Log in
updated 2:54 PM UTC, Jul 28, 2018

FlynnsHarp logo 042016

Stuart Anderson, cowboy-country icon, dies at 93

.

Stuart Anderson, with his 2,400-acre cattle ranch abutting the freeway in Central Washington and his signature mustache and cowboy hat, was the icon of cowboy country as he built what was regarded, in the 1980s, as the nation's most successful chain of affordable steakhouses. (It was actually dinner house chains but probably doesn't matter.)

Anderson, 93, passed away peacefully Monday at his Rancho Mirage home., surrounded by his family, including his beloved wife Helen, who was his partner for more than 40 years. He had been a diabetic for years but it was lung cancer that caused his death, though he had quit smoking in 1980.

Stuart Anderson founded his Black Angus/Cattle Company Restaurants chain in Seattle in the 1960s and from its corporate headquarters there he grew it into a chain of 122 restaurants spread across 19 states, with more than 10,000 employees and $230 million in annual revenue.

I felt compelled to come and talk to Stuart about his knowing he was in the final stages of life and that he was reconciled to that fact because he had led such a special life. It was filled with family, success, travel and, as Helen said, "lots of love." He had agreed to have me come down on Saturday to his home and work on his obituary together but that was not to be.

That became clear with the email Monday from Helen: "My wonderful, sweet, best friend Stuart has gone to that Mansion in the sky. He will be missed more than words can tell. He was larger than life and loved by so many. He was so pleased with the 93 wonderful years he had but said he was ready to go. Thanks for all the prayers and good wishes."

I first met Stuart four years ago when Betsy and I were vacationing in the desert. I had contracted with the Coachella Valley Economic Partnership to arrange a wine-and-cheese gathering of Northwest snowbirds to learn some business facts about their second home. The local Palm Springs Desert Sun publicized the event and as people visited, someone pointed out to me "there's Stuart Anderson," to which I responded: "I don't think so. I thought he was long gone."

So I went over to introduce myself to Stuart and Helen and learned that the guy with a weathered face and wearing a cowboy hat was much alive and provided an enjoyable get-to-know visit.

A couple of days later, I learned that he was actually going back into the restaurant business, reopening one of his first Black Angus restaurants, located in Rancho Mirage, (that had been forced to close and go out of business during the downturn) This is not really true. Someone came along to buy our lease which we gladly sold because of the downturn of the economy at that time. We were not forced to close.

So I produced a column about Helen and Stuart re-opening and running the restaurant, both of them visiting with customers and making the rounds each day for a number of months before it became clear that the challenge was too much for a man then nearly 90 who had been out of the business too long so gladly sold the lease.

I visited again four months ago with the Andersons at their Rancho Mirage condo, and found Stuart, who was speaking softly and slowly but retained the firm gaze he usually offered from beneath his cowboy hat. He wanted to talk about the book and the challenge of selling copies, compared to his first book. It is the story of how he built the restaurant empire that became a best-recognized national company. The book actually has a longer official title: "Corporate Cowboy. Stuart Anderson: How a maverick entrepreneur built Black Angus, America's #1 restaurant chain of the 1980s."

He first tried his hand as an author when in 1997 he produced "Here's the Beef! My Story of Beef," a book he described to me as "fun and informative," but most importantly to him, thousands of copies were sold in the Black Angus restaurants. The book was meant to be an answer to the highly popular Wendy's commercial of the time in which an elderly lady asks: "Where's the Beef?"

At that point it had been a decade since he had retired after five consecutive years of his restaurants being named the top steakhouse chain in the nation by USA Today in a poll by industry publication Restaurants & Institutions. He admitted candidly, in an interview we did a few years ago, that he decided to retire because the new owners took the fun out of his job.

At the time of his first book, he was still well-remembered, in Washington State in particular. He was often seen as a spokesperson for a series of television commercials he did in the Seattle area for a senior housing organization.

After retiring, he and Helen enjoyed their (You mentioned this in the 1st paragraph: 2,400 acre) ranch sprawled along Interstate 90 west of Ellensburg. He had bought the ranch in 1966 with the intent of raising the Black Angus cattle that would be served at his restaurants. But it turned out to be too great a challenge, for various reasons, so he continued to raise the cattle while buying his beef elsewhere, until he sold the ranch to Taiwanese interests, though to many travelers going past, it remains the Stuart Anderson ranch.

A private family gathering is being planned in Seattle but the celebration of life will be held in Rancho Mirage in November, which would have been his 94th birthday.

Continue reading

Entrepreneur of the Year event has become community entrepreneurship celebration

In the quarter century since national accounting firm Ernst & Young (now rebranded as EY) brought its Entrepreneur of the Year event to Seattle and the Northwest, the annual black tie gala has represented a community celebration of entrepreneurship. And with that has come a growing awareness of the importance of recognition for those struggling to build businesses and create jobs.

That increased awareness of the role visibility plays has brought with it an array of events, created by firms, organizations and media entities who want to own a piece of visibility value of their own for creating visibility for and thus developing relationships with young companies and the entrepreneurs who guide them.

Indeed all of those other recognition events have brought value to the startup and entrepreneurial ecosystem by allowing individual firms to attract the attention of potential investors and potential new talent.

But the EY event has remained the most prestigious gathering for entrepreneurs, as this year's select group of honorees preparing for the June 17 event at the Sheraton Hotel are coming to learn. Among other things, Northwest winner get to move forward to compete for recognition at the EoY national and world events later in the year with winning entrepreneurs from the 145 cities and 60 countries in which the EoY event is held.

As Dan Smith, managing partner of the Seattle EY office, put it:"We've recognized many remarkable leaders who have disrupted industries, created new product categories, and successfully brought new innovation and technology to traditional industries."

In fact three winners in the local event have gone on to win at the national level. They are David Giuliani, who as founder and CEO of Optiva, won in the manufacturing category in 1997; Zillow Group CEO Spencer Rascoff, who won in the "services" category in 2013, and Zulily CEO Darrell Cavens, who won in the "emerging" category in 2014.

Smith notes that this year's finalists include 21 entrepreneurs from the life sciences, retail and technology industries, adding "we've definitely seen a lot of growth in these sectors compared to 30 years ago when the program started."

This annual Entrepreneur of the Year event has held a special attraction for me because of personal involvement, both before and since the event came to Seattle five years after Ernst & Young launched it in 1986 in Milwaukee.

Part of my regard for the event is having close connection to entrepreneurial honorees for this special recognition. The first was Kathryn Kelly, the president of a young Seattle firm ­­­called Environmental Toxicology, who was among those honored as finalists at the second event in Seattle in 1992.

Then came Pete Chase, CEO of Spokane-based Purcell Systems, who won in the communications category in 2006 and became a judge in the following three years, before guiding the sale or his company and launching a new company, Columbia International Finance, for whom I am doing some consulting.

And Leen Kawas, Ph.D., president and CEO of the promising young life science company M3 Biotechnology Inc., is a 30-year-old Jordanian woman who is among this year's honorees and whom I tout as changing the face of life sciences in this state. I have had the satisfaction of being an investor and providing introductions and visibility since she arrived at the helm of the fast-growing company in January of 2014.

The impact of the honor on the entrepreneurs nominated was evidenced by Kelly's reaction back then when I expressed my regret, having nominated her, for the fact she had been one of three finalists but had not won in her category.

"You have to be kidding! Just being here (including the video vignettes of each finalist shown before the envelope is opened and the winner disclosed) was the satisfaction of a lifetime," she said.

There is also a bit of amusement for me when I think of the Entrepreneur of the Year event in that as publisher of the Business Journal I was involved in two entrepreneur of the year events before Ernst & Young brought its event to Seattle.

That came about because Woody Howse, then a partner in the venture capital firm Cable & Howse Ventures, approached me about partnering in an event we named Entrepreneur of the Year, which we promoted and held in the mid-'80s to honor a single entrepreneur each year. It would be hard to top either of our honorees.

The first was W. Hunter Simpson, who had taken over defibrillator-manufacturer Physio-Control 20 years earlier and guided it into a global-leadership role in its industry. The next year we honored Microsoft founder and CEO Bill Gates, whose company was just then gathering momentum, having gone public a year earlier.

Cable & Howse, then the area's premier vemture capital, had a vested interest in creating visibility for entrepreneurs, as did the Business Journal. We were among many organizations then casting about to determine how best to serve those individuals who held the keys to our future.

In fact, some edginess on the part of the Ernst & Young Seattle leadership would have been appropriate at our having pre-empted Simpson and Gates as the two most impressive names in the local entrepreneur community at the time.

PSBJ and Cable & Howse partnered for several years thereafter with another accounting firm to stage a High Tech Entrepreneur of the Year event, before Ernst & Young Managing Partner Karl Guelich called me to let me know our party was over because the real thing was coming to Seattle.

Guelich had allowed us to go ahead without comment with a Seattle event using the E&Y copyrighted name, partly out of friendship and partly because he likely figured, as it turned out accurately, that our event might even lay visibility groundwork for the arrival of the official awards event of that name.

For perhaps a decade, the Business Journal was part of a process that represented a win for the firm, for the newspaper, and for the entrepreneurs as well. Ermst & Young always scheduled its event for a Thursday evening and provided all the advance detail needed for PSBJ to produce a special supplement with stories on the event and all the honorees, passed out to all attendees as a keepsake as they left the event and then it was inserted in the PSBJ copies that arrived in subscribers' mail the following day.

Since then some of the biggest names among regional entrepreneurs have been in the winners' limelight at the Northwest EoY. They included Mark Britton of Avvo, Jim Weber of Brooks Sports, Inc., Dara Khosrowshahi of Expedia, Inc., Gertrude and Timothy P. Boyle of Columbia Sportswear Company, Jeffrey P. Bezos of Amazon.com, Inc. and Howard Schultz of Starbucks Coffee Company.

So perhaps I'm prejudiced, but it seems clear that EY Managing partner Smith is accurate in suggesting that "the award has acquired a great deal of prestige, and is recognized around the world as an emblem of entrepreneurial success."

text here .

Continue reading

Art Harrigan played legal role that helped save Seattle Mariners, Seahawks

..

The community thank you last week to former Sen. Slade Gorton for his instrumental role in saving major league baseball in Seattle was an appropriate reminder of his signal accomplishment for the community. But without detracting from Gorton's role, it may also be appropriate at some point to recognize the Seattle attorney whose legal victory set the stage for the search for a local owner.

That would seem particularly appropriate since the Seattle attorney, Arthur Harrigan Jr., had key legal roles in saving two of the Seattle professional sports franchises

Art Harrigan not only succeeded in forcing Mariners owner Jeff Smulyan to give business and community leaders four months to find a local buyer, but five years later he paved the way for a local sale of the Seattle Seahawks by preventing owner Ken Behring from moving the team to Los Angeles.

The legal confrontations with the owners of two of Seattle's professional sports teams came about because Harrigan's law firm, Calfo Harrigan Leyh & Eakes, long represented King County on an array of issues. And both owners came into conflict with the county because they sought to abandon the county-owned Kingdome and their leases there.

The venue for resolving the future of the Seattle Mariners franchise was what amounted to an arbitration hearing before Arthur Andersen, the national accounting firm agreed to by both sides to decide some key issues relating to the lease.

Since it wasn't a court process, which would have gotten large visibility for the battle between attorneys, Harrigan's maneuvering over the meaning of wording in Smulyan's contract regarding an attendance clause that was key to the final outcome was little noted, thus little remembered.

Harrigan's argued interpretation of the lease-requirement wording was accepted by the Andersen firm, so Smulyan was required to give an opportunity for a local buyer to be sought.

Of perhaps equal importance, Harrigan successfully argued that there should be a local value lower than the open-market value. The accounting firm agreed and set a "stay-in-Seattle" valuation at $100 million, rather than the national open-market value of $135 million that it had determined.

That created the opportunity for Gorton and others leading the effort to keep the team in Seattle to find a local buyer for $100 million, rather than $135 million, within four months.

No one knows if, at $135 million, Ninetendo's owner would have opted to pick up the cost of saving the Mariners for Seattle.

With respect to the effort to block the Seahawks' move, King County hired Harrigan's firm to keep Behring from fulfilling his widely publicized intent in the winter of 1996 to leave Seattle and move the team to Los Angeles.

Behring made the argument, after some tiles had fallen from the Kingdome roof, that he had concerns about seismic security of the facility as he announced that he was moving the team to Los Angeles.

Harrigan recalled the February meeting at the Woodmark Hotel at Carillon point at which he, King County Executive Gary Locke, Gary Locke, his assistant, and chief civil deputy Dick Holmquist with Behring's attorney, Ron Olson (who he noted was also Warren Buffet's attorney).

"Olson read from a yellow pad, explaining that the team, fearing earthquakes might impact the Kingdome, had to be moved to the comparative safety of Southern California and the Rose Bowl," Harrigan said. "Holmqust and I were trying not to laugh."

"We were poised to file a temporary restraining order the moment the trucks began rolling up to the team's offices in Kirkland," Harrigan said.

"So when Behring and Olson left the room, I made the call and the restraining order was filed," he added. "Had that not happened, we would have had to go to California and ask a California judge to send them back."

Behring had quickly, after the restraining order, filed suit in Kittitas County, so as part of the legal process, Harrigan also had to get the state Supreme Court to toss out that suit.

A few weeks later he and Behring attorneys met with NFL owners who were considering whether to allow the team to move, in the event Behring could escape the Kingdome lease, and made their presentations.

"I had brought Jon Magnusson and two other renowned structural engineers with West Coast seismic design expertise who explained that the idea that Southern California was safer than the Kingdome in case of earthquake was ludicrous," Harrigan said.

The legal maneuvering all came to an end when it was announced that Paul Allen had purchased the Seahawks.

While Harrigan, 72, is ranked as Seattle's top commercial trial lawyer by Chambers & Partners, which ranks the world's best lawyers and law firms, his legal activities have ranged well beyond the courtroom.

He worked with Craig McCaw in his early Eagle River Investments days, helped create the wireless company Nextel, which became a $7 billion public company, is a member of the boards of several public companies. His is chair, and was a principal fund raiser, for an interesting new company that will generate energy by storing electricity on trains.

Harrigan, a Harvard graduate with his law degree from Columbia, served as Senior Counsel to the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, worked on an investigation of CIA intelligence activities related to Vietnam.

Most intriguingly, and perhaps as important as his later pro sports involvements in Seattle, he headed the committee's investigation of IRS intelligence operations, discovering that the agency was giving individuals' tax returns, under the claim of national security, to other intelligence agencies who were then misusing the information in sting operations.

.

Continue reading

First Innovations in Education Award to Granger School District


The first "Innovations in Education" award will be presented this month to the little Yakima Valley school district of Granger where "Every Child, Every Seat, Every Day" became a mantra for students, teachers and parents that allowed the largely Hispanic district to achieve the best attendance in the state last year.

The Innovations in Education Award is being created by the Discovery Institute and will be presented to three women for their key roles in the attendance-success story of the Granger district, where almost a third of the students are from poverty-level homes.

The award will be presented May 19 at a dinner at the Rainier Club as part of the Discovery Institute's 25th anniversary. Presentation of the award will precede a panel discussion with three noted education-change advocates on the topic of "Creating a 21st Century Public Education System."

The women being honored with the award are:

--Alma Sanchez, mother of four, turned student at Heritage University, turned entrepreneur, who wrote and managed the grant for the attendance-incentive awards program at Granger Middle School.

--Janet Wheaton, recently retired Granger School District administrator, who worked with Sanchez and helped her with the application for the $20,000 grant that funded the incentive program, The "Every Child, Every Seat, Every Day" was the title of Sanchez' grant application to the Yakima Valley Community Foundation.

--Joan Wallace, Bellevue business woman who for more than a decade has helped focus attention on the needs of the families of Granger and created the district's relationship with Heritage.

Discovery Institute is presenting the award in partnership with the Seattle law firm of Patterson Buchanan, a leader in school-personnel legal issues, particularly the annual School law Conference. Bellevue developer and retailer Kemper Freeman, one of whose key focuses has been education since his years in the legislature in the 1970s, is the major sponsor.

To ensure wide visibility for the award this year, and to help guide nominations in future years, Sound Publishing and Q13 television will be media sponsors.

It was in a recent column detailing the dramatic turnaround in "chronic" absenteeism for the schools in Granger to 3.6 percent, more than four times better than the statewide average of 16 percent, that I suggested the achievement merited the attention of those seeking to bring change and educational enhancement to schools. In addition, perfect attendance to 21 percent from 3 percent the previous year.

Steve Buri, president of Discovery Institute, seized the opportunity of the May 19 dinner event and its focus on creating a school system for the current century to agree that the Granger accomplishment merited the first Innovations in Education Award and that the dinner was the appropriate venue.

Discovery Institute's American Center for Transforming Education works with state legislators, policymakers and those involved directly in education to promote systemic change to the nation's education system.

The motivation in Granger to create the attendance-incentive program was the nagging awareness for educators and parents there, as in every economically challenged area, that absenteeism is a key factor in kids failing to succeed in school as well as their becoming prime targets for gang recruitment.

Sanchez worked to create a belief among faculty and staff that full attendance was possible and put encouragement, support and incentives in place for students. She did that by putting together a year-end drawing for five iPads for students with perfect attendance and promoted the program with posters around school.

The year-end awards promotion was accompanied by signage proclaiming "every quarter you are in school every day you will receive fabulous prizes."

The motivation to recognize the achievement with the new Innovations in Education award was the realization on the part of Discovery Institute and the rest of the team of companies involved with the award that significant education change will only come if attention is focused on new ideas that are producing noteworthy change.

Wheaton said she was sure that going forward there will be an effort to measure academic results from the attendance improvement, but added last year already paid a dividend in that it"was the first in many years that the entire district met standard in all areas of the state bilingual test - the Washington English Language Proficiency Exam."

It's worth focusing on the fact that while the public education system is under challenge from forces seeking to bring about necessary changes to curriculum and structure, the Granger story is evidence that essential change can come about through new vision within the current system as well as from external forces.

The panel conversation I will be moderating following the award presentation May 19 event will feature:

--Don Nielsen, who served eight years on the Seattle School Board and has written a book called Every School that has gotten national attention:;

--Bob Hughes, a member of the state Board of Education and former Corporate Director of Education Relations for Boeing.

-- Paul T. Hill, founder of the Center on Reinventing Public Education and Research Professor at UW-Bothell, whose focus is on re-missioning states and school districts to promote school performance, school choice and innovation, finance and productivity; and improving rural schools.


Continue reading

Sanders' campaign reminds of 'Clean Gene's' presidential run in '68

For political junkies, old political writers being foremost among those, one of the recurring exercises is finding similarities between years-apart election campaigns. Thus this year's race for the Democratic nomination for president is offering such a comparison, particularly for those fond of fostering, or for some it's fearful of, the thought that history repeats itself.

With Donald Trump suddenly the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, there will be reach backs to campaigns and candidates of the past to which Trump's campaign this year will draw comparisons.

But the similarity I'm referring to in this case is between Sen. Bernie Sanders' intriguing quest of his party's nomination against an established party figure, Hillary Clinton, and Eugene McCarthy's quixotic campaign for the Democratic nomination in 1968.

McCarthy's campaign slogan of "Get clean for Gene" has become Sanders' "feel the Bern."

That '68 campaign in which McCarthy, a virtually unknown senator from Minnesota, forced Lyndon Johnson to withdraw from any re-election effort then sought to be his successor, will always be a vivid memory for me because it was the first presidential campaign I covered, as a young reporter for UPI.

A quick background for those to whom that 1968 campaign is merely a foggy recollection from a history class. The growing anger, particularly among the young, over the failing effort of the Vietnam War allowed a fed-up McCarthy to decide to run, almost match Johnson's total in the nation's first primary in New Hampshire, and thus caused Johnson to announce in a national television address that he would not seek another term.

Those angry against the war, largely young people who thought it was not only time to end what they viewed as an immoral campaign by their nation's leaders but also seeking broad change in the "Great Society" Johnson had created for their parents' generation, flocked to support McCarthy.

Sen. Robert Kennedy, brother of the slain president and viewed by many as heir apparent to John Kennedy's "Camelot," entered the campaign. For a handful of memorable months until Kennedy's assassination as he left the stage at Los Angeles' Ambassador Hotel following his victory in the California Primary, his campaign brought forth the unrest among minority groups and added those demanding social change to those seeking to end the war.

Kennedy' campaign actually was attracting some Democratic leaders and cementing delegates in each state, including in Washington State where Everest conqueror and Kennedy confidant Jim Whittaker was pinning down Kennedy delegates.

One of my favorite memories of covering parts of that campaign of nearly 50 years ago as a young political writer was a chance encounter at the 1968 Democratic state convention in Tacoma with a to-become-famous high school friend from Spokane.

Kitty Kelley was a spunky young woman for whom that presidential campaign would be the launch pad for a highly successful but controversy-punctuated career as a biographer of the rich and famous.

I glanced across the crowded hall and, seeing her for the first time in 10 years, I made my way through the crowd, said hello and asked her what she was doing there.

"I'm Gene McCarthy's press secretary," she said with a laugh.

"What the heck do you know about being a press secretary?" I asked.

"I decided I wanted to be one and did some research and found that two of the senators didn't have one," she responded. "So I picked McCarthy, made an appointment with him and told him I wanted to be his press secretary. He asked me 'what does a press secretary do?' and I told him we'd figure that out together. So I got the job."

So when McCarthy decided to emerge from relative anonymity and run for president, the campaign brought Kitty contact with political leaders and the prominent in society. Those contacts she made that spring and summer of '68 helped provide the exposure and experience that would allow her to launch her literary career.

I've watched with interest and amusement in the years since then as her ability to uncover long-hidden secrets and get the "ungettable" story on those about whom she produced a string of unauthorized biographies stirred the ire and criticism of the rich and famous and their friends.

Because she was an attractive blond woman with the name "Kitty," those stung by her tell-all biographies of Jackie Onassis Kennedy, Frank Sinatra, Nancy Reagan, the British Royal Family and perhaps most famously, the Bush family, found it easy to dismiss the quality of her work.

Over the years, when controversy swirled around her work, I've smiled to myself to think back on that encounter in Tacoma with a young woman I'd known as a Spokane teenager who had used brains and guts as substitutes for experience and privilege to carve out a high-visibility career for herself.

She thus exemplified an army of young women who did likewise in that decade of the '60s and early '70s, creating important roles for themselves in what had been, prior to that, a "man's world," and opening the way for others of their gender to do the same.

But back to the '68 campaign.

Kennedy's death ensured that Democratic party leaders would gather in force behind Vice President Hubert Humphrey, who didn't run in the primaries but merely gathered the necessary state-by-state support from delegates and local party leaders. Thereafter the outcome of who would get the nomination was really never in doubt, except in the ranks of those young and minorities who had come to believe McCarthy's election was vital to the changes they had come to demand.

The battles in the streets of Chicago between McCarthy supporters and Mayor Richard Daley's police force as the Democratic Convention gave the nomination to Humphrey ensured that McCarthy's supporters would largely abandon the system and stay away from the November election.

In the end Nixon's razor-thin margin of victory made it clear to political analysts that those who decided not to vote ensured that the Democratic nominee would lose.

Fast forward 48 years to the Sanders campaign, which has attracted large numbers of those, particularly the young and new voters, who want out with the current social and political structure and flock to him as the instrument of change.

It's obvious to the Democratic party insiders and most elected leaders in the states that Sanders isn't going to win the party's nomination at this summer's convention. Thus Clinton, as much a part of Democratic establishment and tradition as was Humphrey, will head into the general election season hoping that history does not repeat itself, as in disaffected prospective voters giving the election to the Republican nominee by staying away from the polls on election day.

Enter your text here ...

Continue reading

LSDF may metamorphose into life science, cancer research administrator

Recrimination and agitation over the Republican-led legislative defunding of the Life Science Discovery Fund Authority (LSDF) has given way to cautious enthusiasm about the possibility its staff and board may be tapped to administer and oversee funding activity for the state's new Cancer Research and Endowment Fund (CREA).

It's not yet certain that LSDF, created a decade ago out of the state's share of Tobacco Settlement millions to promote growth of the life science industry in this state, will take over administration of what would be a Center of Excellence for Life Science and Cancer Research. But bringing that about could amount to creating some vision out of what has been legislative confusion.

The Legislature's 2015 final budget compromise funded the cancer-research entity in a head-scratching manner while killing future funding for LSDF. But the lawmakers did not put the organization itself out of business because LSDF must function well into the next biennium to oversee fulfillment of the 46 grants already awarded from the fund. It just can't make any more life-science grants.

The quixotic aspect of the Legislature's creation of CREA was that the lawmakers gave specific detail to its board makeup and duties and required that it contract with "a program administrator" to oversee grant solicitation and distribution and fund management.
 
But lawmakers didn't designate who would manage the $10 million annual state-fund grant that would have to be matched from the private sector before it could be spent, so there has been speculation since then that LSDF would be a logical entity to oversee CREA.
 
Rep. Jeff Morris 

The proposal to turn cancer-fund administration over to LSDF has been up in the air since it was approved by the state House and passed out of committee in the Senate, but stalled in the Senate Ways & Means committee when the regular session ended.

Democratic Rep. Jeff Morris, a member of the LSDF board and sponsor of the proposal, said he hopes the legislation paving the way for a new role for LSDF will be part of final budget negotiations. He explained that Sen. Andy Hill, chair of the Ways & Means Committee and the key Republican in the negotiations, "asked if we would object to a 6 percent administrative-cost cap and I indicated we would not."

John DesRosier 
eanwhile, as a future role for LSDF remains unclear, its board of trustees, staff members and a number of recipients of its grants will gather March 25 to celebrate the contributions of John DesRosier, who served first as director of programs when LSDF was established in 2005, and through most of the Authority's existence as executive director. DesRosier, who has retired, had spent almost a quarter century in research and technology commercialization before joining LSDF as it was forming.

Among those who will be on hand to thank Des Rosier is Lee Huntsman, the first executive director, who was appointed by then-Gov. Christine Gregoire after LSDF was established in 2005 by Gregoire and the Legislature.

I asked Gregoire for a comment on the decade of LSDF's existence and on DesRosier's role and she said: "LSDF has accomplished more than I could have hoped. I believe it has helped save lives and I believe it will continue doing so and there is no greater accomplishment. We were fortunate to have John DesRosier as the leader to make it happen."

Commenting on DesRosier's role guiding LSDF, Morris said "John was one of the best strategic hires I've seen by our state in my years of public service. He made our grant-selection process world class and many other states have looked to our process to improve their own performance"

Part of what the cancer-fund legislation envisions is a board that better reflects an understanding of cancer, but by coincidence that comes somewhat with the current board, whose chair is Carol Dahl, executive director of the Portland-based Lemelson Fund. 

Dahl's research while a faculty member at the University of Pittsburgh was cancer focused and she also spent nearly six years at the National Cancer Institute and built the Office of Technology and Industrial Relations and multiple programs there during that period. 

Asked about her view of DesRosier's role, she said he"has truly been an amazing advocate for the life sciences in Washington and an outstanding steward of the state's investment in LSDF."

"The substantial impact of the LSDF funding resulting in over $60 million in health-care saving, more than a half billion in follow-on funding, and hundreds of lives saved ,is a credit to John's leadership and the dedication of the entire staff that has supported  LSDF since its inception," Dahl said.

One of the largest grants from LSDF was $5 million to Omeros Corp., which related to a $20 million partnership with Vulcan to advance the company's leading-edge G protein-coupled receptor program. GPCRs, which mediate key physiological processes in the body, are one of the most valuable families of drug targets.

Omeros chairman and CEO, Dr. Gregory Demopulos, described LSDF as "an important catalyst for innovation in Washington State's life sciences. And through investments like the one for Omeros has left a legacy of creating jobs and improving health and will have a sustained impact on the people of the state."

DesRosier described LSDF as having been a "critical resource" in helping early stage companies survive so they could gain traction for new sources of funding, including attracting traditional investors.
 
One such beneficiary of LSDF grants is M3 Biotechnology, a young Seattle biotech company focused on commercializing a drug that would reverse neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's by re-growing brain cells.
 
"LSDF funding allowed us to cross the start-up 'valley of death' until we could gain funding traction," said Leen Kawas, the 30-year-old CEO and president of M3 who recently announced completion of an over-subscribed A-Round that brought in nearly $10 million.

Because I was assisting Kawas with marketing and introductions while she was awaiting key grants from LSDF, I bit my lip for being unable to write about LSDF or its challenges with the legislature until her grants had been approved and there was no longer a conflict of interest.

I asked DesRosier if there was anything he wished LSDF had accomplished before the lawmakers struck it from future funding.

"I wish we had been able to create a more diversified revenue stream and not be dependent solely on state funding," he said.

Dr. Bruce Montgomery, perhaps the Northwest's most prominent biotech entrepreneur as well as the longest-term member of the LSDF board, may have best summed up the feeling of lost opportunity that the end of LSDF's life-science mission embodied for many.

"The best quote I can offer is the line from Joni Mitchell's 'Big Yellow Taxi': 'don't it always seem to go that you don't know what you got 'til it's gone,'" Montgomery replied to my request for a quote.
Continue reading

Remembering introduction to alternative medicine and ancient herb artemisinin

Small things sometimes serve to guide memories of major events in our lives, and so it is as I near the five-year mark of my first contact with alternative medicine. It came about as I was commencing a search for information on how I might best deal with a slow-growing prostate cancer.

A search for information on dealing with a cancer for which there is time to weigh approaches inevitably leads to exploration of both traditional medicine and alternatives that involve nature's role.

And it was as I pursued that examination of all my options before deciding on my preferred approach that I met a naturopathic physician, Dr. Eric Yarnell, then on the faculty of Bastyr University, and learned of artemisinin, an extract derived from an ancient Chinese herb called artemisia annua.

I had known a little about alternative medicine, but learning of artemisinin, also known as sweet wormwood, and the fact that it was being viewed as a cancer-fighting agent caused me to want to learn more both about the herb and about Bastyr, which is one of the most respected naturopathic universities in the nation.

In the end, thanks partly to the advise of Yarnell (advise that some have viewed as ironic, given the naturopathic focus on natural therapies), I had surgery to remove the prostate. But I have since learned more about naturopathic medicine and kept in touch with the potential health benefits of nature's products, like artemisinin, and studies relating to their potential to fight not just cancer, but also other diseases.

Paul Amieux 
Bastyr University 

I was reminded of the introduction to alternative medicine and artemisinin recently as I was reading about the Nobel Prize awarded last fall to an 85-year-old Chinese scientist named Youyou Tu for developing treatment for malaria from artemisinin, which has become the norm for malaria treatmemt worldwide.

Reading the story of the aging Chinese pharmaceutical chemist's award, which capped her 49-year search for a cure for malaria and her research that guided her to Artemisinin (which she first encountered in a 1,600-year-old text) caused me to wonder what progress had been made in bringing traditional and alternative medicine closer.

At the time, as I shared my explorations of alternative medicine with my doctors at the Polyclinic in Seattle and at University of Washington Medical Center, medical professionals in whom I had maximum trust and regard, I learned that they then had only a vague awareness of alternative medicine.

So I recently set about learning what has changed in awareness and understanding across medicine's diverse landscape in the past few years.

For one thing, the word "alternative" is disappearing, as evidenced by the fact that the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine has rebranded as the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health.

For another, there is a growing willingness on the part of traditional medical centers to pursue joint research projects with non-traditional medical institutions. That has been particularly true since the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has begun grants to traditional and non-traditional partnerships in an array of collaborative research grants, particularly relating to cancer.

In addition, in the Seattle area and East King County, the presence of an estimated 100,000 resident who are from the Indian subcontinent has brought a focus on Ayurveda Medicine, which has historic roots in that region, as another type of alternative medicine.

"Alternative meant separate from or in lieu of, but they are no longer viewed as two different medical worlds, but rather as integrated, taking the best of both," said Paul Amieux, Ph.D., Bastyr's Research Administrative Director. He actually is an intriguing example of integrative medicine as a graduate of University of Washngton Medical School with a Ph.D in pharmacology and a BA in biology. Thereafter he was an instructor at the UW medical school for a time.

I asked Amieux for a rundown of clinical trials at respected research universities here and around the world where early clinical trials are being conducted on the possible effect of artemisinin on various forms of cancer.

Among the trials are one at Georgetown on intravenous delivery for solid tumors, another at St. George University of London on oral delivery for colorectal cancer and one at University Hospital Ghent, Belgium, a safety study exploring the impact of escalating dosage in liver-cancer patients.

"Although there are indeed phase 1 and phase 2 clinical trials currently running and some individual case reports, there is no definitive clinical evidence of artemisinin's effectiveness from large, Phase 3, controlled clinical trials," Amieux said. "But there are clearly basic science publications that indicate it may effectively kill some types of cancer cells in the labs."

There's always a risk when a layman goes seeking to understand the intricacies of how medicine works. But I couldn't help wanting to learn why and how artemisinin might be a cancer fighter, in addition to already being the worldwide treatment of choice for malaria.

What I learned was that what some have described as artemisinin's "significant anti-cancer effect" is due, according those who undertand to the fact it contains peroxide. And research suggests that when peroxide comes in contact with cells having high iron concentrations, it breaks down, creating free radicals that basically provide overdoses of iron to iron-accumulating malaria and cancer cells.

I also learned, as I delved into alternative medicine, about mushrooms, which were then already being seen in a different light, and studies of the suggested impact of different kinds of mushrooms on different cancers have advanced since then. But mushrooms and cancer is a topic for a different day, particularly relating to collaborative studies funded by NIH, and a specific one involving UW, Cancer Care Alliance, The Hutch and Bastyr, a study whose results have not yet been published.
Continue reading

Stuart Anderson, 93, hoping seniors focus will spur sales of his book


The need to be remembered is an urge that beats strongly in the breasts of those who have experienced fame. And the need tends to grow with the forward march of years beyond the time of fame.

That reality helps explain Stuart Anderson's quest to sell copies of his second book, Corporate Cowboy, and his distress at the fact that the Black Angus Steakhouse chain that is descended from his Stuart Anderson's Black Angus/Cattle Company won't carry or promote his book.


Anderson is quick to admit sales have not gone well for the book, his second. And he is convinced the reason is that it's not coming to the attention of those who dine at the restaurants, which now number 46 in six western states, but mostly California. The company has several times rebuffed his and Helen's efforts to put up posters and sell the book.

In fact, for reasons unknown but that sadden Anderson and Helen, his wife of more than 40 years, he wasn't invited to any of the events surrounding the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the chain in April of 2014, the month in which Corporate Cowboy was published.


So Anderson, 93, is going where he is most likely to find those who will remember him and where some will recall that he was the man who built a chain of 122 restaurants that was, for a string of years in the 1980s, ranked Number One in the nation among full-service restaurants.

The strategy is one of outreach to the seniors who represent a major share of the population of most communities in the Coachella Valley. It's a plan conceived by Brenda Lynn Martin, a longtime friend of the Andersons, who has a high profile in the desert for her promotion of various non-profit and community activities and events.

Explaining her decision to come to the aid of the Andersons in the effort to sell copies of his book, Martin, who has been friends with Stuart and Helen for a dozen years, told me: "My main goal is to fulfill his dream to get those books sold as a part of his leaving a legacy."

So Thursday evening a book signing and jazz fest at the Backstreet Bistro in upscale El Paseo will serve as the debut of a campaign, with Martin partnering with the restaurant's owner, Lavane Hause, to bring the book to the attention of gatherings of seniors at the restaurant each week, with jazz and a book signing.

"If this goes well, we can plan on a series of such gatherings, inviting seniors from a variety of locations, even snowbirds wintering here, to join the jazz and book signngs" Martin added.

"I hope this is the first of many," says Hause, who says of Anderson: "he reminds me so much of my dad. He and Helen lunch here frequently and I can't not try to help him."

I visited in recent days with the Andersons at their Rancho Mirage condo, looking west toward the San Jacinto Mountains, as I try to do each winter when Betsy and I get to spend time with friends in the Palm Desert area.

Anderson, who speaks softly and slowly from the effects of age as well as of a stroke he suffered seven years ago but retains a firm gaze, usually from beneath his cowboy hat, wanted to talk about the book and the challenge selling copies is presenting.

It is the story of how he built the restaurant empire that became a best-recognized national company with 10,000 employees and annual revenue of $260 million. The book actually has a longer official title: "Corporate Cowboy. Stuart Anderson: how a maverick entrepreneur built Black Angus, America's #1 restaurant chain of the 1980s."

He first tried his hand as an author when in 1997 he produced "Here's the Beef! My Story of Beef," a book he described to me as "fun and informative," but most importantly to him, thousands of copies were sold in the Black Angus restaurants. The book was meant to be an answer to the highly popular McDonald's commercial of the time in which an elderly lady asks: "Where's the Beef?"

At that point it had been a decade since he had retired after five consecutive years of his Stuart Anderson's Black Angus restaurants being named the top steakhouse chain in the nation by USA Today in a poll by industry publication Restaurants & Institutions. He admitted candidly, in an interview we did a few years ago, that new owners took the fun out of his job.

But the time of his first book, he was still well-remembered, in Washington state in particular, including for a series of television commercials he did in the Seattle area for a senior housing organization.

After retiring, he and Helen retired to their 2,400 ranch sprawled along Interstate 90 west of Ellensburg. He had bought the ranch in 1966 with the intent of raising the black angus cattle that would be served at his restaurants. But it turned out to be too great a challenge, for various reasons, so he continued to raise the cattle until he sold the ranch to Taiwanese interests, though to most travelers going past, it remains the Stuart Anderson ranch.

It's clear that Stuart and Helen nurture the hope that a focus on retirees and the strategy that Martin has put together may eventually create for Corporate Cowboy success like his first book experienced.

The challenge of travel for Anderson now means they seldom get to visit Seattle or the Ellensburg area any more.

But many of those on their way across Washington State on Interstate-90 will still note "that's where Stuart Anderson's cattle ranch was" as they pass the acreage stretched out along the highway.

our text here ...

Continue reading

Concerns about Internet advertising may make crowdfunding tool difficult for entrepreneurs

It was born with great flourish in the spring of 2012, passed by Congress and signed by the president and hailed as the wellspring of new companies and jobs as the nation sought to emerge from the Great Recession. In fact, with a marketer's touch in a presidential election year, it was even called the JOBs Act.

Now after a nearly four-year wait for a recalcitrant Securities and Exchange Commission to adopt the rules required to implement the intent of the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act to allow businesses to raise up to $1 million a year from a large number of small-equity investors, the rules are set to go into effect May 16.


Meanwhile, more than half of the states, tired of waiting for the SEC to act, have adopted their own versions of what is known as crowdfunding, which is largely expected to be Internet outreach to large numbers of potential investors by entrepreneurs seeking capital.

Because of SEC rules in effect under the Securities Act of 1933, the states' legislation limits fund-raising to residents in the state where the business is located.


And with the arrival of federal crowdfunding comes a growing concern that the crowdfunding laws of the various states may be rendered "impractical" since those who use the Internet or social media, the logical tools to reach a "crowd" of prospects, must ensure no one in another state can see the offering.

Washington was one of the first states to enact legislation to permit crowdfunding, with many of those testifying during the Washington Department of Financial Institutions' rule-making process suggesting entrepreneurs would be queuing up to look to crowdfunding to raise money.

But despite that expectation, in the 15 months since DFI enacted the rules and the law went into effect, only two businesses have filed to raise money in this state via crowdfunding. In fact, according to DFI Director Scott Jarvis, only 100 companies around the country have used intrastate crowdfunding to raise capital.

 
Joe Wallin 
Thus given that there is no line of entrepreneurs forming to seize the crowdfunding opportunity, there is no certainty how much demand there will be for the opportunity to raise money through crowdfunding once entrepreneurs have a choice between federal and state rules. The federal will allow businesses to raise money from investors anywhere in the country rather just in their home state. Using state law requires entrepreneurs to only raise money intrastate. 

One reason for slower-than-anticipated interest could be that the resurgent economy has made it easier to raise money through traditional funding sources, suggests Joe Wallin, a Seattle attorney with Carney Badley Spellman, who basically wrote the state legislation that was passed two years ago.

"The ebb and flow of the economy may impact the ability of entrepreneurs to tap traditional sources of capital so at some point, if not right away, the crowdfunding approach may become more popular," he said.

And now comes the likely additional deterrent to intrastate crowdfunding with the warnings about Internet use to advertise the offering, since the advertising may only be to residents of the state in which the offering is made.

Faith Anderson 

According to the SEC's directive, if someone in another state sees the information on the offering, it is no longer intrastate, which would basically nullify the fund-raising effort.

In one of the most thorough examinations of the new role of states in the crowdfunding phenomenon, Faith L. Anderson of the state DFI's Securities Division, describes as "draconian" the fact that rules "do not provide any relief for insignificant deviations" from the advertising limitations.

"A single out-of-state sale will void the exemption (for the entrepreneur raising money via intrastate crowdfunding) and result in an unlawful offer or sale of securities in the absence of another available exemption," she wrote.

Anderson's comments are part of a report she produced for securities departments of all 50 states as chair of the Small Business/Limited Offerings Project Group of the National Securities Administrators Association.

Anderson's document to her peers is designed to explain the strengths and weaknesses of both federal and intrastate crowdfunding options. But her focus on the challenges the SEC rules pose to intrastate offerings includes the comment that the combined effect of federal rules "is to severely restrict an issuer's ability to take advantage of state crowdfunding provisions that are premised on these federal provisions."

But the SEC staff has said the agency is considering amendments that could make Internet use possible.

"There is no timeframe by which the SEC may finalize the proposed amendments to Rule 147 (the rule that has raised a number of concerns for intrastate crowdfunding)," Anderson said in an email exchange with me. " In fact, they may never as they do not have a Congressional duty to act in this regard."

And Wallin added: "Unless it makes the changes being suggested for use of the internet in intrastate crowdfunding, the SEC is tamping down a nascent but important opportunity to cultivate local funding and entrepreneurship ecosystems before they even have an opportunity to develop."
 
But Wallin notes he is "optimistic that whatever the SEC finally decides, the state can figure out...maybe through new rules or amendments."
 
And Anderson closes her briefing to peers with: "As we learn what works and what doesn't from the viewpoint of entrepreneurs and small business owners, states and the SEC may make further adjustments to their crowdfunding rules."
 

Thus there seems to be optimism that what Congress launched with the right intent, but watched while the SEC dithered for almost four years, may still produce an opportunity for entrepreneurs to create jobs rather than being jobbed by thoughtless regulations.

Continue reading

Congestion anger may give boost to Kemper Freeman's long campaign for roads over rail

 Bellevue developer Kemper Freeman Jr.'s years-long campaign for roads over rails as the way to address the region's transportation needs may be getting a boost just as he is releasing and beginning to promote a report called Mobility 21 as an alternative to the existing long-range plans. 
 
Having completed the Mobility 21 document, for which his Kemper Development Co. was key funder, he is now seeking to generate renewed discussion among policymakers and business leaders in Seattle and on the Eastside about the region's transportation future.

An unexpected assist for the highways believers was the announcement this week from Gov. Jay Inslee that he will be proposing additional lanes on I-405 in the hope of alleviating some of the congestion on the Eastside freeway that has grown dramatically worse of late, and ease the anger of Eastside motorist about it.

Freeman hopes the governor's announcement, which he applauded, may be the first indication of a broad-based effort to force a rethinking of already approved regional transportation plans that focus on light- rail as a key component of long-term plans rather than solutions needed now that focus on roads.

The more long-term boost, by which he hopes he can bring a new emphasis to his argument that more of projected funding should go to roadway systems, may well be in focusing on the greater efficiency to be derived from evolving technology for highways and vehicles.

An underpinning of Freeman's hope to create discussion on new transportation thinking is his focus on the importance of Seattle as the "Super Regional Center," and the importance or access to it for the 8- to 10-million people in the region, including the 670,000 for which Bellevue is a sub-regional center.

"What Bellevue and Seattle have in common is we are both driven by populations far bigger than our immediate city limits," he added, noting that a key roles for the Super Regional and Sub Regional cities is ensuring access.

But he makes clear he views the challenges to a successful synergy between Seattle and Bellevue relate to what he has long viewed as misguided transportation planning for the region.

And he cautions that he has a concern that another pitfall might be what he perceives as the inability of the leadership of Seattle, as that Super Regional Center, to understand that the impact of their decisions go far beyond the city's 600,000 population. And that they have some responsibility to consider those broader impacts on the region.

"Seattle scares me because the rest of us in the region need them to be the Super Regional City and I don't get the impression they are trying to do that," Freeman said. "Our premise is that Seattle and Bellevue each has a role to play in the regional picture and Seattle is not playing its role."

And in discussing the study, Freeman, a generally soft-spoken businessman, raises his voice in anger as he suggests Seattle and the Eastside have a common enemy, Sound Transit. It's Sound Transit's focus on rail as a keystone in the region's transportation future that Freeman has fought for years, including his lawsuit to stop construction of a light-rail line to the Eastside across I-90 that was rejected by the State Supreme Court in the fall of 2013.

Freeman is a believer in rapid transit as a part of the solution, but bus rapid transit (generally referred to by planners around the county as BRT), with center lanes of the I-90 freeway dedicated to buses rather than to rail, contending that when buses reach the Eastside, or suburban points north or south, they can carry passengers to more stops with greater flexibility than light-rail.

And he emphasizes, at a time of increasing frustration about the regions gridlock and congestion, that the BRT approach can begin service and help bring traffic relief in several years rather than decades and at dramatic lower costs.

Now comes what he sees as a boost to discussions that he hopes will lead to a revisit not just the I-90 rail plan but a need to rethink exiting plans.

Freeman, owner of Bellevue Square, Bellevue Place and Lincoln Square as well as emerging pieces of what his marketing folks refer to as The Bellevue Collection, a 6-million-square-foot portfolio of "commerce, style and culture," explained to Eastside business leaders recently about the rationale for Mobility 21.

The point of having produced Mobility 21 at this time is based on what the project describes as "Five Critical Realities," the first of which, that congestion is worsening, is an obvious reality that Freeman hopes may create some new converts in business and government to his goal of greater spending on the "roadway system."

But the more long-term boost, he hopes, he can bring a new emphasis to his argument that more of projected funding should go to those roadway systems by focusing on the greater efficiency to be derived from evolving technology for highways and vehicles.

Specifically, Mobility 21 suggests that automated driver assistance systems and collision-preventing features like adaptive cruise control, automated lane keeping on freeways, radar breaking and blind-spot monitoring will lead to 50 percent more capacity per freeway lane.

In fact, as an observer rather than an advocate for either position, I'm struck by the fact a massive worldwide effort is underway to radically change the shape of personal mobility with smaller, lighter, cleaner, collision-proof vehicles running on existing roadways.

There's an inescapable sense that those advancements will require transportation planners to weigh anew whether the transportation-expenditure priorities should remain the same or be re-evaluated.

And any decision on re-evaluating and possibly revising transportation plans to reflect emerging personal mobility technologies needs to be done with only transportation benefits as the goal, with no consideration for the politics of what kind of transportation some community or business groups might wish to emphasize.
Continue reading

Reflections on presidential primary elections past from New Hampshire to Oregon

Watching the New Hampshire presidential primary results stirred memories that remain strong for Spencer Kunath, although it's been almost exactly a dozen years since he was "on the ground" there doing advance work for 2004 Democratic hopeful retired Gen. Wesley Clark.

Kunath's recollections included his experience on election day's earliest hours in Dixville Notch, the best-known of a cluster of villages in the Granite State's far north where national media attention out of all proportion to the actual import is focused each presidential election year, as it was this year.

Dixville exists as a town only for voting purposes. It's a precinct that sits almost entirely on the property of The Balsams Grand Resort Hotel, a renowned old summer retreat for the wealthy. And its nine registered voters this year (in 2004 there were 24, with Clark on hand for the midnight voting and winning the most Democratic votes) were almost all employees of the hotel, which is now being overhauled.

My conversations in recent days with Kunath, who a year after his New Hampshire experience as he was preparing to spend his junior year at Oxford served the summer of 2005 as my intern at Puget Sound Business Journal, prompted me to recall some of my own primary-election experiences in the days before PSBJ.

My most compelling memory is of the 1968 Oregon primary, my first primary as a 28-year-old political writer, where Robert Kennedy's driven effort to win the Democratic nomination for president hit a snag. Oregonians gave anti-war candidate Sen. Eugene McCarthy that state's nomination nod, the first-ever loss for a Kennedy.

I had the opportunity election night to be immersed in the sea of young supporters waiting in front of Portland's Benson Hotel for the defeated candidate's limo to arrive so they could demonstrate their continued affection for him and his campaign.

Then the limo arrived and Kennedy emerged behind the imposing frame of Jim Whittaker, the Seattleite and Everest conqueror who had become a close friend and constant companion of Kennedy's on the campaign trail.

I had been standing next to an ABC reporter named Bob Clark who quickly and literally disappeared beneath the mass of surging, shouting Kennedy supporters and I avoided Clark's fate by grabbing Whittaker's belt as he pushed past and held on until we had arrived inside the hotel.

As we wrote the stories that night, back at the Portland UPI bureau, to bring newspapers and broadcast outlets news of the outcome, I recall the headline the senior reporter put on his story: "Kennedy bushwhacked on the Oregon trail."

I recalled vividly that headline a week later when in fact Kennedy was "bushwhacked," assassinated by a gunman as he moved through the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel following his remarks after his victory in the California primary.

Reflections on Kennedy in "The Last Campaign," as the book that detailed his 82-day campaign was titled, struck me as particularly thought-provoking for this 2016 campaign.

Because, although he feared, as he told one confidant, that there were "guns between me and the White House," he risked his life to ask Americans to help him reclaim "the generous impulses that are the soul of this nation."

That's the kind of exhortation to healing and hope not likely to grace the lips of any presidential candidate of either party during this campaign 48 years on from RFK's tragic quest to reclaim his brother's legacy and create one of his own.

But back to Kunath and his New Hampshire primary recollections of 2004 and that election climax at Dixville Notch (a word that means pass, incidentally, in White Mountains parlance).

There are a couple of possibly thought-provoking ways to view Dixvlle in the context of its primary election role.

First it could be that as merely a marketing creation to attract attention to Dixville and its grand hotel during primary season it's an appropriate reflection of the marketing that has created the campaigns of some of the presidential hopefuls seeking support from the voters in New Hampshire and in other states. Not quite entirely real but close.

Or the voters in Dixville may represent what Democracy was supposed to be about: Everyone who has the franchise votes (they all gather before midnight and cast their votes since the polls can close only after all registered voters have cast ballots) , and those seeking their support are likely to shake hands with each voter.

Let's see. Out of all proportion to reality. A marketing creation to attract otherwise unlikely attention. Perhaps the ultimate exercise in Democracy. I guess that would be a trio of descriptions that could apply to the nation's primary election season and its presidential hopefuls.

Kunath was 19 and a sophomore at DePauw University when he was dispatched by the Washington State Democratic Committee away from the Washington State gubernatorial race to help in the New Hampshire campaign.

"The voters there (referring to Dixville and the nearby villages) are really accustomed to direct one-on-one interaction with the candidates and expect that they'll come and sit for a visit," Kunath said. "It's a totally different world."

Kunath and I talked about the challenge facing reporters covering any campaign (now as in 2004 and 1968) from aboard the bus of a particular candidate, and the thought occurred to me that it might be a reason the media is often accused of bias.

"Reporters on a campaign bus need access to the candidate so they avoid saying anything negative about the guy whose bus they are on," said Kunath with the insight of one who has had a chance to be there.

"If they get kicked off the bus, they will lose their job because their employer is unlikely to pay for a rental car rather than to just assign a different reporter to the candidate," he added.
Continue reading

Panel with two prominent local TV execs about challenges keys discussion of media accuracy

No time could be more logical for a conversation about accuracy in media than political season and presidential debates.

So this column is by way of sharing such a conversation between a couple of old-media "believers" about increasingly common challenges to old convictions, like how important is media accuracy? What does "accuracy" mean? Accurate to whom? Is it losing its importance? And what is media anyway?

Except the conversation in question was generated not by the political season, but by a panel discussion earlier that day in which I got to question two of Seattle's most respected television executives at the Columbia Tower Club's "Q and A with a CEO" series about the state of television now and challenges to come.

Pam Pearson, vice president and general manager of Tribune-Broadcasting owned KCPQ13, and Rob Dunlop, president and CEO of KCTS9, the local public-television station, both expressed conviction about the importance of local news and information to their stations.

Pearson, who was an executive at Tribune stations in Los Angeles and Chicago before arriving in Seattle in 1999, and Dunlop, who brought 20 years as a top executive with Seattle's Fisher Broadcasting when he arrived in fall of 2013 to guide Seattle's public-television station, have led with their actions rather than their words on this issue.

Pearson, who got her start in news as a reporter for Ted Turner's CNN in Atlanta, has added 10 hours a Day of local news programming to her station's offerings while Dunlop has acquired the on-line news journal Crosscut.com and emerging local website What's Good 206, which presents a millennial perspective on local issues.

Both Pearson and Dunlop have set a premium on quality journalism for their stations, even though news and information are only a portion of their offerings.

The discussion with Pearson and Dunlop ranged well beyond their news commitment since both are leaders in a medium that is challenged as never before by audience segments that can now find their content anywhere, and in fact create content themselves.

And Dunlop shared that his Channel 9 audience that includes about a quarter who are in the 4-to-11 age range. And even that audience is already straying to get their entertainment from devices other than the television screen.

What they are both aware of as they consider what the future holds is that commitment and quality don't carry any guarantee of success in a world where virtually anyone can be a content provider in the internet era, and that as it relates to news, the quest for accuracy is not necessarily pervasive.

As Pearson noted, "There are so few actual barriers to entry into the digital world by content providers...and it is very difficult to know what's credible."

And that question of credibility in news keyed the later conversation with a friend of mine, Pat Scanlon, who is responsible for the existence of this weekly email column because he pressed me six years ago, after my retirement from Puget Sound Business Journal, with "you should have a blog and I'll show you how."

Scanlon has since become what could be described as "the guru of all things digital on behalf of old-line media companies" and is thus versed in emergence of an array of digital content, having built a digital network of perhaps 200 small daily newspapers for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and later USA Today's national high school content.

The conventional media issue of "fact check" in debates or political discussion is a noble effort but one that makes few friends since there is a sense that "most people don't want to read the truth or the unbiased facts, they want to read things that support or reinforce their conclusion,"as one media observer put it.

"When all is said and done, only the local TV station or newspaper, of whatever size, has the tools that make them the perfect brands to hold authority accountable - journalistic standards combined with brand equity in their communities," Scanlon said. "But their window of opportunity to capitalize on this positioning is closing, and slowly some online-only outlets are making ground on the credibility required to perform this function and take this position."

I shared with him that I am less concerned about new-media content-creators and bloggers for whom credibility based on accuracy is the goal but rather on bloggers and other content providers who seek to acquire credibility without being forced to be accurate.

An example that constantly comes to mind for me is bloggers who provide paid content, meaning they are paid by the subjects of their blogs, without readers being made aware of that key fact.

Since I think that is a broader problem then people may realize, I once suggested to a newspaper publisher that he could cement a relationship with the social-media audience by regularly running a well-researched page about what blogs readers can trust and those that are questionable. That type of editorial service would obviously incense those new-media types who demand "who are you to decide what's accurate?"

The rise of Fox News has created its own divisive role as it relates to what politically disagreeing individuals view as "facts."

Thus the emergence of conversations that refer to what "your news media" says vs. what "my media" says in terms of delivering all the facts or in how the facts are portrayed.

In summing up the point about accuracy, Scanlon said: "altruistically, the truth is the truth. But realistically, accuracy means verification from multiple sources."

"And as to media accuracy, I feel it is more important than ever, but harder to attain," Scanlon said. "Currently, there seems to be a sense that whatever 'my' truth is makes it 'accurate.'"
Continue reading

Deanna Oppenheimer, Bruce Kennedy and Ivar Haglund Hall of Fame laureates for 2016

The Seattle banker who became one of the world's most influential women in banking, the man who set Alaska Airlines on the road to national leadership in its industry and Seattle's clown king of fish and chips have been selected as 2016 laureates of the Puget Sound Business Hall of Fame.

Deanna Oppenheimer, who built her reputation at Washington Mutual then became a key executive at Barclay's Bank, guiding its U.K. operations, is still active as founder of CameoWorks and a member of several international boards. Both Bruce Kennedy, who turned Alaska Airlines from a struggling small carrier to a national leader in its industry, and Ivar Haglund, who founded and guided the growth of Ivar's seafood restaurants, are both deceased.
 
All three will be honored April 21 at the annual Hall of Fame induction banquet at the Waterfront Marriott as the three will join 115 other icons of regional business as laureates selected since the Business Hall of Fame was created in 1987 by Junior Achievement and the Puget Sound Business Journal.

Oppenheimer joined Washington Mutual's marketing department in 1985 five years after her graduation from University of Puget Sound and, from the time Kerry Killinger became CEO in 1990 and over the next 15 years, she was a key executive helping guide major acquisition decisions and the dramatic expansion of WAMU.

But she was watching from afar as she saw the Seattle bank that she helped grow during her two decades there disappear in the 2008 financial meltdown while she was steering Barclay's, the respected old British bank, successfully through the global crisis.

She returned home to Seattle in 2011 after five years at Barclay's transforming the global retail and business-banking divisions of the staid 350-year-old institution and founded Cameoworks LLC, a global retail and financial-services advisory firm.

In October 2010 was voted American Banker magazine's Second Most Powerful Woman in Banking.
Bruce Kennedy, who served as Alaska's chairman and CEO between 1979 and 1991, a period of dramatic growth in revenue and route expansion that set the airline on the road to being the dominant force in the airline industry that it has become today.

Kennedy was an Anchorage businessman whose real estate firm bought an Alaska airlines that was near bankruptcy in 1972 and the firm steadied the carrier financially, setting the stage for Kennedy to assume the top post.

Over Kennedy's 12 years at the helm, Alaska's revenue grew more than six-fold to $1.1 billion by the time he retired to focus his attention on humanitarian work, traveling to China to teach English, sheltering refugees in his home and serving as chairman of Quest Aircraft, which made aircraft for dangerous and remote locations.

It was under his leadership that Alaska developed routes to Southern California, Russia and launched the Mexico connection that has become a vital segment of Alaska's business today and that Alaska acquired Horizon Air, a Northwest regional carrier that has grown to be the nation's eighth largest regional airline.

Kennedy died in 2007 when his small plane crashed on Wenatchee as he was en route to visit his grandchildren. He was 68.

Ivar Haglund was a Seattle folk singer and restaurateur who came to be referred to as "King," of Seattle's waterfront And the "flounder" of Ivar's. In 1938 he established Seattle's first aquarium on Pier 54 along with the fish and chips stand as he presided over a growing restaurant chain guiding a belief that quirky fun is important. That conviction included erecting underwater billboards, seeking a permit for a facility to grow marijuana for his special chowder.

In 1965 he launched the annual fireworks display over Elliott Ba every "Fourth of Jul-Ivar." By then he had become a legend as rdstaurateur, radio personalityhe began lofting fireworks over Elliott Bay every "Fourth of Jul-Ivar," he was a legend. He became a radio personality and  Puget Sound's principal champion of regional folk music.

Bob Donegan, whose 15 years at the helm of Ivar's have brought a doubling of revenue as Ivar's clebrated its 75th aniverary last August.

Donegan notes that Ivar set up one of the first pension and healthcare programs and that "Ivar hired people, kept them for decades and treated them well, setting the stage for the company's philosophy that employees come first."

This is the 29th anniversary of the launch of the Puget Sound Business Hall of Fame, although the local event was superseded in 1993 when the JA's National Business Hall of Fame was held in Seattle and Steve Jobs was among the newly inducted laureates on hand to accept his award.

David Moore, JA president for Washington, announced that Seattle Mariner President Kevin Mather would be the chair of the 2016 event.
Continue reading

Attracting investors to Montana's Big Sky Country and its entrepreneurs

.

Those who have watched or experienced Liz Marchi's commitment to provide funding for Montana entrepreneurs and startups for a decade might suggest that the term "angel investor" was coined specifically to describe her.

It was 2003 that Marchi, who had arrived in Montana with three daughters and her then husband and settled in the Flathead Valley, decided to create the state's first angel fund, Frontier Angel Fund I. The fund closed in 2006 at $1.7 million, $300,000 more than she had hoped.

She eventually guided the Kalispell-based fund, which had attracted investors from around the country who were either fans of or summer residents in the Big Sky Country, to lead three deals and gather a total of 12 active investments and was soon also overseeing angel groups that had sprung up in Missoula and Bozeman.

Because she successfully syndicated her deals with a number of other angel groups outside the state, she jokes that she has become "the grandmother of crowd funding." She's not referring to the formal definition of crowd funding but rather the syndication efforts she initiated that attracted a crowd of angels from numerous groups making small investments.

Now Marchi, who grew up near Jackson Hole, WY, but who had never been to Montana when she arrived here in 2000, says she is looking forward to making the investor-leader handoff to Will Price, whose roots in the state brought him back from Silicon Valley to create Next Frontier Capital, at $20 million the largest venture fund ever raised in the state.

Price, on the board of or a key executive with a number of Bay Area tech companies, did his due diligence on the attitudes of national venture and mergers & acquisitions firms toward Montana before making the move to Bozeman.

Price's fund, which closed last April a year following his decision to bring his family to the state where his father, Kent Price, is well known as Montana's first Rhodes Scholar and University of Montana board member, has already made two investments.

I've kidded Liz and her husband, Jon, who in 1978 founded Glacier Venture fund as the first venture fund in Montana and presided over it for 29 years, about being "Mr. and Mrs. Montana Money." To which she once responded: "We are more like Mr. and Mrs. Montana risk capital since we share a very high risk tolerance...and often share the consequences."

Although Marchi talks about making a handoff to Price, as well as "the next generation of angels, including some members of Fund II in their '30s, who slay me in terms of their abilities," she was completing the formation in August of $2.7 million Frontier Fund II, which has already invested $900,000 with syndication adding $300,000 for a total of $1.2 million already invested.

"We have 48 investors in 10 states and meet physically in Bozeman and the Flathead, alternating with a WebEx option," Marchi said, noting that investors met in Bozeman today, with investors from two continents and four states, including Montana investors from Bozeman and Kalispell to review three Bozeman companies.

That sounds less like "handing off" for the 62-year-old Marchi than welcoming the potential follow-on investment opportunity that venture capital can represent for angel. And she hopes Price's fund will provide.

She says she does have an agreement with Fund II to be the key administrator only for the next two years, but could opt to remain longer. And she is down to business cards representing her current five involvements.

But Marchi is genuinely pleased at the implications of the arrival in Montana of Price, who did his homework before deciding a venture fund could work in Montana.

Price shared with me the research he did with and his thoughts about how "changing values" will benefit Montana's ability to attract capital.

Montana was often dismissed as a "fly-over" state, meaning that the most viable potential investors on the east and west coasts usually just fly over on their way to the other coast.

But Price's SurveyMonkey sampling of both venture and merger & acquisitions firms and found that the appeal of the big sky to many increasingly disenchanted with urban challenges was strong but that direct air access is a challenge Montana must come to grips with.

Fully 70 percent of responding M&A firms said they would consider buying a company in Montana, even though 80 percent said they had never been to the state. And a third of the venture firms said they would consider doing a deal in Montana, although 47 percent said they had never been there.

The import of improved air access to a state that has no direct flights currently to the major markets was dramatically indicated with the response of M&A firms, 90 percent of whom said it was "important" or "Moderately important" to have direct air access to the market of their investment.

"That's something the state is going to have to address," Price said. "But I think it will be addressed."

Among venture firms, almost two thirds sad the quality of the local syndicate partner would determine their involvement.

Although Marchi herself has attracted investors from around the country, she observes that "Being away from the noise of the coasts keeps us grounded in an important way.

"The entire conversation and perception needs to move about rural America, what is going on here and its role in making our economy and our country work better," she said, expressing the principle that has guided her commitment to Montana entrepreneurs.

Continue reading

Montana's 'angel' investor sees changing values boosting state's investor appeal

Those who have watched or experienced Liz Marchi's commitment to provide funding for Montana entrepreneurs and startups for a decade might suggest that the term "angel investor" was coined specifically to describe her.

Liz Marchi
Liz Marchi 
It was 2003 that Marchi, who had arrived in Montana with three daughters and her then husband and settled in the Flathead Valley, decided to create the state's first angel fund, Frontier Angel Fund I. The fund closed in 2006 at $1.7 million, $300,000 more than she had hoped.   
     
She eventually guided the Kalispell-based fund, which had attracted investors from around the country who were either fans of or summer residents in the Big Sky Country, to lead three deals and gather a total of 12 active investments and was soon also overseeing angel groups that had sprung up in Missoula and Bozeman.

Because she successfully syndicated her deals with a number of other angel groups outside the state, she jokes that she has become "the grandmother of crowd funding." She's not referring to the formal definition of crowd funding but rather the syndication efforts she initiated that attracted a crowd of angels from numerous groups making small investments.

Now Marchi, who grew up near Jackson Hole, WY, but who had never been to Montana when she arrived here in 2000, says she is looking forward to making the investor-leader handoff to Will Price, whose roots in the state brought him back from Silicon Valley to create Next Frontier Capital, at $20 million the largest venture fund ever raised in the state.

Price, on the board of or a key executive with a number of Bay Area tech companies, did his due diligence on the attitudes of national venture and mergers & acquisitions firms toward Montana before making the move to Bozeman.

Price's fund, which closed last April a year following his decision to bring his family to the state where his father, Kent Price, is well known as Montana's first Rhodes Scholar and University of Montana board member, has already made two investments.

I've kidded Liz and her husband, Jon, who in 1978 founded Glacier Venture fund as the first venture fund in Montana and presided over it for 29 years, about being "Mr. and Mrs. Montana Money." To which she once responded: "We are more like Mr. and Mrs. Montana risk capital since we share a very high risk tolerance...and often share the consequences."

Although Marchi talks about making a handoff to Price, as well as "the next generation of angels, including some members of Fund II in their '30s, who slay me in terms of their abilities," she was completing the formation in August of $2.7 million Frontier Fund II, which has already invested $900,000 with syndication adding $300,000 for a total of $1.2 million already invested.

"We have 48 investors in 10 states and meet physically in Bozeman and the Flathead, alternating with a WebEx option," Marchi said, noting that investors met in Bozeman today, with investors from two continents and four states, including Montana investors from Bozeman and Kalispell to review three Bozeman companies.

That sounds less like "handing off" for the 62-year-old Marchi than welcoming the potential follow-on investment opportunity that venture capital can represent for angel. And she hopes Price's fund will provide.

She says she does have an agreement with Fund II to be the key administrator only for the next two years, but could opt to remain longer. And she is down to business cards representing her current five involvements.

But Marchi is genuinely pleased at the implications of the arrival in Montana of Price, who did his homework before deciding a venture fund could work in Montana.
Price shared with me the research he did with and his thoughts about how "changing values" will benefit Montana's ability to attract capital.

Montana was often dismissed as a "fly-over" state, meaning that the most viable potential investors on the east and west coasts usually just fly over on their way to the other coast.

But Price's SurveyMonkey sampling of both venture and merger & acquisitions firms and found that the appeal of the big sky to many increasingly disenchanted with urban challenges was strong but that direct air access is a challenge Montana must come to grips with.

Fully 70 percent of responding M&A firms said they would consider buying a company in Montana, even though 80 percent said they had never been to the state. And a third of the venture firms said they would consider doing a deal in Montana, although 47 percent said they had never been there.

The import of improved air access to a state that has no direct flights currently to the major markets was dramatically indicated with the response of M&A firms, 90 percent of whom said it was "important" or "Moderately important" to have direct air access to the market of their investment.

"That's something the state is going to have to address," Price said. "But I think it will be addressed."

Among venture firms, almost two thirds sad the quality of the local syndicate partner would determine their involvement.

Although Marchi herself has attracted investors from around the country, she observes that "Being away from the noise of the coasts keeps us grounded in an important way.

"The entire conversation and perception needs to move about rural America, what is going on here and its role in making our economy and our country work better," she said, expressing the principle that has guided her commitment to Montana entrepreneurs.
Continue reading

Life Science Discovery Fund prepares for what could be its most important grant

 

The life Sciences Discovery Fund, in a finale made possible by a $2 million error by a legislative leadership intent on ending state funding for the organization whose years of grants have enhanced Washington's life-science competitiveness, is preparing for what could be its most important grant-making decision.
 
The board of LSDF, which was created a decade ago from the state's $1 billion share of tobacco-settlement money to promote the growth of the life-science industry, will soon be reviewing four finalists for what are characterized as "ecosystem" grants. The $2 million will go to one or more organizations that can stimulate momentum toward commercializing life-science innovations.
 
And while details of the four applications will remain under wraps until the LSDF board reviews them late this month and on February 8 announces one or more awards, one application that would pair the commercialization activities of the state's two research universities should attract considerable interest when those details emerge. That teamed application from UW and WSU is intriguingly titled the "Concept-to-Commerce Coalition."
 
The word "legacy" is one that has begun to be used by those who lament the decision by lawmakers to defund LSDF and who believe that what Executive Director John DesRosier dubbed "ecosystem 2016" grants could serve to create a follow-on to LSDF's decade-long role of funding life-science innovation.

 
  
But DesRosier, who has guided LSDF since it came into existence in 2005, insists "we're not using the term 'wind down' since we want to keep our options open," although he is retiring in April.

And the fact the organization must remain in existence over the next two years to manage the 46 grants already awarded from the fund means LSDF can't just go away. And that leaves some supporters buoyed by the possibility that a new role could emerge for LSDF, possibly with an administrative role managing another type of health-related activity.

"LSDF is in a transition as a model that we know has to change in response to current circumstances, said board member Roger Woodworth, chief strategy officer for Spokane-based Avista Corp.

"It has been a wonderful asset for the state that has been remarkable in terms of attracting, administering and validating a variety of exceptional ideas," Woodworth added. "It is in transition but that doesn't mean we throw it away or shut it down."

The unanticipated opportunity for the "ecosystem 2016" grants came about when the lawmakers, primarily the Republican majority that was never invested in the value of LSDF, specified that while the funds LSDF needed to manage the existing grants would remain in its account, its remaining operating funds would shift back to the general fund.
 
Except that when the lawmakers spelled out the operating-funds total of $11 million, there was unexplainably almost $2 million left in the LSDF account, unallocated and not ordered sent to the general fund. So it remained under LSDF control.

DesRosier notes that the "ecosystem" grant competition will be different from individual grants LSDF has made to for-profit or non-profit life-science entities that have received pieces of the $106 million in grants made since 2007.

"This grant-making won't be about trying to perpetuate ourselves but rather be a key step to support the life-science ecosystem with funding support for one or more organizations that either already exist or would come to existence to stimulate momentum in commercialization," DesRosier said.

"The opportunity for the life-science sector in Washington is a huge one and that's why, when this fund was first created a decade ago, it was a smart way to begin to capture the enormous intellectual capital that existed in this state," says Carol Dahl, LSDF board chair.

 

Dahl, who is executive director of the Lemelson Foundation that supports what are called "impact inventions," points to the fact that almost 70 percent of the $1.5 billion in federal funds that flow into Washington each year is for life science.

 

But Dahl is among the many observers who seek ways to address the dilemma that while this state has developed one of the nation's most impressive life sciences non-profit sectors, it trails many other regions in the development of a for-profit sector. The Seattle area's biotech cluster, for example, is dramatically exceeded by the industry size in The Bay Area/Silicon Valley and San Diego, as well as places like Boston and North Carolina's Research Triangle.

As one national ranking of biotech clusters characterized it, the industry in the Seattle area is "being anchored more to academic and independent research institutions than local companies."

In other words, this state is experiencing a gap between early stage ideas and things that investors can be convinced to embrace.

"I believe in the future of the state's life science community, but there needs to be a change in people's willingness to invest in it," she said. "They need to develop a confidence about being part of the commercialization of what those federal dollars are producing in what has become one of the nation's most impressive life sciences non-profit sectors."

In fact, it was because of LSDF grants that a number of the emerging life science companies that are growing, creating jobs and carving out key roles in their industry were able to bridge what's famously known as "the valley of death" between concept and the time when investors can be lured to be involved.

Enhancing commercialization is what each of the four of the ecosystem grant applicants seeks to foster, including the team-grant proposal put together by UW and WSU.

Anson Fatland, the associate vice president for economic development and external affairs for Washington State University, explained how teaming with his UW counterpart came about after both universities had submitted initial proposals back in September when the plan for the life science eco-system grants was first unveiled by LSDF.

Fatland noted that once he and Patrick Shelby, who directs the New Ventures group at the UW Center for Commercialization, were both invited to submit full proposals, "we decided to sit down and talk about what we were trying to do."

"We realized we had a truly unique opportunity for innovation activities across the state, allowing the industry to really talk about a legacy grant," Fatland said.

The other applicants are Accelerator Corp., which is seeking money for a commercialization funding program; the Washington Biotech and Biomedical Association, and what's called the Southsound Research Coalition, which also involves UW along with Madigan Army Medical Center and Multicare Healthcare Systems.
Continue reading

Gil Folleher, who built strong business-leader support for JA, remembered for his legacy

Junior Achievement, as an organization focused on enhancing young people's understanding of business and finances, has had a natural appeal to business executives and their companies. But Gil Folleher, who died over the weekend at the Eisenhower Medical Center in Palm Springs at the age of 75, brought business-leader support for JA in the Seattle area to a near-evangelical level over his years guiding JA locally.

folleher
Gil Folleher 
Most importantly, perhaps, in the words of PEMCO CEO Stan McNaughton, he "left a legacy of footprints that will be followed for a long time. He was a king-maker-and the kids were the kings (and queens)."

The JA footprints in Washington state have left larger marks than the organization's impact in other states and that has been due to Folleher guiding involvement by executives at the highest levels of their companies.

In fact, he set a model for other non-profits to aspire to with a pattern from the late '80s through his retirement in 1998 of presidents or CEOs chairing, and being actively involved on, JA's board.

There are many important non-profit causes in this region, ranging from the needs of children or the sick or elderly to arts groups and causes to advance the community. And the most successful ones are blessed to have business executives supporting with time and dollars to help point them in successful directions.

And this is a time of the year when business people and others of means should pause to remember the cause or causes that are fortunate enough to have their attention and even affection.

But few organizations have been more successful over the years than JA in keeping focused on its cause: helping guide the understanding of the free enterprise system among young people and, recently even more vital in the view of many JA supporters, teach the importance of financial literacy.

Folleher, who moved from his Seattle leadership position to a role with the national JA organization in 1998 before retiring to Palm Springs, is being remembered by both active and retired business leaders who were closely involved with JA and who thus knew him best for the value he brought to the economic education of young people.

Folleher's strategy of creating close relationships among his board members included the Puget Sound JA chapter sending the largest delegation each year to the National Business Hall of Fame, an experience that he understood would contribute to the bonding strategy. Thus he made the trips an important part of each year's JA activities.

During his second tenure with JA in Seattle the number of students impacted by JA programs quadrupled to more than 60,000, deficits became surpluses and the annual budget grew to more than $2.4 million.

And in the manner of the best of non-profit executives, he groomed his successor well and thus David Moore, JA President for what has grown to be JA oversight for all of Washington state, says of Folleher, "he was my mentor, friend and inspiration." 

Under Moore, who spent a decade as Folleher's marketing director before succeeding him in 1998, JA programs have grown and come to reach a dramatically expanding number of students around the state each year. 
 
It was through involvement with JA as publisher of Puget Sound Business Journal to create a local Business Hall of Fame in a partnership between the newspaper and his organization that I came to be close friends with Folleher and eventually served as chair of the JA board.

Ken Kirkpatrick, retired president of U.S. Bank of Washington, knew Folleher the longest because it was Kirkpatrick, along with his future wife SaSa, who met Folleher at the airport when he arrived in Seattle in 1972 for for his first stint guiding JA's Seattle operations.

Kirkpatrick recalls that he was only 17 at the time, but was serving as JA's temporary executive director, "along with my janitor job there. He treated me like a king and he gave me my first ever Christmas gift from an employer-a very fancy shoeshine kit that I used just last week."

Woody Howse, then guiding Cable & Howse Ventures and now described as "the grandfather of Seattle's venture-capital community" was incoming board chair when Folleher arrived in 1987, returning to Seattle after serving as JA's Senior Vice President in charge of programs and marketing nationally. 

"Folleher's network through all of JA was unparalleled and as a result we got the benefit in Seattle of a world-class sponger of Best Practices," Howse said.

Lasting friendships was true for me, and this column is an unabashed good-memories reflection on a man who not only became a good friend, but who was responsible for many of my closest friendships formed over the mutual connection to JA and the work we all did together to build and promote the organization and its cause.
 
Scott Harrison, retired president of Barclay-Dean Interiors, who also served a term as JA board chair, praised Folleher for guiding board members to "embrace the vision that Gil and his team had for JA."

And John Fluke, of Fluke Venture Partners (another top executive who took his turn as JA board chair) and the son of the man described as "The Father of JA" in this region, said "I know Gil would want all of us to do our part to advance JA's mission to bring economic and personal financial literacy to all K-12 students."

Rather than merely recall Folleher after his death, friends from around the country were able to be on hand in Palm Springs last January for his 75th birthday celebration where, as Moore recalls with a smile, "we partied for three days."

Now those who were close to Folleher will gather again, despite his insisting there be no service or memorial, for a toast and sharing of memories January 13 at 5:30 p.m. at the Waterfront Marriott.
 
In what amounted to an appropriate summing up, Moore noted: "I have always said we are warming by a fire we did not build since what JA is today is a legacy for Folleher's passion and leadership."'
Continue reading

Longtime elected official Lloyd Hara retires, leaving legacy of property-data innovation

Lloyd Hara, who has held more local elective offices over a longer period of time than perhaps anyone in the history of the state, departs at the end of this month from the King County Assessor's office he has occupied for the past six years, likely bringing an end to a career in elective office dating back to 1969.

Lloyd Hara 
But as he turns the keys to the office over to John Arthur Wilson, the one-time aide who defeated him in the November General Election and will be sworn in January 3, he leaves a first-in-the-nation data legacy that will benefit residents, government and non-profits well into the future.

That data file, named LocalScape, was launched last March by Hara's office. He refers to the innovation, which amounts to a property data portal, as a "dynamic m apping tool designed to unleash the power of community data and redefine civic engagement" by layering local property tax value, tax data and census information.

Hara's 76th birthday was December 8 so, appropriately, King County Executive Dow Constantine and the King County Council proclaimed that day Lloyd Hara Day in the county.

And in a last holiday greeting to members of his staff, Hara thanked them for their role in the "nine national awards for innovation, customer service and leadership" that the office won from the national organization of assessors and other groups.

One of his innovations that he had to press for approval from the county's executive and council, was selling advertising on his department's website, which he viewed as adding a logical source of revenue, suggesting that every agency should be open to that idea.

Throughout his career, Hara was an official who genuinely enjoyed meeting his constituents, and thus established a tough standard for his successor.

He has logged more than 200 speaking engagements per year to service organization, real estate gatherings and town hall meetings, in addition to regular meetings with all 39 cities in the county and traveling to Olympia to meet with lawmakers on not only his department's issues, but also issues impacting the county.

As port commissioner, Hara chuckled at the sense that he had so many meetings out and around the county that he sometimes encountered people who didn't even know they were in the Seattle Port District.

Hara, then finishing his first term as a commissioner for the Poet of Seattle, was elected in 2009 to fill the unexpired term of King County Assessor Scott Noble, who resigned. He was subsequently elected, in 2011, to a full four-year term.

He thus undertook a role that made him, in essence, the "tax man" in the county since notices of taxes came from his office, although his office merely served to take the budget approved by the County Council and turn it into the tax per property parcel.

But throughout his years as assessor, Hara seemed always in quest of ways to lower property taxes, sometime stirring discussions with other elected officials, some of whom he sought to put out of business for taxpayer benefit.

One of his controversial suggestions sprang from his sense that regionalization that would involve consolidating functions of various elective offices may be a way that taxpayers in smaller counties may be better served, less expensively.

And he wondered aloud in one of our interviews a couple of years ago "how many jurisdictions should there be that taxpayers are helping support? Could some services be merged into regional units? Can some be privatized?"
It's out of the echo of such discussion Hara started that new ways of doing things at the local-government level may emerge as lawmakers and policymakers cope with new funding realities.

Hara told me that a family challenge, when his son, Todd, learned in August that he had a cancerous tumor in his kidney, put his 2015 re-election campaign in perspective. He said Todd's surgery a week before the election and his doctor's assessment that he was cancer free far outweighed the outcome of a political campaign.
Todd turned 42 on his birthday last week, three days after Lloyd's birthday. 

In fact, it was the second time that a family challenge came during a tight campaign, ironically, he says, in that they were during the two elections he lost.

The first was during his only run for statewide office, 1988, when his race for state treasurer was dimmed in importance by the death of his father.

The start of his career in elective office came for Hara, a graduate of Roosevelt High School and the University of Washington, in 1969 when he was appointed to the office of King County auditor, the youngest person to hold that office.

He was elected Seattle Treasurer in 1980 and served in that role until 1992, winning accolades from the Government Financial Officers Association, the Association of Government Accounts and the Municipal Treasurers Association of the U.S. and Canada, an organization he served as president for a term.

In addition to his elective offices, Hara founded the Asian Pacific American Municipal Officials, the Seattle International District Rotary, the North Seattle Community College Foundation and is past president of the Japanese American Citizens League, Seattle Chapter.

Hara is taking a few days vacation with his wife, Liz, and told me in an email that while he has not made any future commitments, he has "too much energy to simply retire," adding "life is good and there is life after politics."
Continue reading

Spokane Fantasy Flight for orphans, homeless kids sprinkles 'magic dust' of caring on all

Hopefully everyone in need of positive thoughts in these emotion-charged times will in some way be touched by the same "Magic Dust" of caring that sprinkles over all those involved with Saturday's Spokane Fantasy Flight for 62 orphans and homeless kids and their elves to Santa's North Pole home aboard an Alaska Airlines 737-900.

Steve Paul, 'Elf Bernie' 
The magic manifests itself not only in the eyes of the youngsters, ranging in age from 4 to 10 years, selected by shelters and community programs in Spokane and Coeur d'Alene, but also on the faces of the dozens of adults, ranging from TSA agents to elves to Alaska flight-crew members and volunteers.

This will be the 19th Fantasy Flight from Spokane International Airport, although it was United Airlines that created the event in 1997 and hosted the children until 2008 when a scheduling snafu left no plane available for Spokane. Alaska quickly stepped up to save the day, and bring a new specialness to the event, going aloft for a real flight.

United had taxied the planeload of kids around the airport, but employees of Alaska, which of course is more familiar with the North Pole than any airline, asked "why can't we actually take off with the kids?" So in fact they did, carrying 60 kids and their elves aloft for a 40 minute flight to Santa's home. And so it has been since then.
 
Alaska pilot Eric Hrivnak 
So Saturday afternoon the children are brought to the airport where each meets his or her "buddy elf." Then, with the help of the TSA workers, who look the other way as metal jingle bells on the kids' and elves' clothing set off alarms, they all pass through security and board the Alaska flight, which upon takeoff becomes Santa 1 with First Officer Eric Hrivnak, at the controls.
 
For the eight years since that first Alaska flight, the airline has partnered with Northwest North Pole Adventures, the 501c3 created by Steve Paul, "Elf Bernie" on flight day. But the rest of the year Paul is president and CEO of little non-profit and he spends the months preparing for the event by working with organizations, gathering sponsors and overseeing details, all on a $200,000 budget that includes in-kind, biggest of which is the Alaska flight.
 
Paul isn't a wealthy do-gooder who commits to the annual flight as his philanthropy. Rather he has a fulltime job as project manager for Spokane-based Ecova, a national utility and energy-management company
 
It is Paul who is also responsible for the details of making the day special for the kids and, as he once told me,  "I know I can't fix the situations in life that have brought these children to the place we find them. But I can give them a brain full of amazingly magical memories of a day when they took their first airplane ride, when they touched their first reindeer and had their own elf as best friend, and met Santa in his North Pole home."
 
Hrivnak and his Alaska crew are part of the magic since as the flight nears its conclusion, the passengers are told to pull the window shades down and chant the magic words that will allow them to land at the North Pole.
 
As the kids pull down their shades and do a chant, each waves a magic light wand they were given as they boarded and then Hrivnak deploys the engine thrusters when Santa and Rudolph appear on the radar screen, providing the confirmation that the "Santa 1" flight has entered North Pole airspace.
 
Then the pilot lands the plane on the other side of the Spokane airport and the kids and their elves get off, to be greeted by Santa, Mrs. Clause, extra elves and a few live reindeer.
 
A key moment of magic occurs for each child when they have their personal visit with Santa.
 
As Paul told me, "When we send out invitations to the kids, we have them tell us what they want for Christmas. We take those lists and buy each of them a toy from that list. So as each child tells Santa what he or she wants, Santa can reach into his bag and pull that present out for them. The looks on their faces as he hands it to them is priceless."
 
Longtime readers of the column will be familiar with the story since this has become my regular Christmas season offering after my friend Blythe Thimsen, editor of Spokane Coeur d'Alene Living magazine, first alerted me to this amazing community experience six years ago. She served as an elf on that year's flight and wrote of the experience for her magazine.
 
But except for coverage by Seattle's Q13 a couple of times, and again this year, including a piece they sent to CNN two years ago that gained the event national coverage, I've been struck by the general lack of media attention.
 
Although Alaska's CEO Brad Tilden wrote about the event in the Alaska Airlines magazine a couple of years ago, neither the airline nor Paul and his organization have sought attention for themselves for their involvement.

But there is a high-visibility desire on the part of Alaska crew members to participate, as evidenced by the fact that after several years as the captain of the trip, Hrivnak was beaten out last year by other pilots who wanted to guide the trip.

But he made sure he was back at the top of the list this year and thus will be the captain at the controls again this year. 
 
In fact, because this is Paul's 15th year guiding the event, which touches him each year as he experiences using "the power of Santa and Christmas to bring an over-the-top memory for kids usually consumed with worry," I thought of making this column about him.

But when I mentioned that intent to Paul, whom I talk with each year for the column, he seemed to actually bristle at the idea of my focusing on him.

"This event is NOT about me. Never was and never will be," he emailed me. "This event is about injecting a wondrous and magical spirit of Christmas into children that most likely would grow up without such a chance. 

"What our leadership team does (all year long) is to sustain an entity that will continue to deliver on our 1st promise to these children - an amazing day of unimaginable memories of happiness, love and pure joy. Nothing more." he said.
Continue reading

A rural economic development strategy focused on entrepreneurs

 

If Global Entrepreneurship Week, the annual worldwide celebration of innovators and job creators, had been a competition among nations, states and regions, Washington State could have laid claim to being the hands-down winner. And that would be appropriate recognition for the man who has guided much of this state's effort to advance entrepreneurship, particularly in rural areas and particularly with young people, for 25 years.

 

 

 

 

Maury Forman, senior manager for the Washington State Department of Commerce, is proud of the fact that in this state, GEW 2015 was actually Global Entrepreneurship Month and extended to every corner of the state with activities in all 39 counties. Four years ago, when Forman plugged the state into GEW activities, three counties participated.Forman says "we are changing the way communities look at economic development." That's an outgrowth of his effort, over much of his quarter century overseeing key economic-development sectors, to develop a culture of entrepreneurism in rural areas.

Global Entrepreneurship week was founded in 2008 by the Kauffman Foundation, the Kansas City-based 501c3 that is the nation's pre-eminent entrepreneur-focused organization, to create an annual celebration of innovators and job creators who launch the start-ups that drive economic growth.

 

Forman, who joined what was then the Department of Trade and Economic Development in 1991 in a career transition from healthcare at the age of 40, says "No other state can claim that every part of the state had at least one event that celebrated entrepreneurship."

 

 

"One of the exciting aspects of this year's celebration of entrepreneurship was the number of high school programs being held throughout the state," Forman said. "In many cases, college isn't the natural next step it was once for high school students so these programs expose them to the idea of starting their own business once they graduate. Or if they do go on to college, they can focus their education on skills that will allow them to start a business in the years to come."

 

 

Forman says he has kept his primary focus on rural economies because "they need the assistance much more than urban communities," as well as because he has become convinced that the strategies for growth of many rural areas that has been focused on recruiting companies from out of state is outdated.

 

 

"That has to change if rural communities are to survive," Forman said. "Communities have to be shingle ready and not just shovel ready."  

 

 

In a recent article in Governing, a national magazine covering state and local government news, Forman wrote about Washington's three-year-old program called Startup Washington that focuses on building local economies "organically" by serving the needs of local startups and entrepreneurs.  

 

 

Forman is likely among the national leaders in the conviction that programs to enhance local economic development "must nurture the belief that young people who grow up in rural communities can be guided to start businesses in their own community rather than moving to urban centers."

 

 

"Just as young people are looking at new ways to enter the work force other than working for someone else, so too are communities looking for ways other than recruitment of businesses from elsewhere to grow their economies," Forman said.

 

 

One of the ways he is seeking to do that "is by matching those students that are serious about being entrepreneurs with mentors, especially in rural communities."

 

 

Indeed matching students who hope to be entrepreneurs with mentors is becoming the model for successful communities, particularly rural ones, to pursue.

 

 

Some communities have long been employing that model, as chronicled in the oft-quoted book written by Jack Schultz, founder and CEO of Agracel, a firm based in Effingham, IL, that specializes in industrial development in small towns.

 

 

It was in pondering why some small towns succeed where others fail that Schultz set out on the backroads to rural America to find out as he became the nation's guru of rural economic development and wrote of his travels in Boomtown USA: the 7 ½ keys to Big Success in Small Towns.

 

 

I emailed Schultz about entrepreneurism's role in small town success and a possibly emerging role for mentor programs.

 

 

"Embracing entrepreneurism in communities has been a key factor that differentiated great communities from also-rans," he emailed back. "Increasingly, we are seeing those great communities taking it a step up by tying their local entrepreneurs up with their young people, educating them on both entrepreneurship and also the great things happening in the private sector of their towns."

 

 

Schultz' successes in believing in small-town entrepreneurs and small-business lending is partly responsible for the fact the Effingham-based bank he helped found and now chairs the board, has grown eight fold to $2.9 billion in assets and gone public.

 

 

"At Midland States Bank, we have very much focused on small business lending and it has been a major factor in our growth over the last several years," Schultz said.

 

 

In an unusual and innovative commitment to the dozens of communities it serves, the bank has funded a not-for-profit institute to expand an entrepreneurship class that was started in Effingham eight years ago and has now expanded to 27 other towns.

 

 

Forman seemed intrigued by the details Schultz provided:  The class meets each day during the school year from 7:30 to 9 am; meets in local businesses; is totally funded by local businesses with a maximum contribution of $1,000 per business or individual.  Each class has a business and each student must also start a business.  

 

 

Meanwhile, Forman approaches his 25th anniversary with the department on January 1 having collected numerous regional and national awards for his work and successes. Those include last year winning the international Economic Development Leadership Award and recognitionby the Teens in Public Service Foundation with the Unsung Hero Award for his work with at risk kids.   

 

 

He has authored 14 books related to economic development, and has also designed and developed creative "game show' learning tools, including Economic Development Jeopardy, Economic Development Feud and two board games for the profession.

 

 

Forman credits the directors who have guided the department over his time there for allowing him "to be intrapreneurial," meaning behaving like an entrepreneur while working in a large organization, noting "not many government agencies allow the freedom to take risks in an effort to solve a given problem."

 

 

 

 

Continue reading

52°F

Seattle

Mostly Cloudy

Humidity: 63%

Wind: 14 mph

  • 24 Mar 2016 52°F 42°F
  • 25 Mar 2016 54°F 40°F
Banner 468 x 60 px