Linda Kluender really gets into learning, teaching and business and the three mesh well to make her Minnesota Lake consulting business. But she doesn’t teach the finer points of business buying and selling. And she doesn’t wave a magic wand over an accounting hat and out pops a rabbit of cost-cutting measures to keep your company afloat. Her business consulting solutions are more in the interpersonal realm.
Read MoreSon of world’s greatest singer attends Gustavus Adolphus College, marries soft-hearted Iowan and moves to Sweden, later begins long career at Gustavus Adolphus and opens gift shop in St. Peter garage. It’s tough to pick which story to write.
So let’s begin with Jussi, the great Jussi Bjorling, who from 1938-1959 sang tenor at the Metropolitan Opera. Nearly all top-hat music critics utter Bjorling’s name in the same breath as Domingo, Pavarotti and Caruso—and more than a few claim Jussi Bjorling was the world’s greatest singer of all time, of any genre.
Read MoreIt seems almost aeons since your five-year run as executive director of Valley Industrial Development Corp.* ended. So much has changed since 1997. You then became national marketing director of Scholarship Management Services (SMS) before joining the Minneapolis Regional Chamber of Commerce (MRCC) in 1999. You left there in January 2003 as its chief executive officer and president. You have earned a Masters from Regis University of Denver, Colorado.
And now you’ve returned home.
Read MoreHistorian Steven J. Keillor* writes in his book Cooperative Commonwealth that the cooperative was a widely used form of business organization in rural Minnesota through World War II because “business was distant” then. Rural residents and farmers organized cooperatives, such as the creamery, to provide goods and services to areas off the beaten track from big-city suppliers. Ownership in a co-op also gave these rural denizens a measure of local control over their economies.
Read MoreThe Kenya Airways pilot dips his left wing as if to prod Timothy Tulloch into appreciating the vast plains of Tsavo, and beyond, the snow-clad Mt. Kilimanjaro. Nairobi is fifteen minutes yet. The earth below is a lush paradise of cheetah, Maasai villages and elephant herds. The seat belt light above him flashes. Mt. Kilimanjaro appears out his window.
Read MoreOnly four persons from the nine-county area around Greater Mankato have been inducted into the Minnesota Museum of Broadcasting Hall of Fame. Of the four, three are Linders. Our cover story, John Linder, isn’t in the MMB Hall of Fame—yet, but he is creating lots of radio waves in our state’s broadcasting industry.
His waves aren’t tsunamis: they’re more a never-ending, behind-the-scenes ripple.
Read MoreIt was a dark and stormy night.
Leo Nissen was scrunched down in his black sedan, fumbling with chow mein and chopsticks and peering out from behind a Star Tribune. He was waiting for the blubbery bloke with the spaghetti hair and toothless grin—the bad guy.
Read MoreThe outdated notion of private counseling being an hour of pure hell with a daffy German shrink asking stomach-churning questions goes out the window for good during an appointment with Joanna Hocker. She’s a Licensed Psychologist all right, but none like most people have experienced: with her seemingly perpetual cackle of a laugh and infectious Christmas glow she’s more a cross between Phyllis Diller and JoAnne Worley (of Laugh-In fame) than Sigmund Freud and Carl Rogers, both well-known therapists.
Read MoreDan Gislason digs the Icelandic countryside. It’s a winter wonderland of crystal-clean waterfalls and gargantuan glaciers, an arctic canvas of white and lipstick red homes nestled against pastel-green Ansel Adams ridges. Iceland is a cornucopia of mentally stimulating sights and refreshing sounds—the rushing waterfall, the flapping gull, the gentle spring wind melting ice. Rural Iceland would have been a natural fit for Dan today if his ancestors hadn’t left there in the late 1800s.
Read More