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…
Author: Lloyd Graff
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…
Judge Vaughn Walker is back in the news even though he retired from the Federal Bench in February. Judge Walker ruled that California’s Proposition 8 was unconstitutional, which meant that gay marriage was allowed in California because the language of the earlier Proposition 22 had made it legal in the state. An anti-gay rights group had recently argued that Walker should have recused himself from the case because he was in a gay relationship. I had speculated that his would ultimately bubble up because I knew Vaughn was gay. Vaughn and I were close friends during out freshman and sophomore…
I have long been intrigued and perplexed by the ethical question of organ trading. In America buying and selling an organ or tissue from another person is illegal—but we know it’s done. Cadaver bone is bought and sold, cleansed, sliced and diced and machined for orthopedic implants. Steve Jobs of Apple received a liver transplant at a private hospital in Tennessee. Was it donated? We’ll never know. Blood is bought and sold daily. The argument against a legitimate organ market is that rich people will take advantage of poor people because the prime organs will be sold to the high…
The Eric Lefkofsky story absolutely fascinates me. Oh, you’ve never heard of him? You will. When Groupon, the Web coupon business, goes public this summer, this 41-year-old will be worth a cool $4 billion. The remarkable thing about his story is that his success is built on a string of business failures. Eric started his business career after his girlfriend dumped him during his freshman year at the University of Michigan. He was looking to vent his energy and started buying used carpet from trade shows and selling it to college students moving into the dorms. The business took off…
The disappointing numbers coming out of the economic stat providers on unemployment and purchasing manager sentiment confirm what we’ve been seeing since the gasoline run-up and the Japan earthquake—business in the second quarter is decidedly weaker than the first. The Precision Machined Products Association noted the slowdown in their recent survey of members. Graff-Pinkert has seen several orders evaporate because clients in auto-related businesses are waiting for production schedules to stabilize. The recent financial results of AutoNation, the huge dealership consortium out of Fort Lauderdale, indicated that their Japanese car sales fell apart last quarter with Lexus off 60%. Domestics…