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Citizens Gas & Coke Utility has revived its pitch for a regulatory plan that would fundamentally change the way it bills customers,
helping it cover rising expenses as gas sales fall. The plan would create an expanded energy conservation program that could
include rebates for customers who buy gas-efficient furnaces and appliances.
Economic development officials say networking is the first step in a process that, when successful, leads to industrial plant
expansions and company headquarters relocations. Travel, food, gifts and entertainment, they argue, are a necessary cost of
attracting jobs to Indiana.
One night almost a decade ago, Kim Cassel woke up in a hotel room at 3 a.m. It was the latest of hundreds of hotels she’d slept in during her career as corporate vice president of a nationwide candy shop chain. Disoriented, she needed to check the phone book to remember she was in Boston. That’s when Cassel knew she had to open her own business. Within months, she had quit her job, returned to her hometown of Greenwood, leased…
This isn’t just a feel-good story. It’s a feel-great story. It’s all about a young guy, full of ambition, yearning to grow, thirsting for knowledge, deciding to take a chance. Rolling the dice on a dream. Pursuing his passion. There he was seven years ago, fresh out of DePauw University, working in a promising marketing job for our local pharmaceutical giant, Eli Lilly and Co. He was making some nice change. If he wasn’t was just around the corner. So…
Sometimes we need to be reminded of the simplest, most basic things. Like the value of profit in a capitalist society. In a week where I was hard pressed to find the time to write a column, my friend Roland Dorson submitted an unsolicited piece for our consideration. I’ve known the president of the Indianapolis Chamber of Commerce to be a witty man with a clever way with words. Here, he deftly summarizes a notion to which I and IBJ…
The java stands Hubbard & Cravens Coffee Co. opened a year ago within Clarian Health Partners’ three downtown hospitals are brewing a rich aroma of results. Yet executives of the locally based coffee retailer and wholesaler know sales could be sweeter. “The hospitals are so huge that we don’t capture even a third of what we could,” said Marcie Hubbard, director of store operations. “So the question is, how do you reach everybody in that entire hospital?” The 23 Taiwanese…
I’ve noticed a trend in restaurants lately. Most of them seem to have dropped those customer comment cards they used to keep clamped at each table. I can see why. In my whole life, I’ve probably filled out fewer than half a dozen of those things, and always when I was particularly irked about the service. I’ve never turned them in, consoling myself with filling them out to blow off steam and then heaving a sigh as I tore them…
When the state kicks off its spring tourism ad campaign April 22, it will have a little more staying power thanks to a 38-percent surge in spending. The increase, made possible by cutting back in other areas, means a total of $550,000 will be spent on TV, radio and magazine ads targeted not only at neighbors in Chicago and Cincinnati but also Hoosiers from Evansville to South Bend. “We thought it was really important to put more money into that…
A prestigious, full-service hotel soon will complement Carmel’s booming office market along North Meridian Street. A Cincinnati
developer broke ground this month on a roughly $30 million Renaissance hotel with 263 rooms and 14,000 square feet of meeting
space.
The stately 12-story Canterbury Hotel could use a renovation, hospitality analysts say, to restore some luster and help it
take on more modern competitors. Such an overhaul might be on the way, along with new owners for the independent boutique
hotel at 123 S. Illinois St.
It hasn’t been easy the last few years to be a shareholder of Eli Lilly and Co. Lilly’s stock price has languished as the company’s vaunted drug pipeline has suffered hiccups and as legal troubles over its best-selling drug, Zyprexa, have lingered. So as Lilly shareholders gather April 16 for their annual meeting, two key questions hang in the air. Both center on Zyprexa, an anti-schizophrenia drug, which accounts for one-quarter of Lilly’s revenue and even more of its profit….
For those who thought this had been a fairly boring session of the Indiana General Assembly to date, wake up from your deep slumber. Nap time is over. We’ve reached the point where the lowhanging fruit has been picked by lawmakers and passed on to the governor, and the heavy lifting remains. Lawmakers embark upon the conference committee stage of deliberations. To understand conference committee time, forget all your conceptions to date about the session and begin with a clean…
Every few years about this time, I offer free job-seeking advice for collegians. Judging from the resumes deluging my company, it’s time to hum this tune again. The first line of the first song in the musical comedy “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying” is “How to apply for a job.” That’s also the name of a course I’ve long proposed to colleges and universities. While more colleges are doing that, there’s a frequent flaw: waiting until the…
When was the last time you gave someone a break? I don’t mean the last time you stopped your car to let a convention attendee safely cross the street. Think back to the last time you made a difference in someone’s career-a young person’s career. The truth is, you probably manage at least one younger employee who is eager for a break, a promotion or a little more autonomy. Maybe you tried to give your up-and-comer a project to run…
It’s a rite of spring. The annual arrival of Lilly Endowment Inc.’s annual report provides a rare glimpse into the operations of the secretive-butsuper-powerful Indianapolis-based foundation. This year, there’s more anticipation than usual. Beyond the listings of who received the hundreds of millions of dollars in grants the endowment passed out last year, the report-due to be released by the end of this month-also will show where the endowment invests its $7 billion in assets. Until now, that part of…
Globalization, like all sweeping economic trends, provokes a widespread disquiet. Specifically, we fear that somehow, if it continues unchecked, people in the United States will lose their high-paying jobs and we will devolve into a lowwage service economy. As China gains, we lose. To borrow a phrase from Thomas Friedman, they’re frightened that the flattening of the world economy will flatten us. It is true that traditional manufacturing jobs are fewer now than before. And, lots of things are made…
Fred Glass, president of the city's Capital Improvement Board, headed historic transitions in both the mayor’s and governor’s
offices and has become the go-to guy for some of the city’s biggest initiatives, most of them sports-related.
Competitive. That’s how Shelbyville community leaders describe Tony Lennen. Indeed. Any CEO of the city’s Major Hospital needs to be. Shelby County residents can, in just 20 to 45 minutes, drive up Interstate 74 or Interstate 65 to any of Indianapolis’ large hospitals, many of which boast massive marketing budgets and stables of specialists. But in nearly 14 years at the helm of Major Hospital, Lennen has found creative ways to boost profits, enhance technology, woo specialists and even-through aggressive…
Even with the U.S. auto industry under pressure and the North American manufacturing market experiencing relatively slow expansion, Indianapolis-based Hurco Cos. Inc. is on a tear. The maker of metal- and machine-cutting tools and software has stayed ahead of the curve by growing aggressively overseas while keeping a lid on expansion costs. That double feat is easier said than done, said Ananth Iyer, professor of operations management at Purdue University and director of the Dauch Center for the Management of…
It’s been more than five years since I (accurately) predicted that satellite radio would be a major problem for traditional radio. And while I got no love for that call back then, I am going to step back to the lonely side of the street with this call: Terrestrial radio will take a long time to die, and in the short term there may be money to be made. The radio industry (both from the sky and the ground) is…
