Strictly Business

Strictly Business: Insitu embodies skill, luck

There's something unsettling in hearing that a company's success is tied to tragedies like the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and the long conflict that has followed.

Strictly Business: Information can't trump experience

The word "museum" conjures a sense of the static -- a place to look at but not touch, offering little to our nonvisual senses.

Strictly Business: Summer commerce in bloom

Most of us look forward to summer, for all the obvious reasons. We can enjoy the Columbia River Gorge, the mountains, the coast, and the rivers at our doorsteps. The wise among us spend time outdoors hiking or swimming, hunting or fishing, or just enjoying the too-short days of our Northwest dry season.

Strictly business: Dark battle over the sun's power

In politics, the old adage is that the person who masters Roberts Rules of Order is most likely to win the day. In the courtroom, the best procedural expert can win a not-guilty verdict for even an O.J. Simpson.

Strictly Business: Focus of Boeing plan switches to local companies

It was a big, bold statement containing a powerhouse name -- Boeing -- guaranteed to attract attention.

Strictly Business: Recovery like a slow sunrise

Forecasting the weather used to be as much educated guesswork as science. Only one brave local weatherman, Jack Capell, correctly forecast one of the biggest storms in local history, the Columbus Day storm of 1962. On many days of those bygone years, the groundhog and the Farmer’s Almanac often were more reliable than the meteorologist.

Strictly Business: A short way to happier customers

At the risk of revealing my true inner self (as an old woman who is crabby and Andy Rooney-like), don’t you just hate when the sales clerk hands you a 1-foot-long receipt for a one-item purchase?

Strictly Business: A second recession? Experts split

I read and write about the economy a lot, and I attend various economic presentations -- because it’s my job and because I’m a wannabe economist nerd. I’ve witnessed two basic views emerge recently about whether another recession is going to hit us this year.

Strictly Business: Fair forever changed Seattle, N.W.

As a child growing up in Portland, there was a time when I wanted nothing more than to see the Seattle World’s Fair.

Strictly Business: Building a new box gives choice

In November, I was vacationing in New York when a large group of Occupy Wall Street protestors set out to block traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge. Fresh off a visit to the nearby Sept. 11 Memorial, we took in the political theater of demonstrators and police jousting for control of Lower Manhattan’s most-famous artery.

Strictly Business: Spring, and recovery, in the air

It’s easy to overlook the encouraging buds of a spring recovery with so many reports focused on problems in Clark County’s real estate market.

Strictly Business: Wisdom of a business veteran

In the world of technology, the brashness of youth often trumps the wisdom of age. But when serial entrepreneur Steve Hix,74, spoke not long ago at a Clark County PubTalk event, the young people filling the seats at Fort Vancouver’s Artillery Barracks paid close attention to the guy who was probably the oldest person in the room.

Strictly Business: A look beyond labor market borders

Anyone who has a sense of how the economy works knows that markets don’t have borders.

Strictly Business: Keeping an eye on economy

I’d been at The Columbian just a few days when I paid my first visit to a local business. That business was the one-time local powerhouse Hewlett-Packard, and the occasion was a networking event sponsored by a business group now called Technology Excellence in Clark County.