I laud the Republican effort in the House to repeal the new health care law, not because it will succeed directly, but because it will rekindle the debate about how we balance the needs of the uninsured, share the costs, and allocate the control of health care in the U.S. Everybody knows the old system was a patchwork improvisation which developed over 50 years. We’ve adjusted to it over time, but it really isn’t serving us well with constantly escalating prices and 30 million uncovered. I do not pretend to know how to fix what ails the system, but I…
Author: Lloyd Graff
Mike Jackson, the CEO of AutoNation, the big publicly held consortium of car dealers, says pickup trucks are flying out of his stores. He sees this activity as a refection of the confidence of small business around the U.S. Jackson is predicting a two or three year ramp-up to the 16 million car build rate, which has traditionally been the standard of automotive well being. With GM and Ford solidly in the black at 11.5 million units they will be coining money at 16. My question is whether the auto infrastructure can quickly accommodate 16 million. From a precision machining…
There are at least three cable series currently chronicling the business life of pawn shops. What is the fascination with people borrowing against baubles or selling their junk to professional peddlers for rent money? I get a kick out of these shows and their genteel predecessor, Antiques Road Show, because the used machine tool racket that I practice is a bastard cousin of the pawn shop. I’m dealing in esoteric machinery which could be fodder for the furnace, or somebody’s stake to a fortune in Turkey or Topeka. But I’m not only a purveyor of oily, wreaking junktiques from the…
Richard North Patterson is one of my favorite authors, though I often find his novels hard to finish. He doesn’t just write a story, though he is a wonderful story builder and teller. He lays out a problem—one that has no easy answers—and then illuminates it from several points of view. He doesn’t make it easy for the reader. He challenges the reader with a variety of logical yet conflicting views. In the Name of Honor, his most recent book, plumbs the knotty issue of the court martial of a decorated soldier who kills his former commanding officer, the husband…
I’m writing this column two weeks before Thanksgiving. I think the business world has changed a lot in the past year, but many people are so focused on looking backwards that they may have missed it. Business in the domestic manufacturing world has turned decisively better, yet we see a torrent of auctions because legal bureaucracy moves slowly. The two big Detroit auction houses, Hilco and Maynard’s, have been selling off the rationalized flotsam of GM, Ford and Chrysler. These are the forlorn assets of yesterday’s Detroit and they will continue to pour into the system into 2011. Still, looking…
By Lloyd Graff Today’s Machining World Archives November/December 2010 Volume 06 Issue 09 With GM going public and bringing back billions to the taxpayers, we are seeing a batch of revisionist opinion pieces about Rick Wagoner, former head of the auto giant. Malcolm Gladwell, a favorite writer of mine, wrote a fascinating review of Steven Rattner’s new book, Overhaul, about the restructuring of GM for the Obama Administration. Rattner is a Wall Street mover and shaker who headed the restructuring in Detroit. Rattner saw Wagoner as a bureaucratic company guy and ultimately fired him, bringing in crusty Ed Whitacre to…
After the blog about Today’s Machining World’s Real Deal (“The Groupon For the Machining World”) appeared Tuesday, I had a call from Cathy Bothe of Signature Needle Arts which Today’s Machining World did a cover story on a year ago. Cathy was ebullient about the knitting needle business, which she says is growing more than 100 percent per month. She feels the Groupon/Real Deal approach is a viable concept for the machining world, but with a twist. One of her ideas is that a machine setup could be discounted, the other idea is that the first 100 hours of runtime…
Maybe if you are living under a rock you haven’t heard of GROUPON™. But this two-year-old company just had the chutzpa to reject Google’s $6 billion offer to acquire it. So what do they do? They sell coupons for goods and services on the Internet with good writing, a sense of humor, and a cool concept—the deals have a limited time frame and a minimum number of people need to take them before they kick in. Noah Graff and I heard Andrew Mason, the 29-year-old founder of GROUPON™, at a Wall Street Journal forum on growing your business. We were…
For the last nine years I have bought the best dried apricots in the world from Gibson Farms of Hollister, California. I met one of the owners, Mr. Gilbert Gibson, at the Palo Alto Farmer’s Market and we have become business friends. He asks me about my family; I ask him about the crop. He suggests I buy some walnuts; I usually just want the sweetest dried apricots I’ve ever tasted. I always seem to run out of this perfect treat before my trips to the Bay Area, so I order them. No Web site. Just call the house and…
If you want a dose of machining today go directly to the ads, because I’m mad and I just can’t take it anymore. In a couple of days we’ll celebrate Thanksgiving, watch the NFL, sop our dressing, and try to sleep with reflux. But 10,000 miles away thousands of American men and women will be trying to stay alive in Afghanistan. Tell me, why? We are propping up a corrupt Karzai government, playing ball with a Pakistan that harbors Al Qaeda, and inflating our monstrous budget deficit, to accomplish what? I don’t care if you are a lefty or a…