Author: Noah Graff

Today’s podcast is the second half of a two part interview with Chris and Brandon Voss, coauthors of the best selling book on business negotiation, Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It. Scroll down to listen to the podcast. Chris Voss used to be an FBI hostage negotiator. When he retired, he applied the negotiation techniques he learned in law enforcement to the business world. Some of the methods Chris and Brandon teach can seem difficult to execute and counterintuitive, but I can personally vouch for their effectiveness in my own business dealings.   Main Points…

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Today’s podcast is part 1 of a two part interview with Chris and Brandon Voss, co-authors of the best selling book on business negotiation, Never Split the Difference, and executives at Black Swan Group, a company offering business negotiation training. Scroll down to listen to the podcast. Never Split the Difference teaches how to approach business negotiations using the same the techniques that Chris Voss learned from decades working as an FBI hostage negotiator. I can vouch for its effectiveness personally, having listened to the book from start to finish 3 years ago. I probably use its principles in our…

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Today’s guest on the podcast is Taber West, founder of Gravity Worx, the manufacturer of a high performance suspension electric bike, called the E160FS. Scroll down to listen to the podcast When Taber was younger he raced bikes professionally, but as he aged and gained weight he no longer could do the type of cycling he used to enjoy, particularly mountain biking. When he discovered that a high performance e-bike could empower him to ride places he had thought were impossible, he set out to build his own. Main Points (3:50) Taber gives his background. He started out as a…

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Norm and I were born on the same day. We grew up together. We did Cub Scouts in his basement. His mom, Miriam, was the den mother. Norm died from COVID-19 last Friday. I was stunned when I received the news, even though I had not had any contact with Norm for over seven years, and didn’t know of his Alzheimer’s. He was the first of my high school classmates to die from it. I heard this from the internet listserv our class maintains. It brought the COVID plague off the CNBC news streamer into my heart. The cold brutal…

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Our guest on today’s podcast is Ben Cohen, sports writer for the Wall Street Journal and author of the new book, The Hot Hand: The Mystery and Science of Streaks. Scroll down to listen to the podcast. In the book, Ben analyzes many types of hot streaks, from basketball shooting streaks, to investing streaks, even a streak of hit plays by William Shakespeare. Most people have had a moment in their lives where a string of successes have given them the confidence that the next thing they try will also be successful. This book explores whether that belief is actually…

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Are we getting a false positive signal from the stock market, or is it a predictor of the economy in 3 to 6 months? This is the question business folk, big, small, and tiny, are asking themselves as the markets regain the ground lost in the early March slaughter. The big tech stocks, Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Facebook, plus Amazon, Walmart, and Costco, are still sitting near all-time highs, while unemployment swells, small businesses languish, and Macy’s and Kohl’s starve. GM and Ford stock shrink, and Tesla stock hits $700 per share. Are we on the eve of a depression or is…

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On today’s podcast we interviewed Rick Wheeler, owner of O’Malley Manufacturing in St. Petersburg, Florida, a company originally founded in 1910. Scroll down to listen to the podcast. Over the years O’Malley has had a knack for finding niche products to produce such as the Hair Snare, Lint Snare and Bait Bucket, which are all made with robotic injection molding. Rick likes to manufacture with injection molding because it allows him to make his products in-house from start to finish, and to sell them at competitive prices compared to products coming from overseas. Main points of the interview  (3:30)  Rick…

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I am so tired of never ending graphs of suffering. I am tuning out more each day. But I am highly intrigued by the politics of COVID-19, particularly in a presidential election year. Monday, Joe Biden, likely the Democratic nominee to run against President Donald Trump, called him to chat. This was a play right out of The West Wing playbook. With the Democratic primaries all but over, Biden has been pushed off the screens of America. Trump’s approval ratings have been going up by the day as he holds 2-hour “news” briefings, answering almost every question from reporters who he…

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Today’s guest on the podcast is Gabriele Oettingen, professor of psychology at NYU and author of the book “Rethinking Positive Thinking: the Science of Motivation.” Contrary to conventional wisdom that asserts “positive thinking is always positive,” Oettingen’s studies have shown that people who embrace only positive thinking as a way to reach their dreams are often the least successful in achieving their goals. Scroll down to listen to the podcast. Gabriele’s strategy for success requires people to identify realistic, specific goals and then identify potential obstacles along the way. She calls it WOOP which stands for Wish, Outcome, Obstacle, Plan.…

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I am finally taking the time to stretch my neck and shoulders, and particularly my rotator cuff, during my quarantine at home (too many curve balls thrown over the years). I had never taken the time to do it until now. I believe we will look back in a few years and say what an awful yet productive period we are living through right now. I decided to list things I think we will look back on with fondness about this frightful corona time, and ask you to add to the list. 1. Manufacturing is coming back to the US…

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