People

As summer gives way to autumn, longings for the long ago can creep into the days for the sentimental among us and so it is that I sometimes find myself revisiting the days of youth when, somewhere between girl friends, I fell in love with a ’55 Thunderbird. She was white with turquoise interior and had both a soft and a hard top.

I thought about her recently because it’s a special anniversary of sorts: 55 years since the Ford Motor Co. debuted in 1955 what its marketing folks described as a “Boulevard Sportscar.”.

The original T-bird was already a classic by the mid-'60s when I saw one on a car lot in north Spokane, swung in to try it and drove out 30 minutes later, sitting proudly behind the wheel -- one flashy car richer and $1,200 poorer.

Of course that $1,200 has grown by as much as 30 times for those T-Birds who’ve kept their shape and sharp looks and are still nurtured and occasionally driven by those whose love affair with the car remains, making it one of the best investments ever for anyone who held onto one.

The T-Bird was more sophisticated and urbane in its concept than Chevrolet's muscular Corvette, which debuted at the same time and shared stage with the T-bird as the first two-seat American rivals of the European sports cars.

There was something about the jump and roar of the White Lady, half of whose length was hood and the high-horsepower engine that churned beneath it, that stirred the blood.

The car lured Betsy, a co-ed I’d met in math class, and I taught her how to drive a stick shift as she sat behind the wheel of the T-Bird. To this day I'm not certain she didn't fall in love with the car and thus, of necessity, fell for the owner.

Of course it was never meant to be a family car, so when family loomed, the car and I had to part.

But there came a time, as kids reached high school and age began to leave its mark that a gentle tug of longing to own one again began to visit me. I made the mistake of sharing the urge with Betsy and the kids and it soon became sort of a family joke.

They gently poked fun at the idea, whether it was with a three-inch toy version at Christmas or a recording of Mark Cohn's "Silver Thunderbird" on my birthday one year (I played the song probably 100 times over the next few days).

Ford produced the two-seat T-bird for only three years, adding fins and portholes in 1957, before succumbing to whatever urges move automobile manufacturers’ decisions and it turned the Thunderbird into just another sedan.

But then in 2002, the automaker undertook the tallest of orders, seeking to reinterpret an icon, reintroducing the two-seated Thunderbird. It couldn’t be too much of a copy of what had gone before, but it couldn’t depart too much from the inspiration.

As I looked at an auto magazine spread with pictures of what Ford envisioned for the new Thunderbird, I began to have a queasy feeling, a realization that there would be disappointment if I thought of buying one, or even giving it a test drive.

Ford has sold thousands of the attractive retro T-Birds since it was introduced anew and most drivers have certainly appreciated the experience of owning one, but most have been unencumbered by memory. They never owned one of the originals.

But for me, growing older had brought the slow realization that the longing that stirred occasionally wasn’t just about a car, it was also about a time.

I could own a re-creation of a car, but I couldn’t drive it back to the time. My wife and family understood that a long time ago.

 

 

Don Nielsen, who for more than a decade was perhaps Washington State’s most visible and vocal advocate for fixing what he saw as the ills of the public education system, thinks President Obama’s Race to the Top funding challenge to the states will have a positive impact on the quality of education.

“His innovation grants are pushing the states to move faster toward education innovation than they might feel comfortable with and some good will come from that fact alone,” said Nielsen, who long ago decided that he was wrong in his conviction that education reform had to come from the local level.

The President’s education initiative has generated stiff competition among states involved in the race for federal cash from grants the administration promises will be worth up to $700 million for states that show the greatest willingness to push innovation and implement tough testing standards for local schools. But it has also drawn some strong resistance in some quarters.

But while Nielsen thinks the use of financial incentives to get the states to innovate “on balance will be positive,” he forcefully adds “I don’t want the federal government mandating a national test.” He suggests a standard test could emerge from among various testing methods being tried in various states.

Nielsen’s conviction that the education system needing fixing and the gradual realization that the necessary changes could only come at the state level came about first from a two-year odyssey to study schools and then from the inside as a Seattle School Board leader.

His quest to “learn what was wrong with the nation’s public education system” was what prompted his information-gathering tour of the country in the early ‘90s, an unlikely post-retirement commitment for a man who had built Virginia-based Hazelton Laboratories Corp. into the largest independent contract laboratory in the world.

He was chairman, president and CEO of the firm and had made his fortune when he decided in 1992 to retire and focus on education.

After his odyssey, Nielsen returned home to Seattle and ran for the school board, being elected board president in his second term.

He didn’t run again, he says, because he learned he had been mistaken in thinking that change had to come from within the system and primarily in urban areas in order to make a difference.

“I came to realize that the entity of change wasn’t going to be the school district. It had to be at the state level,” he says. “So then you have to figure out what state could become the model for change. I didn’t see any hope that Washington could be the state but I figured Virginia could be.”

Nielsen has been less visible in the education field in the past several years because of the need to focus his attention on the fast-growing family business he oversees, prompting his comment in an interview that he’s “not as engaged in education as I once was.”

But the comment isn’t meant to imply that he’s retired from the fray on behalf of changing public education. He is continuing to work long distance with state and community leaders in Virginia, which he singled out two years ago as a state that “has a chance to do education the way it needs to be done.”

His family business is LightDoctor, a six-year-old commercial lighting and maintenance company that is focused on reducing energy needs with what they describe as “innovative lighting solutions.” LightDoctor, located in Mountlake Terrace northeast of Seattle, has major customers around the Pacific Northwest and, according to Nielsen, “could easily grow 80 percent this year.”

Despite the focus on his business, he remains an opinion leader with respect to education, with controversial viewpoints that have emerged from those years of commitment to seeking solutions to education’s woes.

For example, he says his experience is that “individual merit pay inside a school building is destructive to the culture of a school, more injurious than helpful. Sure, people like black-and-white solutions but this is very gray.”

What he touts instead is a whole-school bonus system for elementary and high schools, arguing “it’s more fair to have a system in which all teachers participate, challenge each other, and be rewarded together. Schools need to be treated like high-performance work teams.”

He suggests that “unions are not the source of the problem in public education, but they are the constraint in fixing it. The problem in public education has been management, not the unions. The unions have become strong because schools have weak management.”

And to those who insist more money is needed for schools, Nielsen says “I don’t think schools are underfunded. Money is not the constraint, rather it’s that we’re spending money in ways we shouldn’t.”

That’s an observation that he’s quick to point out relates to K-12, not to higher education, which he sees as facing a different array of challenges.

What the education system needs, which he says he and others hope can be achieved in Virginia  because of favorable response from business and academic leaders, is “elimination of certification laws, a change in the way we select and change school leadership and having school boards become appointed in urban areas,” he suggested.

He says Virginia has already achieved some education innovations with an agreement a few years ago between the state’s five largest public universities and the governor on a plan that was approved by the legislature.

“The major schools agreed to never ask for a higher percentage of state funding in exchange for no state regulations,” Nielsen explained. “That meant the state backed off on things like employment regulations, purchasing, contracting and the like and left those in the future to the schools themselves.”

The pushback some areas of the country have evidenced toward Obama’s innovation initiative suggest those steps will come about only with some struggle.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Don Nielsen, who for more than a decade was perhaps Washington State’s most visible and vocal advocate for fixing what he saw as the ills of the public education system, thinks President Obama’s Race to the Top funding challenge to the states will have a positive impact on the quality of education.

 

“His innovation grants are pushing the states to move faster toward education innovation than they might feel comfortable with and some good will come from that fact alone,” said Nielsen, who long ago decided that he was wrong in his conviction that education reform had to come from the local level.

The President’s education initiative has generated stiff competition among states involved in the race for federal cash from grants the administration promises will be worth up to $700 million for states that show the greatest willingness to push innovation and implement tough testing standards for local schools. But it has also drawn some strong resistance in some quarters.

But while Nielsen thinks the use of financial incentives to get the states to innovate “on balance will be positive,” he forcefully adds “I don’t want the federal government mandating a national test.” He suggests a standard test could emerge from among various testing methods being tried in various states.

Nielsen’s conviction that the education system needing fixing and the gradual realization that the necessary changes could only come at the state level came about first from a two-year odyssey to study schools and then from the inside as a Seattle School Board leader.

 

His quest to “learn what was wrong with the nation’s public education system” was what prompted his information-gathering tour of the country in the early ‘90s, an unlikely post-retirement commitment for a man who had built Virginia-based Hazelton Laboratories Corp. into the largest independent contract laboratory in the world.

 

He was chairman, president and CEO of the firm and had made his fortune when he decided in 1992 to retire and focus on education.

 

After his odyssey, Nielsen returned home to Seattle and ran for the school board, being elected board president in his second term.

 

He didn’t run again, he says, because he learned he had been mistaken in thinking that change had to come from within the system and primarily in urban areas in order to make a difference.

 

“I came to realize that the entity of change wasn’t going to be the school district. It had to be at the state level,” he says. “So then you have to figure out what state could become the model for change. I didn’t see any hope that Washington could be the state but I figured Virginia could be.”

 

Nielsen has been less visible in the education field in the past several years because of the need to focus his attention on the fast-growing family business he oversees, prompting his comment in an interview that he’s “not as engaged in education as I once was.”

 

But the comment isn’t meant to imply that he’s retired from the fray on behalf of changing public education. He is continuing to work long distance with state and community leaders in Virginia, which he singled out two years ago as a state that “has a chance to do education the way it needs to be done.”

 

His family business is LightDoctor, a six-year-old commercial lighting and maintenance company that is focused on reducing energy needs with what they describe as “innovative lighting solutions.” LightDoctor, located in Mountlake Terrace northeast of Seattle, has major customers around the Pacific Northwest and, according to Nielsen, “could easily grow 80 percent this year.”

 

Despite the focus on his business, he remains an opinion leader with respect to education, with controversial viewpoints that have emerged from those years of commitment to seeking solutions to education’s woes.

 

For example, he says his experience is that “individual merit pay inside a school building is destructive to the culture of a school, more injurious than helpful. Sure, people like black-and-white solutions but this is very gray.”

 

What he touts instead is a whole-school bonus system for elementary and high schools, arguing “it’s more fair to have a system in which all teachers participate, challenge each other, and be rewarded together. Schools need to be treated like high-performance work teams.”

 

He suggests that “unions are not the source of the problem in public education, but they are the constraint in fixing it. The problem in public education has been management, not the unions. The unions have become strong because schools have weak management.”

 

And to those who insist more money is needed for schools, Nielsen says “I don’t think schools are underfunded. Money is not the constraint, rather it’s that we’re spending money in ways we shouldn’t.”

 

That’s an observation that he’s quick to point out relates to K-12, not to higher education, which he sees as facing a different array of challenges.

 

What the education system needs, which he says he and others hope can be achieved in Virginia  because of favorable response from business and academic leaders, is “elimination of certification laws, a change in the way we select and change school leadership and having school boards become appointed in urban areas,” he suggested.

 

He says Virginia has already achieved some education innovations with an agreement a few years ago between the state’s five largest public universities and the governor on a plan that was approved by the legislature.

 

“The major schools agreed to never ask for a higher percentage of state funding in exchange for no state regulations,” Nielsen explained. “That meant the state backed off on things like employment regulations, purchasing, contracting and the like and left those in the future to the schools themselves.”

 

The pushback some areas of the country have evidenced toward Obama’s innovation initiative suggest those steps will come about only with some struggle.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The company has major customers around the Pacific Northwest and, as Nielsen puts it, “could easily grow 80 percent this year.”

 

 

 

 

Obama innovation grants Obamapushiung states to move faster than they migut feel comfortable and some good going to come out of it…they asking for a lot of stuff and states tt win the awardzx will in fact do some changes in the spectrum of their schools that will on baance be positive…

 

 

Former Chairman, President & Chief Executive Officer,
Hazleton Laboratories Corporation
Former President, Seattle School Board

As head of Hazleton, which he turned into the largest independent contract laboratory in the world, Don Nielsen was troubled by the poor skills he often saw in his company's entry-level hires. When he retired in 1992, he decided to do something about it by running for the Seattle school board. "If you want to change public education," he says, "you have to get inside the system."

When he retired at 54, Don Nielsen did something perhaps unexpected of the CEO of the world's largest independent biomedical research and testing company. He set off on a two-year "odyssey" around the United States to try to figure out what was wrong with this country's public education system. Then he ran for the school board in his hometown of Seattle to see if he could be part of the solution.

These interests seem anything but dichotomous to Nielsen, whose passionate interest in education extends back to 1969, when he and his business partner, Kirby Cramer (68th AMP, 1974), were looking to purchase their first company. "The two areas of society I thought were broken were education and medicine," Nielsen recalls. "But education seemed too big a nut to crack."

 

 

Jon Eliassen, seven years after “retirement,” finds himself in a more-than-fulltime “entrepreneurial encore” with the unusual challenge of having top leadership roles at two public companies, both headquartered in Spokane.

Eliassen serves as interim president and CEO of Red Lion Hotels Corp., a $165 million-revenue chain whose business he’s quickly learning, and is chair of Itron Inc., a $1.6 billion metering company that he’s watched mature over nearly three decades from infancy to global prominence in its industry.

Eliassen recalls that when he first took the reins at Red Lion in January he’d get the occasional comment “you don’t know anything about the hotel business.” He had two answers:  “I’ve been staying in hotels for 40 years,” and “I’ve hired good people, so I don’t have to know a lot.”

But it became clear, during an interview, that Eliassen has no timetable for finding a permanent CEO and that he has a good grasp of where he wants to take the company before any transition comes about.

“I don’t view this as a caretaker role and I don’t think of Red Lion as a turnaround situation,” he said. “What I am doing is building an executive team that can successfully run a much larger hotel business, and providing the direction for that to happen.”

Red Lion’s footprint is in the West, with its 43 hotels and motels, 31 of which are owned and 12 are franchises.

Eliassen figures there’s plenty of room for growth for a 50-year-old brand built by a hotel chain acquired in 2001 by what was then Spokane-based West Coast Hospitality Corp., which assumed the Red Lion name in 2003.

As an outsider in the industry, he’s particularly concerned about the trends he sees of downward pricing pressure and a continuous cutting back on overhead, a trend that he says is “not sustainable over the longterm” for the industry.

As elite hotels pinched in this recession are, as he puts it, “pressing down into our space,” it’s putting pressure on Red Lion. But Eliassen also sees that as opportunity “because of the things we can offer a franchisee of a struggling chain.”

“In cases where the franchise obligations have grown onerous, we can offer a temptation to look at our brand,” he added. In fact, he says he’s “very focused.” on franchise development as a key part of the company’s strategy.

It was also at the start of this year that Eliassen, 63, assumed the chairman’s role at Itron with the retirement of LeRoy Nosbaum, who had stepped down as CEO nine months earlier but remained as chair until the end of 2009.

Eliassen, who has been on Itron’s board since 1987, figures the new role won’t add a great deal of time pressure for him since he had already been lead director, meeting frequently with Nosbaum, then Malcolm Unsworth, who succeeded Nosbaum.

Although he is in the unusual situation of having watched Itron since its birth almost 30 years ago as a subsidiary of what was then the investor-owned Washington Water Power Co., now Avista Corp., he makes clear that he doesn’t want to be viewed as responsible for its success.

But he concedes it’s been fun watching “a great run for a company built on a concept that Wendell Satre (then WWP CEO) saw as a way to print bills and leave them at the doorstep to speed up cash flow and improve accuracy of meter reading information.”

That run has included, in the last decade under Nosbaum’s leadership, Itron’s growth into a global leader in providing electricity, heat, water and gas metering devices.

The growth was accompanied by a dramatic run-up in the company’s stock price during the decade, from $5 to about $105 per share, a trend that turned in the final quarter of 2008 when the price plunged to under $40 per share. It has rebounded this year into the $50-$60 range.

Like many whose roots are in Spokane, I own a few shares of both Red Lion and Itron. And I’ve known Eliassen since he took the reins at the old Spokane Area Economic Development Council in 2003, a few weeks after he retired from Avista, where he was senior vice president and CFO and had a 33-year career. We also both served on the national advisory board of the Washington State University College of Business.

In his spare time, Eliassen serves on the board of the Washington Technology Center, the Spokane Intercollegiate Technical and Research Institute (SIRTI), which is the state’s most prominent incubator facility, and is involved in angel investing with his Terrapin Capital Group.

In an interview last spring with the Spokane Journal of Business, Eliassen offered a clue to how long he plans to continue this phase of his “retirement,” saying he wants to remain active for the next six to eight years with companies and their boards.

In the short term, he’s clearly intent on continuing with a dual role that has become increasingly unusual as pressures on CEOs have increased dramatically and their boards have become increasingly reluctant to have them divide their time with board-chair duties at other public companies.

 

Kris Nielsen, whose Pegasus-Global Holdings Inc. has a client list that reads like the who’s who of the power and oil and gas industries internationally, predicts that the disastrous Gulf of Mexico spill will be the oil and gas industry’s Three Mile Island.

And because of the role Nielsen, chairman and president of the firm, and Patricia Galloway, his wife and the company’s CEO, play in guiding long-term strategy for an array of industries, it’s a prediction that’s likely to gather increasing attention as the Gulf disaster unfolds.

“With the recent BP disaster, the oil and gas industry will be forever changed, much as the nuclear power industry was 30 years ago,” suggests Nielsen, whose long career has brought him an international reputation as a risk-management expert.

Nielsen and Galloway come by the Three Mile Island allusion through experience with nuclear power, both in the ‘80s as the TMI aftermath washed over the industry, and now as the industry has finally come back. 

They were hired to try to save the Washington Public Power Supply System(WPPSS), a combine of public and private power entities created to build five nuclear plants, from the eventual collapse that became the largest municipal bond default in U.S. history.

And they continue to consult with power companies on nuclear energy, having worked with Florida Power & Light on nuclear plants and with Georgia Power on the first two Vogtle nuclear plants and are involved with two others that will be among the first new  plants since TMI.

It was during a London “road show” for long-time client Deutsche Bank in the weeks after the Gulf drilling disaster that Nielsen first likened the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe’s fallout to Three Mile Island. Deutsche Bank had asked Nielsen and Galloway to discuss the oil spill and its implications for BP investors in particular.

Until now, their comments have been highly visible and sought after mainly for those in the industries to which they provide guidance and counsel, but pretty much off the radar screen of the general public and the mainstream media.

However, as the Gulf spill’s long-term implications for the oil and gas industry, and for the fortunes of the company responsible, begin to sink in, their visibility may ratchet up exponentially.

Of late, they have been on a two-hour video conference from their company’s unusual rural headquarters each Monday morning with Deutsche Bank executives regarding Nielsen’s and Galloway’s ongoing assessment of the impact of the nation’s worst environmental disaster on the industry, and on the outlook for BP.

It’s a seemingly unlikely company headquarters from which they offer guidance and counsel to major companies around the world, write articles for key industry journals and organize conferences and prepare for speaking appearances.

The western-style log-faced building hard against the base of a treed hillside at the end of a long, dusty road a dozen miles east of Cle Elum, WA, officially replaced their former headquarters near Princeton, NJ, in 2007, although they’ve basically operated out of the Seattle area most of the past decade.

It’s from there on their Unionville Ranch, named for the New Jersey winery they founded and own, that Nielsen and Galloway communicate by phone, e-mail and videoconference with leading executives when they’re not on a plane to somewhere for face-to-face visits. The location is further evidence that entrepreneurs can work where they want to live.

When I asked Nielsen specifically about what he thinks lies ahead for BP, he replied that a  break-up of the company was possible, but would be an extreme outcome.

In a recent newsletter, Nielsen said the regulatory impact, which he predicted “will slowly spread throughout the world,” will impact all areas of the industry, “including the oil and gas services sector, not just domestically but internationally as well.”

But he added that “the oil and gas industry and the U.S. government now have a unique opportunity to ‘get it right’ and getting it right means looking at past disasters and determining how we short circuit idiocy and blend reasonable regulation with reasonable responses from the industry.”

Galloway joined the firm three years after her graduation from Purdue with honors and an engineering degree in 1978, soon became a shareholder, and recalls arriving in Seattle for the first time to prepare for her work with WPPSS and thinking, “so why don’t I live here?” They soon did, buying a condo in Seattle in 1987, the year they were married.

Nielsen and Galloway offer a note of optimism in suggesting that industry and government, by applying the lessons of Three Mile Island to dealing with the oil and gas industry, “should be able to shorten the timeline to regulatory and behavioral excellence from 30 years to 10 years.”

For this to happen, an earnest effort on the part of government to avoid over-regulation must be matched by an earnest effort by the private sector to pursue safety, “not as a result of government regulation but as a by-product of corporate culture,” they suggest.

“In the next decade, the oil & gas industry and companies will become good corporate citizens instead of the pariahs that they are perceived as being today—exactly as the nuclear power utilities have become 30 years after TMI,” Nielsen wrote in his newsletter.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

William D. Ruckelshaus, who has spent most of his life helping create, enforce or promote environmental laws and regulations, says government is obliged to step in on occasion, and probably spend more money, in helping to protect against cataclysmic disasters like the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

Ruckelshaus, twice director of the Environmental Protection Agency, says “society must decide how big the risk of such disasters is and what we need to spend to protect against them. That’s what a regulatory system is about.”

Referring to BP’s preparation for a disaster like the Deepwater Horizon spill, Ruckelshaus said: “There’s no question that risk being weighed by the company was that nothing like this would come along. There’s also no question that if they had anticipated the possibility of anything like this happening, they would have spent a lot more time and money.”

“If they had gone last mile, it would have cost a $1 million a week,” Ruckelshaus estimates. “Think how much they could have saved had they planned for the worst.”

Ruckelshaus, who was chosen in the fall of 1970 by then-President Richard Nixon to be the first EPA administrator, noted in a telephone interview that 40-years-ago appointment had an amusing twist.

Ruckelshaus, now strategic director with Madrona Venture Group in Seattle, recalled with a chuckle that a friend of his had suggested to a Newsweek reporter that Ruckelshaus would be a good selection to head the planned new agency.

“When I read that, I went to (Attorney General) John Mitchell, since I was with the Justice Department at the time, and told him I hadn’t initiated that story,” Ruckelshaus remembered. “I thought that was the end of it. But a little while later, Mitchell called me and asked me if I wanted the job.”

So on December 1, 1970, Ruckelshaus assumed the reins of a new agency that had come into existence as part of an executive order from Nixon. The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAH) was created by that same order.

Ruckelshaus recalled in an Earth Day 40^th anniversary piece in April this year in the Wall Street Journal that he quickly brought enforcement actions against three large cities for violating the Clean Water Act. That was followed by actions against the steel industry and other industrial polluters.

Ruckelshaus explained in the WSJ piece that “I knew that the job of the EPA would be far more contentious in the future if we didn't establish its credibility and its willingness to take forceful—and symbolic—action right from the start. The American people had to know we were serious about meeting their demands.”

Ruckelshaus noted that Nixon signed 16 major pieces of environmental legislation into law during his presidency. To the possible surprise of many, Nixon had initiated most all of them, but Ruckelshaus noted that Nixon’s environmental proposals nonetheless brought him into conflict with a Democrat-controlled Congress.

“Nixon would submit what he thought was good legislation on either clean air or clean water and the Democratic Congress would put in more extreme provisions than Nixon liked,” Ruckelshaus said. “That’s where the political overtones came in because what bothered Nixon was that no matter what he submitted on environmental issues, Congress took it further than he intended. So towards the end, Nixon was quite down on environmental legislation.”

Ruckelshaus returned to head the EPA in 1983 under Ronald Reagan after it became clear the agency’s image needed repair.

In all, Ruckelshaus has spent nearly a half century on behalf of environmental causes, from the time he was a 28-year-old assistant attorney general in Indiana when he obtained court orders against industries polluting the water supply and helped draft the 1961 Indiana Air Pollution Control Act.

Those involvements on behalf of the environment are way too numerous to begin listing, other than to say they continue today with his involvement with the Puget Sound Partnership and its clean-up Puget Sound initiative.

So it’s logical that his input would be of value as the nation grapples with what process to put in place to help reduce future risks of calamities like the BP spill.

“You can never eliminate the risk of these things happening, but there are steps that reasonably should be required to come as close as possible to eliminating them,” he said.

“The problem any society has in avoiding cataclysmic risk is that it is very hard to balance how much money should be spent to minimize the risk,” he said. “If you leave the problem of minimizing the risk just to the company involved, they’ll try to minimize the risk of the cataclysm occurring. So government has to step in on occasion and say we need to spend more to guard against this.”

 

To Ken Alhadeff, the Seattle businessman who is the financial force behind Memphis, winning the coveted Tony award as Best Musical isn’t the climax of his five-year love affair with this play. It only sets the stage for subsequent acts, including a national tour that will launch in October of 2011 in the musical’s namesake city.

And he suggests that the award and the recognition it brings will also set the stage for the next act for Alhadeff and his wife, Marlene, who he emphasizes is his full partner not only in the development of the Memphis success story but in the opportunities that he knows will now open to them.

In fact, it was Marlene’s acquaintance with the founding partner of Junkyard Dog Productions, Randy Adams, when he was managing director of Palo Alto-based TheaterWorks, that set the stage for Alhadeff’s meeting Adams and his partner, Sue Frost. Alhadeff decided to join them as a partner, which he did in 2006.

He was soon given the script of a show that had been in production since 2003 to which they wanted the rights. Thus the Alhadeffs’ ties to Memphis were born.

“As the plane I was on sat on the tarmac in Seattle, I pulled the script out and read it and before the plane lifted off, my tears were falling on the pages of the script,” Alhadeff said during a telephone interview a couple of days after the gala New York celebration that followed the Tony Awards event.

Those who know Alhadeff know him as an emotional guy who gets as strongly committed to the success of his causes as he does to success in his business ventures.

And after that first reading of the script five years ago, he got emotional about Memphis, which he describes as “a meaningful statement about the power of music to change people and about the state of race relations in America.”

For those who haven’t paid attention, Memphis is the story of a poor white kid who frequented now-famous Beale Street’s black clubs to hear what he described as “the music of my soul.” It’s about his struggle to popularize the music in a white world and his relationship with a black singer. One reviewer described it as “a show of soulful sounds and a parade of engaging characters.”

I told Alhadeff that I had the distinct impression, when we talked in early 2009 for an earlier column as he set about the effort to raise the millions necessary to take the show to Broadway, that he viewed his effort as being as much a commitment to a cause as to a potential investment.

“That’s totally true,” he replied. “We believed strongly that this story needed to be told and realized that musical theater is the ideal vehicle to shed light and joy on a subject.”

Now the story has been told and retold on the Sam Shubert Theater stage to enthusiastic audiences. And the wildest-dreams kind of reward has come for the Alhadeffs and others who made the commitment to the cause.

“The production company will continue on,” he said. “Clearly, being Tony-award-winning producers will open almost any door for us to evaluate scripts.

“Because we have produced at the highest levels, along with our partners, it validates our credentials and thus opens doors,” he added.

And financial rewards will begin coming in from those who invested in the Memphis dream, even though he was clear from the outset of his raising capital for the musical that  “the core of the investment in this show has to be based on the passion that comes with seeing it.”

Alhadeff, at age 61, has made numerous successful investments during his business career. But he says this was the first time he had to ask other people to invest substantial amounts of money in his vision.

Part of the vision going forward is for growing theatrical success for his hometown, where Memphis had a two-week run in early 2009 at the 5^th Avenue Theater before its move to Broadway.

That last pre-Broadway stop marked a milestone both for the Alhadeffs and the 5^th Avenue, since it had been 30 years since his late father and a partner had undertaken the restoration and reopening of the landmark theater, which occurred in 1980. Alhadeff went on the 5^th Avenue board in 1994, after his father’s death, and subsequently served as chair of that board.

“Seattle has been on the rise for a long time as one of the premier theater cities in America,” Alhadeff said. “We are going to continue to see major productions developed in Seattle on the way to Broadway.”

And it’s clear that he and Marleen plan to bring their new national theater credentials to boost Seattle’s future opportunities.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Helen Thomas, who as a White House correspondent has been peppering presidents with prickly questions since before the current occupant of the White House was born, deserves a better career climax than the sudden end that occurred for her this week.

The 89-year-old Thomas, role model for decades of women journalists and admired by many for her willingness to confront the powerful, resigned in the wake of an unacceptable comment about Jews needing to “get the hell out of Palestine.”

It’s doubtful if anyone with a television or a computer could have missed the avalanche of comments that has dominated websites and blogs since the video interview with her by a rabbi with a website called rabbilive.com surfaced last weekend.

No one could or would defend the unacceptable comment she made to the rabbi after he spotted her at a Jewish Heritage Day event at the White House late last month and came up with a microphone to get her to make a comment about Israel.

Some bloggers have suggested the rabbi bushwhacked her. And he likely got the kind of comment he was after when he spotted her in the crowd and came up to interview her. But he didn’t put the words in her mouth.

The interview became viral in 24 hours after it surfaced last weekend, the video taking over the Internet and the torrent of comments it unleashed dominating blogs and newspaper columns. The interview came before, but began gaining traction after, the death of nine activists as Israeli commandos boarded a Turkish aid ship bound for Gaza.

But amidst what one well-regarded political blogger named Robert Scheer characterized as a “media tirade” against her that he described “as illogical as it is hysterical” has come the suggestion that the body of work and accomplishments of 60 years shouldn’t be washed away with a single unacceptable comment.

“The few sentences uttered by her were, as she quickly acknowledged, wrong, deeply so I would add,” Scheer wrote in his truthdig blog. “But they cannot justify the road-rage destruction of the dean of the Washington press corps. Suddenly this heroic woman who broke so many gender barriers and dared to challenge presidential arrogance was reduced to nothing more than the stereo-typical anti-Israel Arab that is so fashionable to hate.”

It was a little more than a year ago that Thomas was honored at Washington State University as she and senior CBS White House correspondent Robert Schieffer received lifetime achievement awards at the 35^th annual Edward R. Murrow Symposium.

Because she and I once worked for the same wire service, she a major figure covering presidents for United Press International while I operated down in the relative anonymity of covering governors and legislatures, I got to spend a couple of days with her in Pullman, basically carrying luggage for an old lady.

And in numerous conversations with her during those few days in Pullman, what emerged was the sense of a person irate at the use of military force, whether by the U.S. or Israel. The former was evidenced by her sharp questions of then-President George Bush over the Iraq war in particular and the latter by questions about the U.S. role in the Middle East that made her hated by Israeli lobbying groups in Washington, D.C.

Thomas, a Lebanese-American who grew up in Detroit and joined UPI in 1943, moving to the White House beat during Dwight Eisenhower’s last year as president, is widely known as a critic of Israel. But our conversations made it clear she’s a harsh critic of the Israeli government and what she views as its militarism, not of the citizens of that nation.

Many viewed her penetrating and critical questions posed to Bush, particularly about the war in Iraq, during news conferences as proof that she was liberal. It was a sense that created a virtual hatred of her among Bush Administration officials and GOP leaders.

Thus when President Obama called on her at his first news conference last year, he smiled expectantly, apparently thinking he’d get a softball question. Instead she weighed in with a zinger and a hard-nosed follow-up question that brought a furrow to Obama’s brow.

After her ill-considered comments raised the fire storm, she was forced to resign from Hearst, the company that she’d worked for as a columnist since leaving the then-dead wire service in 1980, and issued an apology.

The head of the Anti-Defamation League said the apology wasn’t acceptable. Refusal to accept an apology is a somewhat untenable position since when the Israeli government apologized after 23-year-old Olympia activist Rachel Corrie was crushed by an Israeli army bulldozer on the Gaza strip as she sought to keep Palestinian homes from being bulldozed, it was accepted.

And just today, the Israeli government apologized for sending the press a link to an online video parodying last week’s deadly commando raid on the flotilla of pro-Gaza activists, an apology they hope will suffice. So someone with more savvy is likely to advise the executive of the Anti-Defamation League to be quiet.

Thomas turns 90 in August. And hopefully some group, ideally a women’s organization, will have the courage to say the litany of firsts in her resume and the barriers she broke on behalf of women deserve recognition. So does the courage she evidenced as a front-row journalist to ask the questions no one else wanted to ask to help keep 11 presidents on an honest track.

It’s a recognition that would be more than appropriate as an honor for her contributions, rather than having the memory of those contributions ravaged by reaction to a single mistake. Hopefully some organization will have the courage to do her that service and be willing to put down anyone who would be so small as to think she should be denied that.

A former female colleague at UPI was quoted as saying she hoped the end of Thomas’ career “does not taint a long and important legacy.” It’s important that some group picks up Thomas’ banner to ensure the legacy is recognized.

 

 

 

Nicole Vogel, co-founder and publisher of Portland-based SagaCity Media, one of the most successful regional publishers of city magazines and related media,has learned that the key to realizing how good things really are in the best of times is to struggle through the worst of times.

“I appreciate my life and what we’ve created so much more now for what we had to go through,” she said, reflecting on the comeback of the company that launched in 2003 when Vogel and her brother, Scott, began publishing Portland Monthly magazine.

Over her first six years at the helm, she made it look easy to build a fast-growing business in what many view as a challenged print-media industry. The company added titles, including Seattle Metropolitan, won editorial awards and grew to annual revenue in excess of $10 million and profit of almost 20 percent.

But reflecting on how the Great Recession hit her company, she admits she had no idea how good things were until growth of 200 percent a year ends “and then you’re not growing at all and it’s all sort of crumbling around you.”

“Suddenly you stop growing, and a company that has gone from four to 100 employees is back to 85,” Vogel recalls. “I thought things were good, but I had no idea how good they were. I’ve learned more in the past year than at any other time in my life.”

“We managed to basically break even last year,” Vogel said, adding that “our revenue shrank, though we’re still over $10 million. But Portland, as a market, was just killed. People don’t realize that at one point, Portland was second only to Detroit in its jobless rate.”

Vogel’s comments on the worst of times came after she put the exclamation mark on her company’s turnaround with the purchase early this year of a group of three magazines in Colorado and Utah, including the 10-year-old Aspen Sojourner, the city magazine for one of that state’s most upscale regions.

The magazines in Aspen and Vail-Beaver Creek and Park City, Utah, bring SagaCity’s magazine business to about two dozen consumer and custom titles. The company also has a number of Web sites through its electronic media division.

Vogel, then with Turner Broadcasting, and her brother, a New York Times writer, actually were putting promising careers on hold, rather than looking for new opportunities, when they quit their jobs and came to Portland to be with their sister, who had lost her husband to cancer.

As they looked for something to do in their new locations, the two researched the possibility of starting a magazine, did the numbers, and, despite the fact 13 similar efforts in the city had failed since 1980, launched Portland Monthly. Nicole estimated they’d need $1.5 million and two capital raises over four years to get into the black.

Two issues later, the originally bi-monthly magazine was profitable, having needed only $300,000 in funds from a variety of investors (plus about $175,000 from Vogel) to find black ink.

They raised another $180,000 to go monthly and have grown since then off of earnings, except for a capital raise to purchase the mountain titles, as Vogel explained: “given the economic climate we wanted to conserve as much cash as possible.”

Scott, who served as editor in chief, eventually left for a key position at the Washington Post and Nicole assumed that role for a time.

It became clear, during an interview, that lessons learned from a severe downturn weren’t the only learning experience Vogel had in launching and growing a company.

Vogel confided that she found “some of the capital-raising experience to be disheartening,” explaining that some of those she hoped would be angel investors turned out to be devils looking for more than financial returns from a young woman, then not yet 35, seeking money to launch a business.

“That was particularly difficult for me because I felt I was past that place in my career,” she added. “I thought I’d proven myself to the boys’ club a long time ago as the youngest vice president, woman or man, at Turner.”

Vogel expects to continue to grow the company, including with possible addition of other city magazines. She noted that the company backed away from pursuing one magazine in a top-10 market because the numbers didn’t work out.

 “We can always build a magazine less expensively then buying one,” she said, as happened with the launch of Seattle Metropolitan in a market that already had a city magazine.

She’s been successful with both cities’ magazines, noting that selling Portland, a smaller market, to advertisers has been easier since creating a success with Seattle Metropolitan. The fact that both have been among the national leaders of city magazines in “street” sales, meaning single-copy sales each month, has helped.

She’s also proud of the fact the demographics of both magazines skew younger and higher-income than the norm for city magazines. And that they far outsell the national magazines in their space, noting as an example that “Vanity Fair’s circulation in Seattle is half of Seattle Metropolitan’s.”

As for the future, Vogel says “I love what I do and the company is still growing and expanding, though am I going to be here forever? Not likely. I could see even myself doing international aid work at some point.”

Is there an opportunity for a national publication of some sort?

“There are holes I see nationally,” she replied, “but I doubt that I’d ever try to create a title to fill them. But the magazine that reflects women of our generation really hasn’t been created. We’re a fickle bunch and maybe if someone created more of an Esquire-style magazine for women, very crisp and with interesting thinking, it might go.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A decade on from its launch as a unique program designed to bring a college education within the reach of kids from the poorest neighborhoods, first in Washington State then in the “Other Washington,” College Success Foundation is ready to see its model transformed into a national effort.

Bob Craves, then a top executive with Costco Wholesale Corp., became immersed in the educational challenges facing the most at-risk students, first as chair of the Washington State Higher Education Coordinating Board, then as co-chair of a special state commission to examine the future of higher education.

It was the work of that commission, called the 2020 commission on the Future of Post-Secondary Education, that made it clear to Craves that “the poorest kids have very little chance of getting their baccalaureate degree unless they have some real resources, both capital and human, to get through the process.”

The commission created by then-Gov. Gary Locke recommended creation of a statewide advocacy group to bring about the necessary changes so higher-ed opportunities would come about for the most at-risk kids.

But Craves, in his to-the-point style, recalled saying “if there’s no money in it, nobody’s going to pay any attention.”

So 10 years ago this spring, Craves co-founded with Ann-Ramsey Jenkins what was originally the Washington Education Foundation, designed to bring mentoring and scholarship dollars to ensure college-education opportunity to the Seattle area’s most at-risk kids.

Craves, who was part of the original executive team when Costco was founded in 1983 and was senior vice president of membership and marketing when he retired, brought his corporate contacts and business acumen to the fund-raising and operations of the organization.

But the vision for what soon became the College Success Foundation was never just the at-risk kids in the Seattle area, nor was it meant to expand beyond its roots solely with the support of the private sector.

Craves realized that the program needed to be brought to the attention of Congress and decided the best way to achieve that was to create a second CSF unit in Washington, D.C. Thus four years ago the District of Columbia College Success Foundation, which Craves also serves as CEO, was launched.

“What we achieve in Washington, D.C., will be much higher in the radar screen because it’s such a political town,” Craves said in an interview. “We’re arguably functioning in what is the lowest income and toughest of any school district in the country.”

And the DC College Success Foundation carved out for itself there the most difficult schools of the most difficult district, three public and three charter high schools and six middle schools.

“Those schools graduated about 1,000 kids a year and we’ll be providing about 250 scholarships a year,” Craves said.

And as the Foundation enters its second decade, part of what it helps achieve may well be Congressional action to provide programmatic funding for programs like the foundation that are emerging in other cities in the country.

Washington congressmen Jay Inslee, a Democrat, and Dave Reichert, a Republican who represents the district in which both Costco and the Foundation are headquartered, are co-sponsoring legislation to provide such funding.

The support from Costco executives from the outset, coupled, of course, with major support from the Gates Foundation, has been a key source of visibility and fund raising for the foundation.

The foundation administers funds donated to the Costco Scholarship Fund, also founded 10 years ago to provide for minority scholarships to Seattle University and the University of Washington. The 11^th annual Costco breakfast will be Sept. 23 at Seattle U.

And as soon as the foundation cranked up in Washington, D.C., so did the Costco breakfast, where about 400 attended the first such event and produced enough donated dollars to fund 25 D.C. scholarships.

As for the future, Craves says “we set our goal at $1 billion in funds raised for scholarships over 20 years and through 10 years we’ve raised about $400 million. By the end of this school year, we will have awarded more than 7,000 scholarships and produced more than 2,000 graduates.”

The foundation’s target will remain the State of Washington and the District of Columbia, meaning that as its model emerges in cities around the country, development of those programs will be left to leaders in those communities. Though Craves adds that the foundation would be available to provide program help in cities where that expertise might be helpful.

The first major effort beyond the Seattle area is taking place in Tacoma, where the city has agreed to spend $250,000 for a community effort to double the number of low-income students who graduate from high school and do well in college.

Craves has his eye on future foundation initiatives in Spokane and Yakima on the Eastside of Washington State.

“People in all these communities have come to understand that helping provide funding to aid low-income young people to get into college is somewhat of a driver of economic development,” said Craves.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tom O’Keefe quickly displays his signature Irish smile when he recalls how, midway through the summer of 2000, it seemed fate might bring the company free global visibility during that season’s World Series, just when his Tully’s Coffee needed it most.

It was in 2000 that O’Keefe’s eight-year-old company was pursuing an initial public offering of its stock and was in the midst of its first big surge, opening 50 new stores, including a significant expansion into the San Francisco Bay Area.

Memories of that year, which turned out to be as close to halcyon days as Tully’s has come in the 18 years since O’Keefe founded it with one outlet in a Kent grocery store, were among the things O’Keefe talked about in a reflective interview following the announcement that he’s retiring.

The World Series possibility, an example of the what-ifs O’Keefe seemed to enjoy conjuring up, popped into his creative mind back then because Tully’s had won the coffee contract in the new Safeco Field a year earlier. And he bought the coffee pact at the Giants’ Candlestick Park home as he guided Tully’s into a growing Bay Area presence.

The point was that if the teams had met in the World Series, as batters came to the plate in either park, the Tully’s logo would be visible center screen on every television tuned to the World Series.

 But as that season progressed, both the Mariners and Giants faltered and the dream passed, unfulfilled. So did the IPO dream as the dot-com bust caused those going-public plans to evaporate that fall.

The following year, as the dot-com meltdown heavily impacted the tech business in San Francisco and thus Tully’s initiative there, as well as the Seattle area, the company was bleeding financially. O’Keefe turned from growth to down-sizing with store closures, lease cancellations and similar money-saving moves. The year-end financial statement for 2001 showed a loss of about $23 million.

O’Keefe, whose title has been “founder, chairman and head barista” since he relinquished the CEO role nine years ago, advised the board March 26 that he is stepping down June 30.  A new chair is expected to be named before O’Keefe’s formal departure date.

After that his only title will be “founder,” though he remains the major shareholder with 11 percent of what’s now formally known as TC Global since Tully’s sold its coffee roasting and wholesale business to Green Mountain Coffee Roasters for $40.3 million last year.

We visited in his office the week after the announcement as he prepared to leave for Asia, where he has been this week, commencing with a visit to Korea for the opening of the first two Tully’s stores in that country. O’Keefe says he hopes to see 100 stores over the next four to five years.

O’Keefe often suggests that it is in Asia that fulfillment could come for the IPO dream, unfulfilled as a result of the 2000 meltdown and again when the company’s announced hope of raising $50 million with a 2007 IPO was dashed as the economy spiraled down.

In a letter to employees two days after his retirement announcement, he alluded to that when he wrote: “I believe a huge part of our future, not to mention shareholder value, is in our international division.” 

But when I mentioned the theme of dreams unfulfilled in an e-mail to him in Asia following up our face-to-face, I could sense the bristle across the miles.

“To be clear, there have been many dreams fulfilled with this Tully’s business adventure,” he said. “The few lows, mostly market driven, still have been eclipsed by the incredible people that I/we have interacted with from the beginning…employees, shareholders and customers.”

O’Keefe has been a high-visibility philanthropist since early on. He and his wife, Cathy, helped launch the cystic fibrosis guild in Seattle in 1982 and the annual auction that has raised literally millions of dollars since then. The O’Keefes are also responsible (along with Larry Benaroya and his wife) for similar millions raised over the past 17 years for Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation.

O’Keefe, in his letter to employees, talked about how Cathy had early on suggested to him that the company needed a “fourth point of difference” from other companies (beyond “our coffee, people and stores”) and that point should be “everything we do in the community.”

“That’s when we added “and for the kids in the community in which we serve,” his employee letter explained. “This point of difference #4 is the heart and soul of our company.”

It was in discussing his roots (Irish from his father, Greek from his mother) at one point in our conversation in his office  that O’Keefe disclosed that his father had used the promise of huge incentive fees from Boeing to convince his wife to pack up the family of five kids and leave their Springfield, MA, home.

“My father had designed a ‘noise suppression nozzle’ that went on the back of each engine of the planned Supersonic Transport (SST),” O’Keefe recalled, “and Boeing was going to pay him literally thousands of dollars in bonus fees for each engine installed.”

It was not long after the family moved to Seattle that Congress killed the SST program.

Despite the loss of those thousands of dollars in fees, O’Keefe recalls that his father’s Boeing salary was “about the same for one job that he had been making for four jobs in Springfield. He was an inner-city high school physics teacher, coach/administrator for the football and basketball teams, a physics professor at Western New England College at night and was an administrator for the airport in Hartford…and he held those jobs all at the same time.”

He expanded on those details about his father in a lengthy e-mail to me from Asia, and how his mother had taken care of the upbringing part while his father “worked all the time,” but still paid enough attention to “make me take debate if I wanted new football shoes.”

Over the years, it’s been clear that O’Keefe has sought to avoid diluting the share value of his hundreds of investors, and ultimately to reward them with an IPO. It’s likely that the force behind that desire has been the voice of his father (who died in 2000) in his ear telling him to, as he recalls: "Protect your shareholders. They gave you their money."