A year after joining Qwest as vice president of corporate communications, Bob Charlton is no longer with the Denver-based phone company.
Qwest’s corporate communications staff, which deals with investors and the media, will now report to Laura Sankey, vice president of marketing and advertising. Sankey recently joined Qwest from Coors.
“We’re simply reorganizing corporate communications functions to align more fully with the marketing and advertising effort that’s led by Laura Sankey,” said Qwest spokesman Bob Toevs.
Charlton’s last day with Qwest was Friday. He formerly spent more than 20 years with Dow Chemical Co.
Additional business news briefs:
100,000 shares? That’s a healthy meal
Stephen B. Hughes can afford to eat very well these days.
The longtime food industry executive, whose résumé includes chief executive of tea-maker Celestial Seasonings, has done well with his latest venture, Boulder Specialty Brands.
The company, which will change its name later this year to Smart Balance Inc. after its $465 million acquisition of Cresskill, N.J.-based GFA Brands Inc., has seen its share price increase by about 30 percent since its initial public offering in December.
Hughes last week transferred 100,000 shares of company stock to his wife and a trust, a transaction valued at about $1 million based on Friday’s closing price of $10.50.
Chamber keynoter hits a flat note
“Today” show travel guru Peter Greenberg entertained hundreds of local business leaders as the keynote speaker at the Denver Metro Convention & Visitors Bureau’s annual membership meeting last week.
He also probably made some in the audience a bit uncomfortable.
To highlight its accomplishments over the past year, the convention bureau showed a video touting its colorful new destination brochures and how it was able to draw a record number of tourists to town last year.
Greenberg then took the stage and promptly told Denver’s hospitality industry to burn their brochures. The strong numbers don’t matter, he said.
“It’s not about people seeing Denver, it’s about people experiencing it,” he said.
Greenberg went on to skewer the airline industry, calling it “a good example of what you should never do.”
“If you want to become a millionaire, start with $1 billion and open an airline,” he said.
Many good workers are looking for work
It’s tough for companies to find good workers – and even more difficult to keep them.
A new study by research firm Leadership IQ found that 47 percent of high-performing workers are actively looking for other jobs. That compares with 25 percent of middle performers and 18 percent of low-performing workers, whom companies most would like to kiss off.
“The worst part of this is that we typically cause our high performers to quit by how we treat them,” Mark Murphy, chief executive of Leadership IQ, said in a statement. “Who gets the late hours and the stress? It’s not the low performers.”
The results were based on a survey of 16,237 employees on a range of work and retention issues.
A long chow line for stock in Chipotle
McDonald’s Corp. couldn’t meet demand for the spinoff of Chipotle Mexican Grill Inc. as subscribers sought 14 times more shares than it had to offer.
The company will accept 18.6 million McDonald’s shares out of 262.7 million tendered by investors. About 16.5 million Chipotle shares were offered in the exchange, Oak Brook, Ill.-based McDonald’s said Friday in a statement.
McDonald’s, the world’s largest restaurant chain, is making the final break with Denver-based Chipotle after first selling shares to the public in January.
The split will let McDonald’s focus on improving profit at its more than 31,900 restaurants worldwide, while freeing Chipotle to pursue U.S. expansion.
“Ginger or Mary Ann?” question stumps Ritter
Politicos of any stripe – even bleeding-heart liberals if they’re being honest – would admit they often get a chuckle from Jon Caldara, president of the libertarian Independence Institute in Golden.
Caldara’s biting sense of humor surfaced again last week in his weekly newsletter, where he recounted a question that he submitted to gubernatorial candidates Bob Beauprez and Bill Ritter via the Boulder Weekly.
His simple question: “Ginger or Mary Ann?” (Note to those born since the late ’60s: It’s a reference to the TV comedy “Gilligan’s Island.”)
Caldara describes the responses this way: “Bob Beauprez laughed and answered, Mary Ann. Bill Ritter paused and gave this answer, ‘Did the congressman answer this? You caught me off guard. I have nothing to say on that. I don’t know the answer to that.’
“In over a decade of asking this goofy question to politicians, this is the first time anyone has EVER gotten it wrong. Bill, how can you NOT know how to answer this one?”
FROM STAFF AND WIRE REPORTS
This story has been corrected in this online archive. Originally, due to a reporting error, it misstated the name of the event at which Peter Greenberg spoke. It was the Denver Metro Convention & Visitors Bureawu’s annual membership meeting.
Additionally, it incorrectly stated that Stephen Hughes, chief executive of Boulder Specialty Brands, sold shares. Instead, he transferred them to his wife and a trust. The item also indicated that Boulder Specialty Brands had changed its name. The change will take place later this year.
