The news that Japan will show a net deficit in trade for 2011 is another signal of a shifting economy that currently favors North American manufacturing. Europe is in a mess, and with the Euro still hanging in at $1.30 and no real structural changes yet, it is also losing competitiveness. The Mori Seiki plant now being built in Davis, California, near Sacramento is a clear sign of the sea change happening now. Equally significant is Honda’s announcement that it will be building its first Acura in Ohio in three years. Mori plans to build 20 percent of its production…
Author: Lloyd Graff
I just returned from a long weekend of political-tourism in Charleston, South Carolina. It didn’t start out as a Newt-Mitt chocolate kind of trip, it just happened. My oldest son Ari challenged me to lose 25 pounds. I said, “Okay, if I lose 25 and you drop 15 we’ll go on a trip, just the two of us without wives to a place of mutual interest” (that Southwest flies to). I lost 23 pounds (close enough) and Ari ran the Chicago Marathon and slimmed down in the process, so we decided a few months ago to go to Charleston, South…
Should I plan as if I am going to live forever, or like I’m living on borrowed time? None of us really knows how long we will be allotted on this planet, but economic reality tugs at us to plan for something. In business if you feel threatened every day by incoming storms, you look at everything short term. Liquidity is of the utmost value and you accept just about any offer thrown at you. If you feel bulletproof, you make grandiose long term projections and arrogantly reject most propositions as unworthy of your big plan. Most of us play…
Recently I had a long conversation with Tom Peters of Symbol Job Training Inc., a CNC operator training school in Skokie, IL (a Chicago suburb). For $5,340 his firm will teach you to be a beginner CNC lathe and mill operator in just four months. The company was started by Alex Kogan, who previously had a CNC job shop. Kogan, and his daughter (Tom Peters’ wife) run the school. I like the idea that the school is a for-profit enterprise, though I’m still happy there are also community colleges and public initiatives out there to train new machinists. The more…
It is so hard to make solid predictions about the economy for 2012 because unpredictable events like the earthquake-tsunami in Japan and the floods in Thailand in 2011 will always happen. But so what. We have to make some assumptions and guesses if we are going to run our businesses. These are mine for 2012. 1. Growth in the industrial economy will accelerate. Automotive in North America is hot and getting hotter. I particularly like the growing market share of vehicles being made here−reaching 70 percent−and the rising production of pickup trucks. The Ford F-150 sold almost 600,000 units in…
The wonderful definitive biography of Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson spends many pages on the close collaboration between Jobs and his Chief Designer, Jony Ive. Ive was the brains behind the design of the iPod, iPhone and iPad. He and Jobs worked closely since 1997, refining a minimalist approach with an emphasis on rounded rectangles that makes Apple’s products so beautiful and unique. Great design works so effortlessly that we often ignore it as we enjoy it, while crappy design gets in the way of usage and pleasure. When I read a blog by Joseph Szczesny of The Detroit Bureau a couple of…
I’ve been anxious to see Tim Tebow, the controversial Denver Broncos quarterback people love to hate because he is unabashedly committed to his religious faith and fearlessly shows it to the cynical press and doubters. Tebow had been relentlessly mocked in Chicago going into Sunday’s game with the Bears, but once again he led an amazing comeback in the last few minutes to get to overtime and then win during the extra period. Tebow’s performance was miserable through the first three quarters, and terrific in the fourth. The Bears helped Denver by making bonehead plays and playing soft, “not to…
I had an opportunity to interview James Altucher, a writer, Web guy, venture capitalist, stock picker, who has a big following as a blogger. We discussed a lot of topics, but the one I found most provocative was his view of the importance of college for most young people. Altucher thinks the notion of 18 year olds heading off to five years of college and piling up huge debt is dumb. He looks back on his time at Cornell and wonders why he did college. This was the same conclusion Steve Jobs arrived at when he went to Reed College…
If Mitt Romney does decently in Iowa and wins New Hampshire he has the Republican nomination. If Newt Gingrich wins Iowa and is respectable in New Hampshire he has a chance to be the nominee. If Newt is the nominee, Barack Obama gets four more years to fight with Congress and Carterize his presidency. Anybody for a third party? ********* Bud Pohlman died last week. He saw the future of high production turning in the Hydromat rotary transfer machine manufactured in Switzerland by Pfiffner. In his way he was a visionary in the screw machine world in America. ********* Looking…
I see a mini-trend developing in the consolidation of companies in distribution and Hydromat machining companies. A major automotive supplier whose core business process is rotary transfer turning of steel bars is close to closing a deal with a fastener supply firm with CNC machining capability. I’ve already seen two other acquisitions of this type and I can anticipate more as the supply chain becomes more taut. Three years ago Tribal Corporation, a plumbing supply company, bought Marshall Brass to add screw machine and rotary transfer capability to their successful distribution firm. MultiTech, a primarily cold heading company near Chicago,…