Commentary
Reform School Days
It is no secret that a college degree is an essentialqualification to succeed in todays economy. Proving workplace value is at afever pitch and applicants are looking for ways to garner a competitive edge,many through furthering their education. These types of potential studentsrequire nontraditional avenues to learning such as online courses, fast-trackdegrees and the flexibility…
The Death of an Intellectual Giant
A great man died yesterday. Chalmers Johnson was the kind of intellectual the world no longer seems capable of producing. I had the good fortune of studying Japanese political economy under him at the University of California, Berkeley in the late 1970s. He later taught at the University of California, San Diego and launched the…
Glimmers of Hope?
The Sunday Seattle Times offers a page full of graphs to support a rather grim view of the state’s economic future. But that pessimistic view isn’t necessarily supported by the graphs on the page. Economics is all about trends, and if you look at the trendlines over the past year, conditions look substantially brighter. We…
The faces of philanthropy within the Puget Sound business community
McKinstry Co. and Delivery Express are among the faces of philanthropy within the Puget Sound business community. McKinstry Co. and the McKinstry Foundation, founded by executive Dean Allen, are deeply devoted to local nonprofits, focusing on education, youth, global/health science, and community outreach. Delivery Express of Renton and president Dave Hamilton literally go the extra…
The Rest is History
1896: Theodor Hilferstadt, telegraph operator for Western Union who had recently arrived in Seattle from Germany, sneezes while sending a wire and accidentally substitutes a g for c in the message Plenty cold in Yukon. 1900: Arthur Hamsher Jr., a Minneapolis attorney for the Great Northern railroad, was looking for unused assets to liquidate to…
A Nerve Center for New Businesses
We are headed into winter and with so many storm clouds already around us, its hard not to feel gloomy. Where are all the cranes that once littered the skyline? There are 76,000 fewer construction jobs in Washington than there were in 2007. Construction activity is back to where it was in 1997. More than…
Letting More Fresh Air Into the Room
There are a few diseases for which the cure is moredangerous than the affliction. Alethophobiaan intense, abnormal or illogicalfear of the truthis one of them. It sounds like a rare and serious psychiatric disorder, butIm betting that two out of three people suffer from alethophobia. And theapproved cure, administered by companies all over the world,…
How Can We Boost Performance at Colleges and Universities?
Institutions of higher education have long esaped scrutiny because of fears that any form of outside evaluation would infringe on academic freedom. Universities have also benefited from a post-war consensus on the importance of higher education to science, industry and society. But that consensus is crumbling, and that is a disturbing trend. The absence of…
Competition or Collaboration: Which Generates Greater Innovation
We have always assumed that it is market economics, the forces of competition that drove innovation in our great country. In “Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation,” Steve Johnson suggests it is something else altogether. He argues that the greatest innovations including the light bulb, the television and the Internet come…
Representing Washington… Barely
When a national publication creates a list of the top 100 whatevers, it plays into our sense of regional pride/inferiority complex to itemize the players who hail from our corner of the country. Despite this year winning the race to reach autumn first, the Northwest is not well represented on the Vanity Fair 100, the…
Enough With the Doom and Gloom
The stock market acts like it’s the end of the world. But in the real world, plenty of local companies are investing for the future. Wall Street would have you believe that the future is so grim, companies are refusing to spend their money. Corporations nationwide have something like $2 trillion on their balance sheets….
Burning the Compact
The old paradigm in employment benefits, circa 1999: Whatwill it take to get you to work for us? A signing bonus? Stock options so youcan retire at 30? A concierge to take care of all those chores you dont wantto be bothered with? A funky workplace with exposed brick walls and old-growthceiling beams? Foosball tables…
The Technology Solution
I should be a technology skeptic. The first time I met myfather-in-law, a former engineer in the Apollo space program, he told me thatsatellites would soon eliminate illiteracy by beaming daily lessons tovillagers around the world. As a business reporter, I wrote countless storieson how the internet would make all of our lives better. Today,…