A little more than two weeks to go before the 2012 American election. It seems like business is stuck in the mud–slinging. I’m going to make the contrarian case that this is precisely the time for people to take action, because almost everybody is so scared about the outcome of the election. If the President is re-elected, many people I talk to think it will be a bad thing for small business and manufacturing. But if you listened to his arguments, Obama is gung ho for small business and manufacturing, and the remarkable thing is that this segment of the…
Author: Lloyd Graff
One of the more interesting areas developing in manufacturing today is the three-dimensional printing of parts. The process is in vogue for the rapid prototyping gang. It merited a front cover story in The Economist’s April 2012 issue and was a hot area at IMTS. Recently, somebody printed a guitar of playable quality. Another party copied most of a gun, which made some law enforcement folks shiver. With the availability of guns legally and illegally, plastic guns are probably the least of our worries. Publicly held firms like Stratasys have been bid up to stratospheric levels, partly because sales have…
I am suffering from a case of auction advertising fatigue on the Web. Every morning I see 15 or 20 ads for auctions on various sites. I used to open most of them looking for a nugget of useful information. Now I just feel overwhelmed, and maybe open a couple. Machine tools are my business and even I won’t open the undifferentiated commoditized email barrage, so I doubt most people care anymore. The Internet auctioneers have diminished the quality of their offerings by both showing the reserves and hiding the reserves. I think eBay has actually become more transparent because…
It’s October and I can’t resist writing about one of my true loves – not politics – baseball. It’s been another remarkable regular season. Baltimore and Washington make the playoffs. The Orioles and Yankees stay within a game of each other for the last two months of the season. Washington benches their stud pitcher Steven Strasburg for the last month and the playoffs because they believe a pitcher coming off Tommy John surgery should not pitch more than 160 innings. Amazing stuff. ***** Here’s another shocking story, courtesy of Hanan Fishman of Partmaker. Tsuyoshi Nishioka signed a $9.5 million dollar…
Richard Gonzalez, Chief Operating Officer of Abbott Laboratories (market cap $108 billion) has a Bachelors Degree from the University of Houston and a Graduate Degree in Biochemistry from the University of Miami. Except he really doesn’t. Niaspan, Abbott’s potential blockbuster drug, was going to be the next big thing in cardiovascular care – except a study published after it hit the market showed it didn’t do anything to prevent heart attacks. Is there a link between a COO who fudged his credentials and a drug his company over-hyped? Do we care if Harvard jocks cheated on tests or if Derrick…
By all accounts I have heard IMTS was a major success for the exhibitors. I am always skeptical about supposed pre-registration numbers at shows, but this year it appears that IMTS actually exceeded the 87,000 number that was floated before the show started. The 100,000 mark was probably reached. If you can generalize, buyers were even more schizophrenic than usual. With excellent cash flows the last couple of years, manufacturing migrating back to North America from China, and with favorable depreciation rules for the moment, this should have been a selling free-for-all. But I gather many buyers were drooling yet…
For 10 years, once a month, I would leave my comfortable bed at 4:45 a.m., drive through the winter slush to a local Jewish temple, and schlep mattress pads off the floor where 50 homeless guys had snored the night away in warmth and awkward camaraderie. I did it not out of a soaring sense of compassion for the hapless poor of American society, though those feelings did warm me on those frigid mornings, but because my friend Jerry Levine, oil industry lobbyist and book reviewer extraordinaire for Today’s Machining World, suggested I do it. The volunteers used to go…
Today I get to celebrate the end of IMTS and the start of the Jewish New Year – Rosh Hashanah. For me these are surprisingly connected events to be treasured and assessed. My life is a combination of the mundane and the spiritual, but I find it strange and sometimes inspiring how the stuff of business and the practice of my religion wrap around each other so often in my daily life. This hit me at IMTS when I met with a fellow traveler in the machine tool world at the Mazak exhibit. He had sought me out after reading…
The NFL for 2012 began on Sunday and Monday. IMTS took the stage a short walk from the stadium where the Chicago Bears played the Colts. Both are big powerful institutions controlled by a small group of owners and run by a loyal staff of administrators on the East Coast. And both organizations face major challenges today. The NFL has two major problems that are closely related. It’s current and past players are extremely worried about the physical toll of the game – particularly concussions. The corollary issue is that parents are increasingly forbidding their kids from playing tackle football…
The election is two months away. Polling data, which has been remarkably accurate during the primaries, is showing a close popular vote, but the electoral map favors President Obama. A Republican must win Florida and Ohio, most likely, to win the presidency because California and New York are solidly Democratic. If Pennsylvania goes Democratic, which is likely according the polls, and Illinois is probably not in play, Florida and Ohio become absolutely crucial for the Republicans to put enough electoral votes on the board to win. I thought Mitt Romney made an excellent speech to the Republican Convention, but it…