People

David Giuliani, the Seattle-area entrepreneur who launched two companies that became new-innovation success stories, has co-founded a statewide business organization named Washington Business Alliance that he hopes can help bring a new innovation to the way government makes decisions. It might be said that Giuliani, who launched and built Optiva and Clarisonic into hugely successful companies that revolutionized teeth cleaning and skin cleansing, has set his sights on building a business organization that would cleanse government of the need for ideology in its decision-making.

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Occasionally we run across something from yesterday that causes a sense that change isn’t necessarily always for the better. And perhaps nowhere is that more true than in the political realm. That thought occurred to me a few days ago when I had the opportunity to read a speech by former Governor and U.S. Senator Dan Evans to the January 1995 Economic Forecast conference in Seattle.

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John Buller and H. Stuart Elway, long-time players in the old top-down process of decision-making in Seattle and Washington State, are embarked on separate initiatives whose basic message is that things won’t work that way in the future. Both hope to spark new forms of civic engagement aimed at broader inclusion in charting the region’s next chapter.

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They are an unlikely band of evangelists for the free enterprise system, a group of mostly Hispanic college students whose resumes almost inevitably include the phrase “first in (his or her) family to attend college.” Yet the students who participate in the Students in Free Enterprise (SIFE) program at Heritage University in Toppenish, and close the year competing against college teams from across the country, prove themselves not only believers in, but practitioners of, free enterprise.

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As then-Gov. Gary Locke’s staff was weighing which artist to hire to paint his official portrait, he was on hand at Safeco Field for the unveiling of the retirement portrait of Seattle Mariner great Edgar Martinez in the fall of 2004. After Mariner CEO Howard Lincoln unveiled the portrait on the field before 40,000 appreciative fans, Locke contacted his staff and basically said “I want that artist.” The artist who painted Edgar was Michele Rushworth and Locke, whose eight-year tenure as governor was nearing conclusion, thus became the first public commission for the Sammamish, WA, artist. It was a noteworthy step for a woman who, with little formal training in that medium, had decided a few years earlier to make portrait painting her career

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Reflections on the 40^th anniversary of Watergate will, for many, merely be a pause to recall a bungled break-in that began the most tragic chapter in the history of the presidency. But for Egil (Bud) Krogh, an up-and-coming young Seattle attorney who became a key part of Richard Nixon’s White House team, the lessons from the fall of a president echo down the years less as a bitter memory than as a reminder of integrity lost. To Krogh, it’s important that the events of 1972 that led inexorably to the resignation of Richard Nixon two years later be kept ever in the minds of elected officials and those who work for them. Thus he maintains a busy speaking schedule sharing his thoughts on integrity and the perspective of power before corporate and legal groups, academic assemblies and gatherings of young people on the importance of integrity-based decision making

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When Gaylene Anderson decided on an entrepreneurial coming-out party from her tech-transfer role at the University of Idaho, she chose the biggest business-plan competition stage in the country and picked the quintessential symbol of Idaho to tout her fledgling company. The result was a storybook debut in which she wowed the audience and the judges and is now gaining national attention for herself and Solanux Inc., whose academia-developed process turns the potato into a health food.

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John Ellis, who was a reluctant CEO looking forward to retirement when he was called on 20 years ago to help find local owners to save the Seattle Mariners’ franchise, admits that he wasn’t even a baseball fan when he undertook the almost-lost cause of saving baseball for Seattle. “I didn’t know much about baseball and wasn’t really a baseball guy,” Ellis admits, reflecting back on the events of late ’91, early 1992. And he didn’t really understand how deeply embroiled he would become when he undertook the role that Seattle Mayor Norm Rice, and subsequently other business leaders, urged on him, a role in which he soon found how challenging saving the franchise would be.

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If a company deserve to be judged by the leader it keeps and leaders by the companies they build, then Alaska Air Group and its chairman and CEO Bill Ayer should be judged well. Ayer, 57, who steered the company for the past decade through an increasingly successful flight while for the rest of the “legacy” airlines the 10 years proved an image-scaring and scary ride, has announced that he is officially turning over the CEO reins to Alaska president Brad Tilden.

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The uncertain future course of national health care is retarding fledgling efforts to expand what’s known as “compassionate care” for cancer patients as hospitals in Seattle and elsewhere are proving reluctant to launch new cancer programs that drain rather than enhance revenue. Matt Loscalzo, who helped develop the concept of “psychosocial” programs as the underpinning of “compassionate care” for cancer patients and their families, laments that major hospitals around the country have been reluctant to incorporate it into their treatment programs.

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