close to them. While telling a story of the family of a Down Syndrome child he reads this short essay written by Emily Perl Kingsly, the child’s mother. I found it very moving…
Hydromat has its Oktober Fest Open House in St. Louis coming up next week. The Precision Machined Products Association (PMPA) has its annual meeting this weekend in Hawaii. The Machinery Dealers National Association (MDNA) has their bi-annual Weekend With The Pros starting Friday. It’s time to get together and schmooze. These are extremely valuable get-togethers, especially in the time of Web ascendance which turns us all into iPad zombies. I do think the PMPA Hawaii con fab is too out of the way. Maybe they should do Winnipeg next year. The industrial auctioneers would love to do most of their sales online,…
I recently had the pleasure of taking a 10 hour international United flight. Why did I fly the notoriously “unfriendly skies” when historically I have always hated United? The airline’s seats have the worst leg room of them all, unless you pay hundreds of dollars for the privilege of not developing blood clots. The food — I don’t want to look at it, smell it, and definitely not taste it. Worst of all, United flight attendants often seem to ooze negativity straight from their pores. Too often they transmit a grouchy vibe and simply look like they don’t won’t to…
Martin Winterkorn, the CEO of Volkswagon, is now unemployed because his company dealt improperly with the waste from 12 million diesel cars. Waste is a hot topic again. An XPRIZE of $20 million is now being offered as a challenge to make useful, economically viable products from the carbon dioxide waste, which pours out of coal and natural gas fired power plants all over the world. The unfortunate people who live in Singapore, Malaysia and Beijing are now walking around with masks. They deal everyday with the awful debilitating haze which blankets their air. In America we recycle our plastic…
The mess that Volkswagen now finds itself in will be a business case study that students at Harvard and Penn will have fun with for years. But for VW it is a problem that just keeps getting worse by the day. It has cost VW CEO Martin Winterkorn his job and will cost the company many, many billions of dollars. As a spectator who has never even considered owning a diesel automobile, I find it a fascinating case of over-reaching, because Winterkorn promised everybody he was going to run the biggest car company in the world and do it by…
It was the kind of PR blurb that arrives 40 times a day, making some inane announcement that everybody ignores. It came on Friday after 5pm, which is the time PR firms send stuff that they don’t really want you to read. That’s why I read it. It was a pretty juicy piece of news, if you could read between the lines. The DMG/Mori Seiki combo, which was announced in 2012 around IMTS, is making some major changes. Mark Mohr, the President of the combined American operation, is being sent to Davis, California, to run the DMG MORI USA manufacturing…
The National Football League is two weeks into its season and New England and Green Bay look very strong because they have great quarterbacks in Tom Brady and Aaron Rogers. Who will win the Super Bowl? I have no idea, but the biggest winners may be the owners of the massive Fantasy Football sites that blanket ESPN and Fox with ads, FanDuel.com, and DraftKings.com. Those internet sites have taken in a ton of venture capital money and sold pieces to ESPN and Comcast to fund their enormous advertising campaigns. With approximately 35 million people playing and the sites taking a…