Daniel Amos, the head of Aflac, the remarkably successful medical insurance firm, was interviewed in the New York Times on Sunday. His remarks on leadership and motivation are intriguing. He treats employees like voters and challenges his sales staff not with overt quotas but by telling his people he wants them to make a particular figure. For instance when he used to be a sales manager he would say to an employee, “I want you to make $60,000.” He recounts that employees couldn’t say, “No, I really don’t want to make that much.” He says they didn’t know how to…
Author: Noah Graff
By Lloyd Graff My daughter Sarah does funerals virtually every week as a Rabbi in Palo Alto, California. She has a knack for capturing the essence of the person who just died. She talks to the family, selects stories, brings in her own remembrances and embroiders the eulogy with texture and empathy. I thought about her eulogies before I started to write this piece about the death of Automatic Machining Magazine because I hope to strike a truthful and empathetic tone. Automatic Machining started almost 70 years ago under the name Screw Machine Engineering in Rochester, N.Y. Don Wood, its…
By Lloyd Graff I often talk to machining folks who like to reminisce about the good old days when General Motors owned 50 percent market share and when people actually believed “what’s good for General Motors is good for America.” General Motors got sloppy in every way. They made ridiculous deals with the United Auto Workers Union, spawning the infamous “job bank” and health care and retirement benefits that gave the company a monstrous sled to pull. In those good old days a lot of leaks developed. So many carbide inserts seeped out to bars near big factories to be…
By Lloyd Graff Don called me yesterday to ask if I still remembered him. I said “sure, you are that fat Polack in Milwaukee with the Davenport shop.” I could say that because even though I haven’t seen Don in a decade, I always loved his good humor and sense of joy about doing business and making money. “Remember me, I was that skinny kid who walked into your old plant in south Chicago with my Dad and bought my first two Davenports,” he said. I remembered the story even if I could never remember Don as skinny. Don bought…
While job losses keep mounting in today’s brutal economy, a growing number of companies are avoiding layoffs using a program known as work sharing.Instead of laying off employees, companies are keeping them while reducing workers’ pay, often by 20 or 40 percent. The employees generally get to hold on to benefits as well. Then, state governments step in and make up part of the lost wages, usually about half. Seventeen states have adopted the program, and economists and executives are hailing the program as a way to keep workers employed and retain skilled labor. A similar work sharing program has…
By Lloyd Graff Over the last few years Chinese and Russian firms closely tied to their governments have bought up scarce mining and mineral resources. The Chinese have indicated that down the line they may make smaller purchases of U.S. Treasuries and spend more cultivating strategic materials. The Chinese are also developing their nuclear energy production almost as rapidly as they are building their dirty coal-fired electricity production.A recent Atlantic Monthly piece, discusses the Chinese attempt to control the market for neodymium, the critical material needed for the industrial magnets in wind turbine engines and motors for priuses. Molycorp, bought…
Brian Bittner of Beamer Laser Marking Systems demonstrated one of the company’s products to Noah Graff, engraving a pen in about one second with a Today’s Machining World logo. He designed the logo using a Windows based computer on the spot.
By Lloyd Graff Joey Votto is a great young hitter who plays first base for the Cincinnati Reds. Many students of baseball think he will eventually win a batting championship. He’s that good—left-handed, beautiful inside-out stroke to hit the ball to left center, and the snap to yank the ball out to right. But it may not be this year, because Votto is sidelined indefinitely with an anxiety disorder that makes his life so miserable he has to take a time out from Major League Baseball, even though he’s killing the ball. On the flip side, Zack Greinke of the…
By Lloyd Graff June 3rd, and the world looks a lot different than just 30 days ago. GM finally did the dirty deed and filed, and the stock market reacted with relief. It appears suppliers are going to get paid from the Feds lending as the reorganization goes forward. BorgWarner stock is up 80 percent from its low and Johnson Controls has also bumped. All of the commodities are zooming with copper near $2.30 and ArcelorMittal stock more than double from its yearly low. Obviously, the markets are signaling a bottoming of the economy. One of the most encouraging aspects…
By Lloyd Graff Over a dozen years ago I developed a wonderful business relationship with Ed LeClair, who used to be operations manager at Curtis Screw Company LLC., of Buffalo N.Y., one of the largest precision machining companies in the U.S. Among Ed’s many responsibilities at Curtis was buying used machinery, which put us on the opposite sides of the table, but we developed a great rapport even while we were negotiating like pit bulls on the price of Schüttes and Acmes. It came as a shock when Ed told me he was leaving Curtis in 2007 to…