CHALLENGING ARCHITECTUREi love john levesques column Boomtown Update in the December issue of Seattle magazine [published simultaneously as his Final Analysis column in Seattle Business]. Its a great article and I love the descriptions. We already were referring to the [apartment building] boxes in Ballard as architecturally challenged, but his addition of Bow-Wow-Haus is brilliant….

Will your business be the next one to join the regions fastest-growing sector? Coffee, airplanes, apples and software may dominate the economy in Washington state, but we are witnessing the astonishingly rapid formation of a large and growing new sector focused on global health. In this space, two seemingly different companies are finding distinct and…

Nearly two of three Seattle area companies with online services that received venture capital funding in the past year have a big kick me sign on their backs when it comes to class-action risks. Only one in nine have written clauses in their terms of service to protect against these risks in a form with…

By the time people got around to building a serious industrial transportation system in the Pacific Northwest, canal building had largely dried up in the rest of the country. Railroads were faster and better equipped to handle rugged topography, so thats the way everyone went. The one notable exception was the canal dug to create…

You might not think the business experiences of two Microsoft executives could help alleviate illiteracy in the developing world or devise a better strategy for attacking hydrocephalus, a potentially devastating health condition. After all, what does business have to do with literacy and disease? As it turns out, a lot. David Risher, who had worked…

Among the many broken promises the future made to the present was the end of the commute. No longer would the working masses pack themselves into wheeled metal boxes twice a day, burning hours and fossil fuel to reach their places of employment in a centralized location. Instead, they could work from home, at whatever…

Some years ago in this space, I wondered what it would be like if CEOs ran their companies according to Jesuit principles of leadership. The Jesuits call them Ignatian principles, after Ignatius Loyola, the soldier-turned-priest who founded the religious order 475 years ago. Jesuits operate a lot of universities, including several in Europe, and they…

The Minimum WageJohn Levesques final analysis column on the $15 minimum wage in the September issue was a nice article, but I think it would be more powerful if he gave more space to the effects on our economy of lower-middle-class and poor workers having more money in their pockets versus having that same money…

On a brisk seattle morning, a couple dozen of us meet at Seattle Parks and Recreations Denny Park headquarters for a Civic Boot Camp. The goal is to prepare us for civic engagement, says Diane Douglas, executive director of Seattle CityClub and a 2014 honoree in the Community Impact Awards (see page 31 for the…

In November 2012, Washingtons voters supported legalization of recreational marijuana, passing Initiative 502 by a 56 percent to 44 percent margin. Unlike Colorado, which had a robust medical marijuana system before its recreational system was created, Washington started its regulatory scheme from scratch. This was because former Governor Chris Gregoire felt forced to veto nearly…

If you want to attract top talent to your company, you need to tell your story in a way that makes you stand out from the pack. Yet most job descriptions fail to tell a compelling story. Here are the three most common mistakes: Story Fail No. 1: Culture CoolIn an effort to appeal to…