“Your wait will be four minutes. Thank you for your patience.” All I wanted was to buy a pair of pants from the Territory Ahead catalog, which I had recently received at my home. I am “old school.” I prefer to talk to a person when I order goods. I do not give a credit card number in an online transaction, less out of fear of it being compromised than dealing with my vision, which is always compromised. It was 9:45 last Friday night. I expected the call to take 10 minutes, 15 tops. After four minutes, the automatic response…
Author: Lloyd Graff
Americans on average spend 7.4 hours staring at a screen of some kind every day, according to Kleiner Perkins analyst Mary Meeker. That breaks down to 147 minutes watching TV, 103 minutes in front of a computer, 151 minutes in front of a smart phone and 43 minutes in front of a tablet. The U.S. is ranked 6th in world in screen time consumption—Indonesia and the Philippines are at the top of the list. I’m sure I spend at least an average of 7.4 hours of screen time daily, and I don’t even own a TV. Working a salaried office…
We all get the phone calls from the brain dead solicitors advocating for good charities like the American Cancer Society and the American Heart Association. I pledge my pittance but I really don’t want to listen to the pitch, even though I know it’s worthwhile. But not all charities pitch for pennies. The Cystic Fibrosis Foundation just hit the jackpot by playing the fundraising game much differently than its peers. The Foundation, based in a modest office building in Bethesda, Maryland, just landed a $3.3 billion check to pursue drugs and therapies to ease the suffering of the 30,000 people…
A favorite blogger of mine, Seth Godin, wrote a piece Sunday in which he recounted not making his high school quiz team because he was too slow with his buzzer. He would wait to push his buzzer until he “knew” the answer, which usually resulted in one of his competitors answering before him. Eventually Godin learned that the secret to winning a quiz game is hitting the buzzer as soon as you feel the answer coming. You often have enough time between striking the buzzer and time running out to retrieve the answer. If you can’t pull up the correct…
My search for a romantic life partner is a dramatically different process with different goals than those of my parents and grandparents. Today’s dating world revolves around online dating sites, text messaging and partner experimentation. It yields opportunities to go out with tons of diverse people but produces a lot of confusion as well. I recently listened to the book, Modern Romance, written by the hilarious young comedian Aziz Ansari. The book analyzes the dating world of today’s current singles (like me), particularly those around my age of 35 and younger. Ansari, age 32, relates to my current search for…
One of the things that has always fascinated me about the used machinery business is the daily assessment of risk and reward in the deals we go into. Every deal for my company Graff-Pinkert is inherently a gamble on the future value of a discarded machine tool. It also is a judgment call on the risk assessment of our competitors who may or may not know about a machine we have interest in. My son Noah calls it a daily treasure hunt. It sounds better than “going to the gambling tables.” I think I understand the risks after being around…
How do you change a loser into a winner? This is a question that has intrigued me for decades as a sports fan and a business owner. I think the question can be refined today to, “how do you change a non-winner into a winner?” or, “how do you transform mediocrity into superior performance?” Winning doesn’t mean a championship, and success in business can be defined as longevity and happiness with performance, even if the owners do not get mega rich. But there is a mindset in sports or business or academia that consistently moves the needle toward success vis…
After reading Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future by Ashlee Vance, I understand why many folks are proclaiming that Elon Musk is one of the greatest visionaries of our lifetime. Much like Steve Jobs did, he envisions products which most of us would think impossible and then finds ways to actually build them. But his ambition is not to invent a clever product or service simply for profit, he wants to create products with the purpose of changing the world. He wants to stop our dependance on fossil fuels. He wants to put a colony…
The machining world is a conservative one, where change comes slowly. In the screw machine arena change often takes a decade to filter through the industry. Today we are seeing a shift that is catching on in conservation of metal, particularly brass. Hot forges produce near net shapes, which are then machined by multiple station rotary transfer machines. This is a method that has come into vogue for fittings manufacturers. The volumes must be high to justify the initial capital investments, but the paybacks are significant from the reduction in scrap turnings from the traditional way of doing things. With…
In May I had the wonderful opportunity to go on vacation in a small paradise in northern Spain called San Sebastián (Dononstia in Basque). When I asked folks from San Sebastián how they felt about their home city they simply beamed. They boasted that the city is the gastronomic capital of the world, it has the most beautiful scenery in the world, has a solid economy, and that its Basque language has no other languages it can trace itself back to, making it the oldest language in all Europe. I’m happy to say the bragging of the San Sebastiáns didn’t…