The Digest
What’s Happening at KVCC
What’s below in this edition
Wal-Mart analyst (Pages 1-3)Friday recreation (Page 10)
Salute to wellness (Pages 3/4)Day of Silence (Pages 10/11)
Focus folks (Page 4)Music legacy (Pages 11-13)
Scholarship fete (Pages 4-6) Hispanic College Day (P-13/14)
A Katrina perspective (Pages 7/8)Band concert (Pages 14/15)
The ‘Edge’ (Page 8) Art-show reception (Page 15)
Tornado time (Pages 8/9)‘The Last Waltz’ (Pages15/16)
Adopt-A-Highway (Page 9) PTK winners (Pages16/17)
Health screens (Pages 9/10) Student photos (Page 17)
And finally (Page 17)
☻☻☻☻☻☻
‘Wal-Mart Effect’ author here Monday
The good, the bad and the ugly about Wal-Mart’s impact on American business and consumerism will wrap up KVCC’s 2005-06 Artists Forum series.
Charles Fishman, author of “The Wal-Mart Effect : How the World's Most Powerful Company Really Works--and How It's Transforming the American Economy,” will speak at 7:30 p.m. on Monday (April 17) in the Commons Theater on the Texas Township Campus.
Fishman’s presentation is free. He’ll sign copies of his book from 6 to 7:30 p.m. and meet the public at a reception following his remarks, which will be capped by a question-and-answer session. Artists Forum is jointly sponsored by the college and the Irving S. Gilmore Foundation.
Fishman, now a senior editor and reporter for Fast Company magazine, shops at Wal-Mart stores and, like most Americans, appreciates the enterprise’s price-cutting strategy. His book postulates that the story of Wal-Mart’s evolution is actually the story of the transformation of the American economy over the last 20 years.
Fishman’s penchant for journalism can be traced to his days as a seventh-grader in the mid-1970s. After attending Harvard where he worked for the student newspaper, Fishman was hired as a metro reporter for the Washington Post. He recalls he often
wrote more stories in two weeks than he now writes in a year.
Taking a respite from the world of news gathering, he went to work on a Mississippi River tugboat, pushing coal barges for a power plant. It was dirty, difficult, dangerous work. He retired after dislocating his shoulder falling down a ladder carrying a can of Comet. He was attempting to carry out the captain's order: "Fishman, find yourself something to clean."
Shoulder healed, he returned to journalism to cover the space shuttle Challenger disaster as a national reporter for the Post. Next came a stint with the Orlando Sentinel, where he was a staff writer, managing editor, and editor. He left to freelance and ended up ghostwriting a book, “The Real Heroes of Business and Not a CEO Among Them.”
After a variety of management assignments for the Raleigh News & Observer in North Carolina, he yearned for a return to writing, which is how he ended up at Fast Company as its pioneer reporter. He calls himself “the voice for traditional journalism inside the wild laboratory of new- new journalism.”
The genesis of his book was a story in the December 2003 issue of Fast Company headlined “The Wal-Mart You Don't Know.” Learning that little had been written about Wal-Mart, he decided to focus on an American company that has been relatively secretive in its operations.
Fishman follows the ethics of journalism in his account, presenting the consumer benefits of Wal-Mart’s staggering growth and places it in the context of globalization and the rise of mega-corporations.
Wal-Mart employs 1.6 million people in the United States alone in outlets that are nearing 4,000 in number. It does more business than Target, Sears, Kmart, J.C. Penney, Safeway, and Kroger combined. More than half of all Americans live within five miles of a Wal-Mart store, which is reminiscent of the fact that each minute of each day, an American is within arm’s length of a spider.
He also presents the case against Wal-Mart. Commented one reviewer: “His carefully balanced approach only makes the downside of Wal-Mart’s market dominance more vivid.”
Through interviews with former Wal-Mart insiders and suppliers, including the chief executive officer of Snapper mowers who engineered his products being removed from the shelves of the world's biggest retailer, Fishman explores the company’s “penny-pinching mindset” and shows how Wal-Mart’s “mania to reduce prices has driven suppliers into bankruptcy and sent factory jobs overseas.” The account contains research on Wal-Mart’s effects on local retailers.
The Snapper CEO balked because he believed Wal-Mart’s philosophy wasn't compatible with his company’s future. Snapper markets what it believes to be quality machinery, stuff that is reliable and durable. Cost is not really a factor. The value isn't in the price, it's in the performance and the longevity. That’s at loggerheads with how Wal-Mart operates.
In Fishman’s view, the “Wal-Mart effect” is double-edged. Consumers benefit from lower prices, even if they don’t shop at the company’s stores, but it has the power of life and death over its suppliers.
He suggests that Wal-Mart is too large these days to be subject to market forces or traditional rules. In the end, he sees Wal-Mart as neither good nor evil. Instead, it is simply a fact of modern life that can barely be comprehended, must less controlled.
Economists define “The Wal-Mart Effect” as a combination of factors that including forcing local competitors out of business, driving down wages, keeping inflation low, and productivity high.
On a global scale, its relentless commitment to “everyday low prizes,” according to one economist, has had a massive impact on the trend of importing goods from China at the cost of U. S. manufacturing jobs.
“Because of its strict policy on secrecy,” wrote David Siegfried in his review for the American Library Association, “surprisingly little is known about the inside workings of the largest corporation ever in the United States and now in the world.
“Fishman takes us inside the carefully guarded workings of the ‘Wal-Mart ecosystem,’” he wrote, “where management surrender their lives and families, working 12 hours a day, six days a week, in a near-holy quest toward the never-ending goal of lower prices. He brings to light the serious repercussions that are occurring as consumers and suppliers have become locked in an addiction to massive sales of cheaper and cheaper goods.”
KVCC to celebrate wellness Tuesday
April 18 is the date for a KVCC celebration of wellness featuring presentations and exhibits on nutrition, physical activity, exercise equipment, chiropractic techniques, health measurements such as blood pressure, cardio-pulmonary function, massage, and a cooking demonstration with lots of healthy recipes.
The 2006 Wellness Festival will run on Tuesday from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. in the Student Commons. It is free and open to the public.
The featured presenter will be nutritionist Chris Johnson at 9:30 a.m. and 12:30 p.m. in the Commons Theater.
Johnson will explore the current landscape of fad diets and outdated nutritional guidelines. He’ll blend nutritional and physiological information with a step-by-step program that people can easily implement and follow without sacrificing an enjoyable lifestyle.
Among the exhibitors will be Gazelle Sports, the college’s dental-hygiene, nursing and respiratory-therapy programs, the Kalamazoo Center for the Healing Arts, chiropractor Chuck Carpentier, Lee’s Sports and Sportswear, Natural Health Foods, Breakaway Bicycles, Coca Cola, the American Cancer Society, the American Heart Association, the American Diabetes Association, the Kalamazoo Bicycle Club, Rotary International’s "Fit 2006: Community Walking Program,” Abundant Health Chiropractic Center, the Milwood Spine Center, Holtyn & Associates, the KVCC Wellness and Fitness Center, and Canteen Services, the college’s food-service vendor.
There will also be demonstrations of pilates, yoga, aerobics, and stretching.
Mike Boersma of the Kalamazoo Bicycling Club will outline levels of riding for all bikers that can add to a person’s physical fitness and reduce transportation costs.
Marie Teitgen will detail the activities and events of the local chapter of the American Cancer Society that are undertaken to bring about the eradication of the disease.
Kalamazoo Rotarian Karl Sandelin will discuss a physical-fitness collaboration between the local club and a counterpart organization in Finland intended to promote wellness and health through a daily commitment to exercise. The endeavor, which will include 1,000 participants in this part of Michigan and 300 in Finland, will run from June 1 through Aug. 31.
The Milwood Spine Center’s Dr. Geoffrey Chau will explain how a person’s posture is the window to one’s health and well-being, while Jacque Stamos of the KVCC Canteen will arrange for chicken and vegetarian stir-fry recipes to be prepared for purchase over the noon hour.
Those attending a presentation will receive a free Wellness Festival 2006 T-shirt designed by KVCC students at the Center for New Media.
The college’s fitness-and-wellness program for its employees has been chosen as a national model by Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and Prevention.
Representatives from the Atlanta-based division of the U. S. Department of Health and Human Services came to the Texas Township Campus for a site visit last fall. The CDC is the lead federal agency spearheading national efforts to identify and disseminate information about model health-promotion programs at worksites. The KVCC program was identified by a panel of experts as one that could serve as a national benchmark.
That designation trigged the visit by the agency’s new SWAT (Swift Worksite Assessment and Translation) project. It was launched because America’s overweight workforce is both a challenge to public health and a bottom-line business issue that affects the cost of health care, absenteeism, productivity and employee morale.
The CDC reports that SWAT’s mission is to identity innovative health-promotion programs in the workplace that show promise in helping employees maintain or attain healthy weight. A coming phase will be for the CDC to highlight programs that demonstrate positive results.
Focus Program to honor achievers
Success stories will be on the menu when The Focus Program stages its 15th student-achievement luncheon on the Texas Township Campus on Friday (April 21).
The Focus Program teams KVCC with Western Michigan University to ease the transition of students into four-year programs and degrees. More than 2,000 students have been involved in the initiative.
The invitation luncheon will be held from 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m.
The guest speakers will be Focus Program graduates Iesha Murray, Steve Galvan and Lorraine Woodson.
Galvan is in his senior year at WMU. Murray will be a graduate student at Western while Woodson is employed at the Family Health Center.
Focus Program assistant Aisha Tillman, who is set to receiver her master’s in social work from Western, will sing at the luncheon. She is ending her two-year relationship with the KVCC program at the end of this semester. “Brother2Brother” enrollee Derek Potter will recite his poetry.
Stryker’s Brown at scholarship dinner
To help the KVCC Foundation reach its goal of raising money for scholarships, it has booked a keynote speaker who knows a bit about attracting capital investments and profits.
He’s John W. Brown, whose resume includes taking the Stryker Corp. from annual sales of $22.7 million in 1977 to placement on the Fortune 500 list and yearly sales exceeding $3 billion within 25 years. Stryker’s annual sales are now nearing $5 billion.
Now semi-retired as non-executive chairman of Stryker’s board, Brown will speak about “Lessons Learned” at the foundation’s second fund-raising dinner slated for 6 to 8:30 p.m. on Wednesday, May 31, at the Radisson Plaza Hotel & Suites.
● Tickets for “Opportunities for Education” are $95 each.
● A corporate sponsorship for a table of eight is available for $1,200.
Commented Steve Doherty, the foundation’s executive director:
“This will be an evening full of inspiration, excellent dining, common-sense commentary and personal anecdotes that apply to both business and everyday life, and the knowledge that participants will be helping students and the college in producing quality graduates and an effective workforce.”
Brown, who got his start in higher education at a two-year college in his home state of Tennessee, was raised on a hard-scrabble “boondocks” farm just outside of Paris near the Kentucky border.
His early memories of a work ethic were of steering a plow behind two mules.
While hanging on to that plow, he realized that education would be his ticket out of the river-bottom land of the Tennessee Valley Authority. At Freed-Hardeman College in Henderson, he majored in pre-engineering and met his future spouse, Rosemary. They are the parents of two grown daughters.
After earning his degree in chemical engineering at Auburn University in 1957, Brown launched his professional career initially with an aluminum manufacturer and then with the company destined to be Morton Thiokol.
Brown moved closer to Kalamazoo in 1965 when he joined the Squibb Co., a major pharmaceutical competitor of The Upjohn Co. In addition to rising to the post of assistant to the president, Brown was also a new-product coordinator, working with manufacturing and marketing divisions to bring Squibb innovations into the mainstream.
In 1972, when the parent company purchased Edward Weck & Co., Brown was tapped to serve as the subsidiary’s president and was in that position when the late Burton Upjohn of Kalamazoo would not take no for an answer and recruited him to join Stryker in January of 1977 as president and chief executive officer.
The year before Brown began calling Kalamazoo home, Stryker sales were pegged at $17 million with earnings at $1.1 million. By 1987, those corresponding figures were $148 million and $12.7 million.
Brown’s first year at the helm was dedicated to orienting himself and mapping long-range plans. If Stryker was to fulfill the destiny foreseen by its founder, Dr. Homer Stryker, and his son, Lee, who died in a plane crash in July of 1976, the path to travel, in Brown’s viewpoint, must lead to the public sale of the company’s stock so that the generated funds could purchase other enterprises and produce diversification.
“A gentleman’s agreement I had with the Stryker board,” Brown told an interviewer, “was that eventually we would take the company public. It’s one way to establish the true value of a company, but I also had a personal motive. I always had the dream that if I ever got to run a company, I wanted it to be in the public arena.”
That all came about on March 28, 1979, when Stryker filed for its initial public offering with the Securities and Exchange Commission, proposing the sale of 2.1 million shares of stock, which represented less than 40 percent of the entity’s holdings.
The rest has become corporate and Fortune 500 history. By 1980, Brown was chairman of the Stryker board. He began his phase-out in 2003 when Stephen P. MacMillan was appointed his imminent successor effective Jan. 1, 2005.
KVCC President Marilyn Schlack will also have some podium duty May 31 as she offers perspectives about how scholarships give students the boost they need to become productive citizens and workers, the kinds that tend to give back later in their lives.
The KVCC Foundation was formed in 1980 and has accumulated nearly $8 million in assets. Its mission is to enhance educational opportunities and the learning environment at the college by supporting the academic, literary and scientific activities of KVCC students and faculty.
Its assists the college’s Honors Program, minority and non-traditional students through scholarships and awards grants that promote innovative approaches to learning.
“Because KVCC’s tuition is the lowest among the state’s 28 community colleges and fees are practically non-existent,” Doherty said, “scholarship dollars take students a very, very long way toward their goals. We want to help even more in the coming years, now that state and federal sources of scholarships are either drying up or are in jeopardy because of budget cuts.”
In the current academic year, the foundation was able to assist almost 400 students through scholarships amounting to $200,500 that covered not only tuition, fees, books and supplies, but also child-care and transportation costs that students face in pursuing a degree or a new career.
“That represents a minimal fraction of the dollar value of scholarships that are available through the KVCC Office of Financial Aid,” Doherty said. “That type of assistance has federal and state sources that carry restrictions. So do some of those scholarships established by organizations or individuals. And all of those are very important.
“Ours, however, are more open-ended, less restrictive, and available to a broader representation of students who choose to attend KVCC,” Doherty said. “They are what our ‘Opportunities for Education’ event is all about.”
While the unprecedented, nationally recognized gift to this community that is The Kalamazoo Promise is a blessing to families living in the Kalamazoo Public Schools district, Doherty said, during a typical semester no more than 15 percent of KVCC’s enrollment are Kalamazoo graduates.