One of the prevailing myths in manufacturing today is that “there are no good people.” The reality is that there are good people, but you have to invest in them to make them top notch. Hydromat, the Swiss-American rotary transfer machine company in St. Louis, is making that investment today in young people coming out of nearby community colleges with a four-year in-house training program. The apprenticeship approach still works well in Europe, but it is rare to find companies in the U.S. with the long-term view to commit to a $50,000 training program in exchange for a two-year work…
Author: Lloyd Graff
General Motors is cautiously experimenting with selling cars online using a hybrid strategy of making the sale online, while running the transaction through a participating dealer. GM is gently tiptoeing into the Web strategy because its dealers are still a vital sales force. Dealers also have huge political clout and pay for a lot of brand advertising. But the specter of Google, Amazon and Tesla has to be spooking them. Google is developing a self-driving car which could be available by 2020. Amazon is a sales colossus that could go into the car business with a Chinese or Korean import.…
By Lloyd Graff. Nicholas Kohart’s company makes components for the natural gas industry in his manufacturing plant near Philly. Business is brisk, though the shale boom has changed his product mix. He is now in the market for a 2” capacity CNC lathe (might go a little bigger) with live tooling and sub-spindle. He runs mostly aluminum but has some projects coming up using stainless. Nick is not wedded to a particular builder. He knows he will buy a new lathe and he wants a capable local distributor. He contacted me to find a Web site that had candid user…
By Lloyd Graff. Conventional wisdom says that if you pour money into the American economy it causes inflation. I am really wondering if this “wisdom” is economists replaying a scenario in their minds that is now obsolete in the silicon age. The theory of scarcity of raw materials, scarcity of housing, scarcity of talent, scarcity of bananas or Berettas is proving to be flawed. The general trend for most prices in the economy is steady to down. In the world I live in, price increases are always challenged. CNC machines have improved and decreased in price. Hourly rates have stagnated,…
By Lloyd Graff. I listened to President Obama’s speech on Syria Wednesday. It shook me up, particularly the line about the children who were gassed and “never woke up.” I woke up at 4:30 am in a cold sweat and I could not go back to sleep. I saw the images of the poor gassed children in their burial white sheaths. And then I remembered my moment under the showers that spewed the Zyklon B gas at the Majdanek concentration camp in Poland. I was a concentration camp “tourist” at Majdanek, which is inside the Polish city of Lublin. The…
By Lloyd Graff. I was out in Palo Alto visiting my daughter and made a call on my new favorite coffee shop, Philz Coffee. The Philz approach to coffee makes Starbucks seem like a crude imposter, and I don’t think Starbucks is all that bad at what they do. But Philz is what Starbucks started out as, before it lost its way and corporatized, and before Howard Schultz wanted to own a pro-basketball team in Seattle and have books written about him. Philz was started by Phil Jabar 10 years ago, and the original location was in a corner grocery…
By Lloyd Graff. My team, the Chicago Cubs, is terrible again this year — like last year, and the year before. They haven’t won a World Series in more than a century. But I still follow them. I still check the results – every night. I still check the batting averages. Believe it or not, I research the minor leaguers too. They are our hope – our “stars of the future.” Why do I do this? Why do I care so much? I mean, I checked the score before I went in for heart surgery. I am a bloody fanatic…
By Lloyd Graff. Could driver operated gasoline cars be the next Kodak film? With Tesla’s stock valued at $20 billion today, selling 20,000 cars at most, and Nissan valued at $42 billion, selling over 1 million vehicles, the market is telling us that Tesla is headed in the right direction and that traditional models could be toast in 10 to 15 years. Google is investing heavily in the driverless auto, so it is not a stretch to imagine that the epicenter of the car business will move to Silicon Valley in a few years. The big car companies have a…
By Lloyd Graff. Seth Godin, my favorite blogger, recently wrote a provocative piece about the failure of Kodak and what it means to us as we try to figure out what works in our own businesses. Kodak knew it was in trouble in its core film lines. Its response was to pour money into research on film to produce the absolute highest quality film. The strategy failed. The consumers did not define quality the way the Kodak engineers defined it. Consumers wanted photographs they could instantly send to each other at a modest cost. The perfection of the image was…
By Lloyd Graff. This is a story I love to recount to friends about how to look at a business. Harry Quadracci, founder of the immensely successful printing company, Quad/Graphics, allowed competitors to come in every year to see what it was doing, giving away best practices and the current secret sauce. He believed that by showing competitors the newest best stuff it was doing, the company would be forced to take the next steps to get better. In 40 years, the company has grown to 25,000 employees with printing facilities on three different continents. I get both amused and…