Commentary
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,…
The Art of the Hire
All companies talk about the value of talent, but one local business, the Seattle Seahawks, clearly lives and dies by the people that it hires to execute its strategy for winning. With approximately $240 million in revenue, the team has the most public recruiting and hiring process imaginable, with job offers being made on live…
Bonus Your Way to Profits!
I dont care, Gary. I mean, I have to tell you, I justdont care about the bonus. I was listening to Ron, a veteran employee who was tellingme to my face that the $300 quarterly bonus just wasnt important to him. Waita minute! When was the last time I had my hearing checked? I couldnt…
Stimulus Spending Set to Create More Washington State Jobs
Economists keep warning that as federal stimulus spending begins to run out in coming months, the lower spending could put a drag on the U.S. economy. But in Washington State, at least, we have spent a small fraction of the $4.5 billion in Recovery Act funds that has been allocated to us. That means you…
A Terrific Bargain
I have just read Steve Reno’s article (“The Labor Gap,” July 2010) in SeattleBusiness magazine. I recently participated in the admissions process for UWElectrical Engineering for students who will enter our program inAutumn 2010. There were about 320 applications for admission, and wemade 120 offers. We expect about95 to accept (a very high yield, indicating…