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,…
Author: Lloyd Graff
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…
By Jerry Levine. It’s been a month since George Zimmerman was acquitted of murdering Trayvon Martin. Some media commentators suggest that when it comes to race relations, little has changed in the past 50 years. “No white jury is going to convict a white person of murdering a black person in the South.” I disagree. To quote Charles Barkley, “When it comes to race, I don’t think the media has a pure heart.” Driving for high ratings, which enhances advertising dollars, the cable news stations ran the trial non-stop, knowing the racial animus they created would keep people glued to their sets. I…
By Lloyd Graff. Labor Day Weekend is coming up. As a kid it was a day for double headers on TV, barbecue and watermelon. It was the demarcation line between vacation and school. When I joined the working world, it was the signal that the machining world was going to get serious about finishing the year strong. It meant IMTS every four years and selling machines. But for the last five years, it has been the long weekend when my life teetered on the blade of life and death. Labor Day 2008, is shrouded in fog for me. The doctors…
By Lloyd Graff. A big topic of conversation these days is “What do you charge per hour?” The hourly rate, either as a wage or a basis to charge clients, has been baked into the economy for decades, but is it the wrong way to measure the value of time? Adam Davidson, an economics writer for NPR, just published an excellent piece in last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, entitled “What is an Hour of Your Time Worth?” The subtitle was “The hazards of measuring the economic value of an idea.” Davidson discusses Jason Blumer, an accountant who took over his…