Sometimes the absurdity of trying to do business and make money and then pay the appropriate taxes to the Feds and State just about knocks me over. I’m currently doing the annual ritual of getting my taxes and financial statements in order. I am using a good accountant – conscientious and smart – and we are struggling to come up with documents that are consistent with accepted practices and have at least a distant relationship with “Truth, Justice, and the American Way,” as they used to say in Superman intros. After many many years of being involved in this process I am convinced it is…
Author: Lloyd Graff
I bought out my brother Jim’s interest in my family machinery business six months ago. I promised him that I would not write about the breakup, but I want to take a few lines to describe how the post breakup is going for me. The day after our deal closed I was vacationing with my wife, my sister and brother-in-law at the Chautauqua Institution near Jamestown, New York. (We had planned this trip a while before with my sister. That the breakup with Jim culminated at the same time was an odd coincidence.) The four of us were having lunch…
I’ve been doing business for a long time, but I am still shocked by the appalling clumsiness of big organizations. After decades of Lean and Six Sigma, ISO 9000 and all the other baloney foisted upon us by consultants, the big organizations have capitulated to the sloth of the manual. The playbook keeps getting thicker and more clogged with sticky, obfuscating bubble gum. Decision making is becoming decision avoidance. Only after a disaster strikes will companies decide to buy a generator. If a crisis is sitting in the lobby, big companies ask it to leave because they have a meeting.…
Warren Buffett has been trying to buy Heinz, the king of ketchup, for 33 years. He finally got the deal by partnering with a Brazilian firm named 3G that will do the tough managerial surgery on Heinz, which will make it a cash cow for Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway. I have studied Warren Buffett’s approach to business and I try to apply it to my business and my life. Make the deal. Play to win. The Heinz deal was out there for many years, but nobody could figure out a way to make it work at the numbers Heinz’s Board demanded.…
It feels like we are in a golden period of film entertainment that I haven’t experienced in a very long time. In the last couple of months I have watched the first season of the Showtime serial Homeland, which is absolutely brilliant. Way better than 24, which I loved until it ran out of gas in its later years. I saw Lincoln, Steven Spielberg’s latest, and it was a terrific flick, even though I admit I slept through some of the first hour. I also recently saw The Impossible, a film about the aftermath of the Thailand tsunami in 2004,…
For me, Chrysler again won the Super Bowl advertising bowl in a rout. The Paul Harvey commercial for Dodge Ram trucks was absolutely brilliant (see the video below). It came in the fourth quarter of the game, after all the awful Coke and Bud Light commercials made you just want to turn the sound off and run to the john. What a dismal group of commercials this year – until the Paul Harvey narration of “on the eighth day God made a farmer,” over a gritty compilation of still photos of farmers doing their work. It followed in the footsteps…
The Super Bowl – just another football game ruined by the hype and the ads. But not this one, Sunday. This game really intrigues me because it is the Sibling Bowl. The brothers Harbaugh coaching against each other. If two men ever had football in their blood it would be these guys. Their dad, Jack Harbaugh, head coached at Western Michigan and Western Kentucky. Son John coached running backs and linebackers under his father at Western Michigan for two years. Father Jack later coached running backs at Stanford under son Jim in 2009. Tom Crean, now head basketball coach at…
The wedding dress business has tied the United States intimately with China. My niece Diane is a doctor doing her residency in Baltimore. She is super busy, so my sister Susan is doing the spade work for her upcoming wedding. I was fascinated when I heard about the process of buying a wedding dress. It turns out that a large percentage of the world’s wedding dresses are produced in the city of Suzhou, near Shanghai. (Suzhou is also home to thousands of machining companies.) The industry has been rapidly moving online with precious little attention paid to the intellectual property of…
Their faces bear a remarkable resemblance, though separated by 25 years. The coloring is similar. One has oversized ears, the other an enormous aquiline nose. Both are 6’4″ tall and love to play basketball. President Barack Obama won his second Big Game in November. Colin Kaepernick won his second NFL Playoff game last Sunday in Atlanta. Two kids of mixed race parentage raised by white people. Kaepernick was adopted by German Americans, Rick and Teresa Kaepernick, living in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. Obama was virtually adopted by his mother’s parents, white Kansans who moved to Hawaii after his Kenyan father…
The vertical machining center built in 1996 was dirty, but it had been making parts a week earlier in a factory near Milwaukee. When we brought it into our plant our best mechanics looked at it and motioned for help. We called a local CNC repair firm and asked for assistance. The repair guy they sent charged $120 per hour, plus $75 per hour travel time. He was booked up for a week. We checked his references as best we could. Nothing negative showed up on the web, so I decided to take a chance on him and signed a…