| Virginia goes
to bat for major league ball
Ah, summer and the livin’ is easy.
Time for the beach and a little baseball. As the daughter
of a former professional baseball player and ump, I’m
rooting for Virginia in its bid to land major league
ball via the Montreal Expos. Back in the 1940s and 1950s
my dad, Paul L. Crawford, played in the minors for the
Norfolk Tars and the Durham Bulls. He was a southpaw
catcher who scored quite a few homers. He went on to
manage a Piedmont League team at Elizabeth City and
then later took a job as an umpire for the Tidewater
Tides.
This Triple-A team was a successor to
the Tars. I can remember cheering for the Tides in the
1960s when the team played at Lawrence Stadium in Portsmouth,
long before Norfolk built Met Park and then Harbor Park
stadium, the current home for the team now known as
the Norfolk Tides.
So, not surprisingly, baseball and business
make sense to me. Why not use sports to create jobs,
economic development and family entertainment? You can
read about Virginia’s effort to snag the Expos
here.
When it comes to fouls, no one seems
to have hit as many as the executive suite, with several
big-name company CEOs falling from grace in the last
two years after scandals exposed exploits of greed and
fraud. This month’s cover
story takes a look at the challenges of the corner
office. We interviewed four executives in Virginia —
two CEOs and two company owners — to get a feel
for the challenges executives face today and how they
handle them.
Many leaders rise to the top because
they model ethical behavior. One group of CEOs is so
concerned about the need to renew the importance of
ethics in business practices that it put up $2.7 million
to fund a new ethics institute at the University of
Virginia’s Darden Graduate School of Business
Administration. Read our story on how the Business Roundtable
Institute for Corporate Ethics hopes to educate new
and emerging business leaders here.
Also in this month’s issue is
a look at telecom survivors.
Some are finding new growth by offering Voice over Internet
Protocol, which allows telephone traffic over the Internet.
Besides baseball, another rite of summer
— every four years — brings the country’s
two major party national conventions, where fears of
terrorism will bring additional security measures. A
Richmond-area firm, Hankins and Anderson, is one of
a handful the U.S. State Department hires to improve
security at embassies around the world. Its executives
can tell you how long it takes to get home from Afghanistan,
34 hours, and what it costs to buy a beer in Laos —
50 cents for a half-liter. For more details, check out
the company profile.
That’s our roster. If you run
into Bud Selig, don’t forget to mention that Virginia
would make a good home base for the Expos.
Paula
C. Squires
Managing Editor
psquires@va-business.com
Return to Virginia Business - July 2004
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