Chris Wiener’s effortless, boyish smile never seems to fade, and neither does Lady and Champ’s enthusiasm for ear scratching, nor the autumn sunlight piercing the rear barn window to warm a deserted barn-wood chair. The idyllic setting could have been an inspiring Norman Rockwell Saturday Evening Post cover.
A long-shot gamble paid off, and nursing home Lake Shore Inn of Waseca remained a viable enterprise because of it.
In 1987, recent Minnesota State University MBA graduate Pete Madel III gambled when accepting a position at the nonprofit Cystic Fibrosis Foundation—Minnesota chapter. Starting at the Foundation just didn’t have the panache of being a junior executive for, say, Cargill, General Mills or 3M.
Examples of how to run a highly successful $260 million corporate division roll off Bob Whitney’s pursed lips like 60 mph change-ups off Johan Santana’s spindly fingers—it’s a thing of beauty to watch, because few are better at it.
The 47-year-old Whitney is vice president of manufacturing for the Waseca division of Washington state-based, NASDAQ-traded Itron, which also has facilities in Raleigh, Oakland, Spokane, rural South Carolina, and four foreign countries.
Ideas flow from Mary and Wayne Dankert like newsprint off a high-speed printing press. Watch them go. The ideas flow because the two have so many percolating about in their constantly churning minds—so many ideas printing and collating, printing and collating, so many, one, two, three, four. And the ideas leaving make room for more.
Gene Miller now thanks his lucky stars that Waseca County’s welfare director retired a year early, meaning Miller and his unfinished MSU master’s degree in 1976 weren’t quite ready to interview for that position he had dearly wanted.
Iowa State defensive tackle Roger Ashland crouched at the five-yard line and readied himself to hammer a Nebraska running back corkscrewing through the air toward the goal line. Roger licked his chops, but he was the one getting slobberknockered.
“He just knocked me…oh, my gosh,” Ashland was saying of a 1966 collegiate football game, “that was the hardest I’d ever been hit in my life.”
MN Business News
