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Opinion

Dec 29, 2022

Reimagining the corporation

Welcome to the New Year! 2023 is a new one indeed. Business as usual isn’t so usual anymore. Tech companies are downsizing faster than local daily newspapers. Starbucks baristas are the new trend in organized labor. Amazon’s growth is slowing. Global consumption and supply chains can no longer be taken for granted. Twitter i[...]

Nov 29, 2022

Business is better

Over the past several months, there’s been a bit of a buzz about the direction of the global economy. In conversation, many business leaders will express deep concerns about inflation and the onset of recession. Yet, when asked about their financial performance, most all of them say, “Business is going great!” Within these[...]

Bernie Niemeier. Photo by Caroline Martin
Sep 29, 2022

Full speed ahead

No other region of Virginia moves the entire commonwealth forward like Hampton Roads. Sure, Dee Cee is about technology, government contracting and national politics. And Richmond is about politics that are generally more local. Hampton Roads, on the other hand, is about the military and commerce. The ports, the railways, inters[...]

Virginia Business Editor Richard Foster
Aug 29, 2022

All businesses great and small

There are 32.5 million small businesses in the United States, employing more than 61 million people and making up a staggering 99.9% of the nation’s businesses, according to the U.S. Small Business Administration. As business journalists, though, we tend to focus almost exclusively on the larger businesses that reap bigger pro[...]

Aug 29, 2022

2022 Virginia 500: Moving up

When I give my elevator speech about the Virginia 500, it usually starts this way: It’s like the Fortune 500, but instead of focusing on companies, it’s about people. More specifically, unlike the Fortune 500, which ranks companies by gross revenues, this is a more subjective list. We strive to inventory the most powerful an[...]

Bernie Niemeier. Photo by Caroline Martin
Jun 28, 2022

Higher gas prices are needed

The U.S. inflation rate, which reached 8.6% in May, is at its highest point in 40 years. In 1982, it was just over 6%. Since then, the U.S. inflation rate has hovered mostly in the 2% to 4% range. The inflation rate is determined by changes in the cost of a fixed basket of 80,000 […]

Richard M. Jeanneret
Jun 9, 2022

The evolving workplace (or what I wish I told my younger self)

In 1983, when I walked through the doors of my first job in Washington, D.C., I could have never anticipated where life would take me — from a young staff accountant to a vice chair at Ernst & Young, advising C-suites and boards, as well as leading thousands of professionals. And now it’s bittersweet to […]

May 29, 2022

Interesting times

History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes, according to an apt but apocryphal quote frequently misattributed to Mark Twain. We’re certainly seeing that dynamic writ large in the 2020s, though events don’t seem content with reviving just one era. A deadly pandemic has taken millions of lives across the globe. Infla[...]

Apr 28, 2022

Something phishy

About seven or eight years ago, I was sitting at my desk one morning when I received an urgent text from my then-boss. She was holding a meeting, according to the text, and needed me to purchase $1,000 in electronic gift cards as a giveaway to the attendees as soon as possible. Needless to say, […]

Apr 28, 2022

Commentary: Adjusting to a new shipping reality

Ocean shipping patterns established during the first year of the pandemic have taken root, and it’s time for shippers to adjust strategies for the long term. That was the takeaway from the first in-person Trans-Pacific Maritime (TPM) Conference in three years, presented in Long Beach, California, in March by IHS Markit Ltd. (n[...]

Apr 28, 2022

Sound investments

Let’s simply call it a magazine publisher’s reality check. When news reports of supply chain disruptions and record backups at West Coast ports began to appear last year, I immediately thought, “What’s going on at the Port of Virginia?” When I leave downtown Norfolk, it is almost always via the Midtown Tunnel. Emerging[...]

Virginia Business Editor Richard Foster
Mar 30, 2022

Rising to the challenges

Last summer, as I was eating dinner at a Norfolk bar with a group of my Lead Virginia classmates from far Southwest Virginia, one of them asked what decision makers in Richmond thought about their region. “Most of them don’t think about it at all,” I replied bluntly and not a little sadly. During my […]

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