By Noah Graff In order to make it professionally next year more people than ever in this world are going to have reeducate themselves, whether they’re learning CNC programming, switching professions after being laid off or starting their own businesses. Lately I’ve been learning to administer a certain magazine’s Web site and taking salsa lessons. I’ve noticed that since I’ve gotten older (I’m almost 30) I’ve been listening to my teachers better. They say kids soak up knowledge much faster than adults. That may be true, but unlike when I was a kid, today I’m more aware of the learning…
Author: Noah Graff
Dear Oprah, I am a fan of yours. I’ve been watching your show since before you were the Color Purple. You’ve had Nobel Prize winners, cancer doctors, dessert chefs and exercise mavens, but you’ve never had anybody remotely like me tell their story. Perhaps after you read my take you will invite me to be a guest. My name is Arby Eight. I am a National Acme screw machine and damn proud of it—for the last 51 years! My story is the story of North American industry and today I’m feeling !@$#%# unappreciated. I started my productive life in 1968…
I recently had a long conversation with Brad Ohlemacher of EMC Precision Machining, the new name and incarnation of an Acme screw machine shop in the Cleveland area, called Elyria Machine Corporation. Brad and his brother Jeff are two of the most studious and innovative job shop owners I know, constantly attending seminars, conferences and learning from proponents of the black art of plant productivity. These guys are always on a mission to make their company not just profitable but a group with an identity and team spirit. Brad and Jeff utilize Verne Harnish’s Rockefeller habit of the morning huddle…
It has been 25 years since folk singer/song writer Steve Goodman Died at 36, yet his popularity is still growing. “Go Cubs Go,” his ode to the Chicago Cubs is still sung at Wrigley Field after each Cubs victory. A 778 page biography of Goodman came out recently, and his albums and songs are popular on iTunes. He wrote a song that feels like a perfect fit for these tough business days. When I saw the latest dreary statistic on the lack of growth of industrial production on the front page of Monday’s Wall Street Journal, it confirmed Steve Goodman’s classic,…
By Lloyd Graff Greg Mullins is a “glue person.” He is one of the thousands of skilled vagabonds who hit the road every day so the modern world holds together. Greg’s specialty is 10- to 20-year-old semiconductor-making machinery, particularly equipment made by GCA Corporation, which is out of business now. It is still found in a lot of defense industry plants and military bases. Greg is well paid. His services sell for $275 per hour, plus travel. He also earns a healthy per diem, which eases the pain of constant travel. He has been in the field since 1980 and…
By Noah Graff For the upcoming issue, I interviewed Daniel Seddiqui, a 27-year-old native of Northern California who recently completed his quest to work 50 different jobs in 50 states in 50 weeks. Before he started his journey Seddiqui had been unsuccessful in 40 interviews for finance related jobs (his college degree was economics) and had several jobs in various states he hadn’t found fulfilling. For his 50-50-50 quest he tried to work a stereotypical job for each state. In Maine he was lobster fisherman, Mississippi (the state with the highest obesity rate) he was a dietician. He was a…
By Lloyd and Noah Graff Thirty years ago, the first Sony Walkman hit the market and revolutionized the portable music world. For $200 a middle class consumer was finally liberated from the big, cumbersome, old tape recorders. It was the iPod of its time, a small, portable, sexy device perfect for exercise or travel. In that same year Francis de Caussin with his three sons Adrian, Dave, and Larry were in the process of radically changing the CNC machine tool world out of their little shop in Los Angeles. So the story goes, the first Fadal vertical machining center, the VMC45, was…
By Lloyd Graff It seems today that the conventional wisdom in business is wrong at least half the time. A few years ago the banking industry was built on the tenet that the price of single-family homes would never go down in price. Missed that one. Then there was the cardinal principle that the world was quickly running out of oil and the price was headed upwards forever. Missed that one too. And now it appears that the long-held popular theology that the United States is going to be held hostage by Middle Eastern sheiks for a century is soon…
By Lloyd Graff The current Fortune Magazine’s cover story is about Zipcar, the car sharing rent-by-the- hour company that is changing the way people look at car ownership in urban areas. Zipcar has outflanked Hertz and Enterprise in this fast growing segment of the rental business, though the biggies are now pushing to catch up. The Zipcar approach is 10 years old with 325,000 members who pay $50 per year for the privilege of being a Zipster. Cars are available at unattended parking lots in big cities. People rent them to go to the store, move residence, visit friends, go for an interview etc.…
By Lloyd Graff This is the story of a cold saw that tells us how the used machinery business sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t. Two partners bought a deal with a small assortment of machine tools in Arizona. They chose to auction the equipment off in the worst possible market, the spring of 2009. The most valuable piece in the sale was a Kaltenbach KMR100AP cold saw, new in 2004. The partners in the auction had figured the circular cold saw would bring $30,000 at sale, but for an assortment of reasons including ineffective advertising, an out-of-the-way location and abysmal market…