Two weeks ago, I attended the Precision Machined Products Association (PMPA) Management Update, a three day annual conference where around 200 representatives from manufacturing companies in the association gathered in Arizona to network and go to lectures on the economy and business management. It was a great place to bond with my machining industry peers, find some leads and get a scoop for a blog. I almost always come away from PMPA events with a warm feeling from seeing how much the members genuinely care about their industry and each other. As usual, one of the main issues on the minds of…
Author: Noah Graff
When I was traveling through Switzerland last fall, I stumbled upon a new Brazilian shoe store in Zurich called NAO do Brazil. I felt a refreshing energy as I walked through the door of the shop that reminded me why I love traveling so much. I was an American in Zurich, shopping at a store selling shoes made in Brazil, from a company owned by a Frenchman. I was given a tour of the shop by the location’s owner, Lamar Hawkins, an African American man from Austin Texas, and the store manager who hailed from England. Every pair of shoes…
At the beginning of September, I attended the Syndicat International Du Décolletage in Bern, Switzerland. The Syndicat, or S.I.D. Congress, is a conference that brings together precision parts manufacturing organizations from the U.S., Switzerland, France, Spain, Germany, Sweden, and Ireland. It was a week of mingling, fondue-dipping, and touring impressive Swiss shops and prominent machine tool builders like Pfiffner and Tornos. As a technical member of the Precision Machined Parts Association (PMPA), I was grateful to receive an invitation. I often feel like a little bit of an oddball at PMPA events because I’m not a manufacturer and I’m not…
Recently I finished Andre Agassi’s autobiography, “Open,” the most interesting and entertaining non-fiction book I’ve read since the Steve Jobs biography. From the first chapter on, Agassi states that he “hates tennis.” As soon as he could hold a racket, his domineering father began grooming Andre with the goal of him becoming the number 1 player in the world. Every day from grade school until he left home for Nick Bollettieri Tennis Academy, Andre was forced to hit for hours with a ball machine his dad had souped up, which he named “The Dragon.” His dad would stand behind him…
Lloyd Graff recently purchased Jim Graff’s interest in Graff Pinkert & Co., and he felt it was time for a redo of the company’s Website and logo. Today’s Machining World also changed its logo five years ago and redesigned its Website last year. Its important to stay current in business, and periodically refreshing marketing and advertising is a way to do it. I was in charge of coming up with the logo and it was a tough gig because we really had no idea what we wanted. I did a Google search for logo creation and found a site called…
We at Today’s Machining World have been thrilled with the activity on our Web site lately. We received 98 comments on a recent blog because Lloyd admitted he voted for Obama partly because of his skin color. While it pads our egos to get so many comments, we find the ugly negativity that flows out of many of our readers when buttons are pushed about politics in this country depressing. So for all the haters out there whose anger may cause them to lose perspective on what really matters, we are running the following poem by Mother Teresa, “Do It…
A recent article in Wired Magazine featured a list of principal forces which spur new innovations. One of the forces the piece discusses is the audacity of individuals. The people who change the world have to have a strong belief that they can do things better than anybody else before them and not be afraid to fail. Creating a device that fit in your pocket that could hold thousands of songs, mass producing all-electric cars, building a lathe that can do 16 operations at a time unmanned 24-7–it takes balls and arrogance to try that stuff. Audacity is vital and…
My impressions after being in the business for nine months. How do I think I’ve done? My friend Michi, a machinery dealer in Italy, once told me that it would take at least five years for a person to understand the machinery business. I felt that time frame was similar to my previous gig writing/editing at Today’s Machining World. It wasn’t until the fifth year working at the magazine that I felt like I sort of knew what I was doing, or least knew what I didn’t know. So of course what did I do then …? I decided to…
Last Sunday 60 Minutes did a story on Chrysler’s great comeback since Sergio Marchionne of Fiat took the reins of the company in 2009. When Marchionne came on, Chrysler used a $6 billion high interest loan from the U.S. Treasury to modernize the company’s plants with state of the art equipment, upgrade 16 existing car models in just 18 months and begin integrating Chrysler and Fiat’s operations. Last year Chrysler turned a $1.83 billion profit and paid back its $6 billion federal bailout six years ahead of time. When Marchionne came on, one of the first things he did was…
In mid-December I trekked 3 hours from Chicago to Northeast Indiana for a tour of manufacturing companies put on by the Northeast Indiana Regional Partnership and Indiana Michigan Power. On paper the trip didn’t exactly have the same allure as my last two traveling assignments for Today’s Machining World (to Japan and France), but the people and the companies I encountered on the trip may have been the most genuine, shrewd and successful out of the three destinations. Turns out, when it comes to manufacturing Indiana is where it’s at. Over 40 percent of Indiana’s workforce is involved in manufacturing.…