This is the 12th edition of Georgia Trend’s 100 Most Influential Georgians, and it’s different from the others for one main reason – the speaker of the House did not make the cut this year. At presstime, Rep. David Ralston…
The word came down from Atlanta late in July, about a week before teachers in the Peach County school system reported to work for the 2009-2010 school year. “We were told, essentially, that we had to cut almost $800,000 from…
Hospitals are scary and necessary motherships of healing where medical miracles happen daily, and where tens of thousands of people die unnecessarily every year. Patients, who don’t want to be there to begin with, have to confront their illnesses and…
You hear it every time another corporate scandal makes headlines, whenever an Enron, an Arthur Andersen or Bernie Madoff rears its misguided, greedy head: “Whatever happened to business ethics?” And on the heels of that, the jokes, beginning with the…
Georgia is experiencing its highest jobless rate in decades and the line for unemployment benefits is only expected to get longer. Ask one of the 500,000 or so people who are out of work in Georgia about the best place…
Bob Prechter wants to change the way you think. He wants to alter your most basic assumptions about cause and effect, the market, the economy, human social history and Shakespeare. To some, especially the 80 or so people who work…
They don’t give kids sling blades any more at Rabun Gap-Nacoochee School, and that really bothers some of the older alumni who remember the good old days. But that isn’t the worst of it. Turns out, some of the students…
James Trussell was 37 in 2003, when he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, but he’d been experiencing the symptoms for several years – the rigidity in his body, the tremors in his hands. Because he was young, and it’s an…
Jeff Marshall hates the term “for-profit.” Hates it. “It’s a twist of words, a nuance to make ‘not-for-profit’ seem somehow more – I don’t know – community friendly,” says Marshall, a cardiologist and president of NGTC Health Properties, a partnership…
Craig Lesser still has the bar tab three years later, tucked away in the back of a commemorative photo album. Scrawled on the back of the receipt are details of a billion-dollar deal that is salvation for a struggling Georgia…
Under different circumstances, there was nothing the Georgia Tech faithful would have enjoyed more than the sight of Charley Trippi falling flat on his face. Unfortunately for the Yellow Jackets, the University of Georgia sophomore phenom was lying prone in…
The big man dropped heavily to the ground. He couldn’t move his right side, couldn’t speak. He’d been having heart problems, but his wife had seen a stroke before and that’s what she told the 911 dispatcher. Dr. David Hess…
There’s tangible evidence of a higher power at work in Sandy Springs. It’s on the roof of the Northwest Unitarian Universalist Congregation sanctuary, where 20 solar photovoltaic modules are capturing the sun’s energy and creating electricity. Down in Bluffton at…
Beverly Hall was at her wits’ end, ready to throw in the towel after just six months on the job as the Atlanta Public Schools superintendent. It’s not that Hall didn’t know what she was getting into a decade ago…
It took Fuller Cochran 10 years to buy his farm in the Appalachian foothills of Whitfield County, beginning in 1932, at a cost of one bale of cotton per year. It was an investment in a future he could not…
Atlanta will be the center of the biotech universe this month when it hosts the BIO International Convention, May 18-21, at the Georgia World Congress Center. If there were an Olympics for the global life sciences industry, this would be…
While you’re sitting there reading this, millions of your fellow humans are defending the planet against an alien attack, winning the Stanley Cup, raising the dead, trading blows with Muhammad Ali and wreaking havoc on the world’s oil supplies, among…
Jason Winters’ first task as the new (and probably youngest ever) Chattooga County Commissioner had nothing to do with economic development, the campaign platform that got him elected. That’s because the county’s animal control director resigned the minute Winters assumed…
Anyone paying attention to the economic news coming out of central Georgia is at risk for whiplash. For every up there was at least one down, for every high a low, every yin a yang. There is an overall purgatorial…
Buoyed by two growing ports, fortunate decisions at the Pentagon, a sprinkling of colleges and universities and two interstates, the economy of southeast Georgia is surviving a national and global recession, with parts of the region almost assured of emerging…
Michelle Nunn Atlanta President/CEO Points of Light Institute Co-Founder Hands On Network In 1989, a group of friends met in an Ansley Park condo to found a new kind of volunteer organization, matching helping hands with worthy causes. Hands On…
Now you can look it up. It’s official. Last summer, Merriam-Webster added the word “subprime” to its new edition of the Collegiate Dictionary. The primary definition: Having or being an interest rate that is higher than a prime rate and…
Builders aren’t building and bulldozers are idle. New McMansions sit vacant. Businesses are declaring bankruptcy, and unemployment numbers are growing. Automakers want government bailout money because they can’t sell cars, in part because consumers can’t get loans from skittish banks,…
Atlanta’s epic, daily traffic congestion, and the hapless drivers who grow old as they creep sluggishly from place to place, have long been the fodder of jokes and ridicule. But as leadership talked much and did very little to loosen…
Spurgeon Richardson Former President/CEO Atlanta Convention & Visitors Bureau Atlanta Age: 67 For more than 17 years Spurgeon Richardson led the ACVB, and the hospitality and tourism industry soared. Millions of business travelers and tourists flocked to Atlanta, landing at…
There’s an energy harvest in Georgia as utility companies look to the state’s abundant forests for a clean fuel stock to satisfy a growing appetite for electricity and lessen reliance on coal-fired plants that spew harmful greenhouse gases, such as…
Richard Sowell took a roundabout route from blood-spattered kitchen tables in the wee hours of rural south Georgia mornings to his current post as dean of the WellStar College of Health and Human Services at Kennesaw State University. His father…
A drought envelops Georgia like pitiless lava and parched communities carefully monitor their drinking water supplies. Stream flows approach record lows, and lake levels plummet. Water authorities throughout the state try to wring every available drop. Administering the supply of…
It’s the Friday before Labor Day and 73 employees exit The Atlanta Journal-Constitution for the last time, the latest round of job buyouts at the tilting daily newspaper. As he watches colleagues leave for the longest holiday weekend of their…
Anyone who honestly remembers early adolescence knows that the “Wonder Years” were not always so wonderful. The sporadic, out-of-sync growth spurts, the sudden appearance of facial hair and attitude, raging hormones, raging curiosity, raging independence – all in all, quite…
Last April a group of 100 or so Metro Atlanta leaders went to school in Denver, where they saw a thriving metro region confronting familiar challenges of rapid growth. These Atlantans, part of the 12th annual LINK (Leadership, Innovation, Networking,…
In the gap between opportunity and sealing the deal they paced the halls, wearing intersecting paths in the carpet, these polished, well-dressed men and women with hands-free communication technology, holding conversations with telephone phantoms half a hemisphere away. Spanish and…
The seeds of a national revolution were planted 40 years ago in Atlanta, when Phil Woosnam guided a soccer team stocked with foreigners to the city’s first major league sports championship. Throughout that summer of 1968 the Atlanta Chiefs played…
When Catherine Ross looks at a map of the Southeastern United States, city limits and state lines start to blur and something else comes into focus. She sees the rough draft of economic salvation, a web of seamless connectivity, metropolitan…
Cathy Gaddis spent her career under the hoods of other people’s cars, a single mom raising two sons around a rotating menagerie of pets and in the pits of Oklahoma dirt tracks where she drove her own Fords – “Fords!…
Charles Kemp grew up in rural southwest Georgia, on the frontier of primary healthcare, traveling from farm to farm with his father, a veterinarian based in Camilla. Kemp is 24, a third-year student in the Mercer University School of Medicine.…
Every time she arrives at the grocery store checkout counter Judy Gordon is given the same choice we all get: paper or plastic. And she always chooses neither. “If I had to choose, I guess I’d go with paper because…
The path to enlightenment for Freddy Bensch and Kevin McNerney began with 10 cases of liquid gold. The two were students at the University of Colorado at the time, studying environmental conservation and accounting, and working part time at a…
Tom Bell just didn’t get it. He was the new guy, so he couldn’t possibly know that Grady Memorial Hospital’s financial despair was like traffic or Neal Boortz or gravity – a chronic condition of life in Atlanta, subliminally evident,…
Beverly Sparks grew up the daughter of a bug man in the heart of south Georgia’s agricultural swath. Her father, an entomologist for the United States Depart-ment of Agriculture (USDA) in Tifton, made a habit of taking his work home…
It was like a religious conversion for Jill Stuckey, or maybe the Big Bang, a tree falling in the woods hundreds of miles away, heard and felt. About two years ago she was called to Gov. Sonny Perdue’s office for…
Peter Michelson has been walking the green line for about 30 years, since he was a kid in Boston going door-to-door for Greenpeace, campaigning to stop the bludgeoning of baby seals in Canada. He’s a fourth-generation contractor, an environmentalist with…
Business incubators are like almost any other hatchery – the most important component isn’t the physical space. It’s the heat that you cook with. “Bricks and mortar are important, but you can get a building anywhere,” says Don Betts, program…
Gena Abraham wasn’t like the other little girls. Growing up in a house filled with her older sisters’ dolls, she was more likely to sit on the floor playing project manager, building make-believe homes and cities, shaping her vocational infrastructure.…
Robert Sumichrast is grounded in a reality where physics, philosophy and business converge. He’s an academic, a scientist interested in how things work in the world, and humanity’s place in it. And he thinks he can guide the Terry College…
A few years before she became governor of Texas, Ann Richards gave the keynote address at the 1988 Democratic National Convention in Atlanta. She began by wryly noting the historic scarcity of women at the podium. “But if you give…
Places in Georgia Trend’s Most Influential Georgians Hall of Fame are reserved for individuals whose achievements and accomplishments ensure them a permanent place on any roster of prominent and powerful Georgians. The 2008 honorees are baseball legend Hank Aaron, former…
There is no such thing as a perfect 10. What would be the point? “Ring the bells that still can ring, forget your perfect offering. There is a crack in everything – that’s how the light gets in,” writes Leonard…
Michael Adams President University of Georgia Athens Age: 59 UGA continues to be recognized as one of the nation’s best business and public research universities. Adams’ efforts to improve student quality are reflected in the growing campus. Total construction initiated…
Gena Abraham, Commissioner, Georgia Department of Transportation Ray Anderson, Founder/Chairman, Interface, Inc. Charles Bannister, Chairman, Gwinnett County Board of Commissioners Robert Benham, Justice, Georgia Supreme Court Sally Bethea, Executive Director, Upper Chattahoochee Riverkeeper Neal Boortz, talk show host, WSB Radio…
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