Pitney Bowes, the postal management company, is a hated name at my office, and probably yours too, if like us you are stuck with a machine and a contract you no longer need. And trust me, you are stuck if you have signed a contract with this fat old company that has a mighty big problem. Their business, their wonderful cash cow of a business, is rapidly going down the drain. They share the Eastman Kodak problem; the U.S. Postal Service problem. What do you do if the market for your core business is shrinking? We’ve seen this story in…
Author: Lloyd Graff
The New York Giants won the Super Bowl on Sunday and certainly enhanced the NFL brand and the Eli Manning brand. But the real marketing coup goes to Forrest Lucas, who owns the privately held Lucas Oil Products Inc., the name on the stadium where the game was held. The stadium also hosted the 2010 NCAA Basketball Tournament Finals. In an advertising contest where huge companies spend tens of millions of dollars, a shrewd guy with a relatively small company – around $150 million in sales – got enormous name recognition by piggybacking on America’s high holiday of football –…
Emily Halgrimson, Today’s Machining World’s Managing Editor, was invited to join 11 other journalists from the U.S. and Canada (six in the automotive sector and six in the food industry sector) by the government of Thailand’s Board of Investment (BOI) on a four-day media tour to promote Thailand’s industry around Bangkok and the Southeastern seaboard. Saturday, January 14th 10 a.m. – Left Chicago’s O’Hare International for Thailand on American Airlines. It’s not comforting to fly a bankrupt airline’s 757 over the Pacific. The distance is a drawback to North Americans doing business in Southeast Asia – 15 hours to Shanghai and another six to…
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…
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…