Tom Friedman, the New York Times columnist, wrote a book a few years ago titled The World is Flat, where his thesis was that national and geographical separations had gone away. A factory in Thailand is the same as a factory in Tupelo and a call center in India can do the same things as one in Indianapolis. The events of 2011 have shown us that he misunderstood the hills and depressions still separating the inhabitants of our planet. The earthquake and tsunami in Japan is still affecting Toyota and Honda. They are under social and political pressure to keep…
Author: Lloyd Graff
For the last eight years I have lived my life as partially sighted. I’ve suffered detached retinas in both of my eyes, with the sight in my right eye permanently compromised and my left eye repaired by laser. My left eye is also impaired by floaters and a cataract but my doctor is afraid to operate on it because such a procedure would increase the possibility of another detachment, he says. I have a patch for my right eye that I seldom wear because I don’t want people to regard me as “disabled,” but I’m rethinking that notion because the…
Reflections on my hotel experiences from a week on the road. I just got back from travels that took me to Austin, Texas, Palo Alto, and Pasadena, California. I stayed at three hotels, two of which cater to conferences, the other an independent in Silicon Valley. One thing I expect from a hotel these days is a good TV. At the Barton Creek Resort in Austin there was a new flat screen in the room, but it had snowy reception on most channels. If I wanted to watch the World Series I had to squint to read the score. I…
I attended the Precision Machined Products Association’s annual meeting in Austin over the weekend. The question I heard often was, “Why is my business so good if the economy is so bad?” Unfortunately the speakers hardly addressed this topic, so I will try to explain it. 1) Structural changes in the world economy now favor American manufacturing. A lot of businesses have gone away in the last 10 years. They’ve closed, moved to China, downsized, gone bust, or merged—and not much has started up in the last decade and a half. Manufacturing was downsizing in the ’90s but it was masked…
Thoughts while making applesauce for the winter. Is the screw machine the Winesap apple of machining? I was talking shop with some apple orchard owners at a couple of farmers markets over the weekend. I asked why there were virtually no old varieties like Gravenstein and Winesap sold anymore. Even the more common Jonathan is scarce. They said the answer was pricing power and demand. People will pay $3 per pound for Honey Crisp and Jonagold. For Gala and Macintosh they can shop the supermarket and buy them for 99 cents. The farmers are doing what business people do, planting…
My son Ari ran the Chicago Marathon last Sunday and finished. My wife Risa, son Noah, and I were there along with his wife Elissa to cheer him on. As we were driving into the city to see him, my mind turned to Steve Jobs’ biological father, who abandoned his pregnant wife who then put the baby (Jobs) up for adoption. Jobs’ biological father, a Syrian immigrant named Abdulfattlah “John” Jandali, ironically moved to San Francisco, the same city where Steve had been adopted by a high school dropout who became a machinist, and his wife Clara. Jandali eventually moved…
I am heartened by a lot of what I see in the marketplace. People are sobering up. They are more serious, less complacent. I see smart kids beginning to turn away from becoming aspiring hedge fund gamers to more meaningful work. The glumness in the media is probably a good contrarian indicator of a tilt in attitude toward productive work and away from the sickening day trader mentality of the last decade. What does concern me a lot is the widening chasm between rich and poor in America. The success dream still lives on, but the path out of poverty…
Steve Jobs did his best work after receiving a death sentence. He was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2004. In the last seven years Apple has revolutionized the computer and telecom world with the iPhone and iPad. In Jobs’ commencement address to Stanford, which is on the video below, he talked about his life. He said at 17 he read a quote that said that one should look in the mirror every day and ask yourself if this is the last day of your life are you living it the way you want to live it. He said that he…
A few years ago every time I got together with friends the conversation touched on stock prices. Then it was house prices. If I was talking with a woman it gravitated to diet and exercise. Now everybody wants to talk about jobs, and why their kids can’t find good ones, and what should their grandchildren learn to be able to make a living in 10 years. This is actually a topic I’ve thought quite a lot about—not as much as baseball—but enough to blog like I know something. 1) Globalization affects everybody and it is not going away. Your X-ray…
In talking to my correspondent who attended last week’s EMO show in Hanover, Germany, the mood in Europe is profoundly bullish. The aisles were packed and the frauleins in the booths were smiling. Every day the financial casino trembles with each whisper from Athens and Bonn, but at EMO people were quoting and selling stuff – lots of stuff. Bill Cox of Cox Manufacturing in San Antonio was really excited by the new Tornos multi, which is basically six sliding headstock machines in one unit. It’s called the Tornos 514 and has a built-in integrated short barloader. Very elegant design…