Recently Tiger Woods fired his longtime caddy Steve Williams. It became a big story in the sports media because Williams had high visibility at Tiger’s many triumphs, and I would assume he knew a lot about Tiger’s personal travails. The question that arises for me is, how important is a caddy to a professional golfer? Is a caddy more analogous to a personal assistant in business, or Tenzing Norgay who climbed Mount Everest in 1953 with Edmund Hillary? Stevie Williams immediately hooked on to Adam Scott, a 31-year-old journeyman on tour from Australia who was “the next big thing” ten…
Author: Lloyd Graff
I was talking with a client recently who was happy to relate how his company was doing. The firm makes brass and steel fluid handling hardware sold at big box retailers and through industrial distributors worldwide. The company had six plants, three in the U.S. and three in China, but has closed one in China and is in the process of closing a second. The cost advantages of making product in China have eroded. The strength of the Yuan currency, quality challenges, supply chain interruptions, and the human cost of running people back and forth has caused them to pull…
We were visiting my daughter and son-in-law in Palo Alto and wanted to celebrate life by going to their favorite restaurant, the Flea St. Café, in Menlo Park. We had a wonderful meal and wanted to top it off with dessert. Everything at this establishment is made with in-season local ingredients. We ordered blackberry pie, blueberry panna cotta, and angel food cake with fresh strawberries to share. The menu said that the angel food cake had the herb thyme in it, which seemed absurd, but my wife wanted angel food cake so we ordered it. The waiter had actually tried…
The U.S. women’s soccer team lost to Japan in the finals of the World Cup but the game to remember was the absolutely thrilling quarterfinal against Brazil, which I would call one of the greatest games (of any kind) I have ever watched. I have taken great joy from being a fan and cheering for my children and wife in countless games and tournaments. My parents were avid fans of my sports career. I will never forget my Dad setting up a movie camera at one of my basketball games and my mother shouting above everybody else in the crowd…
I’m going to try to make a little sense out of the unemployment statistics from my vantage point in the American economy. The stats show 9.2% unemployment, yet in my economic world most people are in hiring mode. Some people I talk to are looking for specific skills, like knowledge about CNC operation or screw machine set up, but even more are looking for people with a good work ethic and a willingness to learn and work hard. A few years ago it was all about recruiting skills, finding a disaffected person or enticing somebody with a fat package. Today…
I read an interesting piece about the Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook) approach to recruiting. There is a new tech bubble puffing up in Silicon Valley these days, and the competition for talent is fierce. When Facebook identifies a candidate they are hot for, Zuckerberg takes over the close. His approach is “the walk in the forest.” Near the Facebook campus is a forested area abutting Stanford University. Rather than holding an office interview, the 27-year-old CEO asks the person he is interested in to take a hike with him through the nearby woods. You don’t turn down the boy billionaire’s request…
I went to my longtime family physical therapist, Doug Conroy, Monday, and after spending an hour talking, feeling and observing my body I could see he was measuring his words—not a good sign. His conclusion, pending doctor verification, was that if I want the ability to get the exercise I need to have a good quality of life, I’m probably going to need knee replacement surgery. It was not necessarily the news I wanted, but it was no huge surprise with the chronic knee pain I feel. I’ve written about orthopedic implants, visited Zimmer and DePuy in Warsaw, Indiana, and…
The yellow flag was waved in April and it feels like business has been in neutral for three months. Personally, I’m tired of it. This was supposed to be the big rebound year, but the earthquake and the oil speculators stole it from us for at least a quarter. I like the spigot from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve being turned on. It alerts the oil hoarders that they can’t always play games with commodities like oil and win. What is the “real” value of a barrel of oil? Nobody knows. But $3 gas would be a welcome sight and with…
Randy Lusk is the extremely bright owner of Lusk Quality Machine Products in Palmdale, California, near Los Angeles. We often exchange ideas on the phone about machine values, but Randy is so canny that he usually buys machines for less than I can find them. A few days ago he posed a technical question about machining a long piece of stainless steel on the Precision Machined Products Association (PMPA) list serve. He received 10 well thought out suggestions from other members of the group, but he also receive a kick in the butt from Slavko Grguric, an iconoclast in the…
While many companies lament the latest business burp to rationalize their cautious inertia, Dick Conrow and Rob Marr of C & A Tool Engineering, Inc. in Churubusco, Indiana, just keep on building. Today’s Machining World did a cover story on the firm five years ago, showing a picture of their chalet-style office on the cover. I reached Rob a couple days ago and he caught me up on business. C & A Tool is a big contract shop near Fort Wayne. They bought a 300,000 square foot building last year for expansion and are beginning to fill it up with…