A family from Calgary rides the gondola at Panorama Resort in Panorama, B.C.Todd Korol For The Globe and Mail
Each week, Report on Business editors choose five stories that shouldn't be missed. Here are the 'must reads' for the week of July 26, 2010.
Selling the high life in hard times
As Fortress Investment Group LLC struggled to keep control of its Whistler Blackcomb Ski Resort during the Winter Olympics, Rick Jensen managed to steal a small jewel from the resort operator's crown. The former three-term mayor of Cranbrook, B.C., gathered a group of friends and persuaded them to bid for Panorama Mountain Village, a fully developed ski hill with underdeveloped real estate potential just outside Invermere, B.C., a 3 and 1/2-hour drive from Calgary. Late last winter, Mr. Jensen's group took ownership of the resort for a reported $27-million. Their bold gamble will provide one of the first tests of whether a recovering economy will restore consumer demand for Canadian resort property, a market that was hammered by the recession.
Please hold, we’ll be with you in a moment
Putting customers on hold for an hour tends to drive them away. As does dragging out a simple request for more than two weeks. Or calling back three times to confirm the answer to a simple "yes or no" question. But cable giant Shaw Communications Inc., at least according to its Western Canadian rival Telus Corp., is employing these "bully tactics" to keep subscribers within the fold, frustrating Telus's effort to win new customers. In a complaint filed with the telecom regulator, Telus has alleged that Shaw is throwing up roadblocks to customers who want to switch to Telus's relatively new Internet-based TV (IPTV) product, Optik, which the company is rolling out through Western Canada - the heartland of Shaw's formidable cable footprint.
BP taps all-American as next CEO
Among the many accomplishments that have brought Bob Dudley to the precipice of leading one of the world's largest companies, one of his primary credentials may not appear on his résumé at all. It's his passport, emblazoned with the outstretched wings of the bald eagle. Named to the top spot at BP Plc on Tuesday, Mr. Dudley will be the first non-Briton to take the job. His own background includes the kind of executive experience expected for someone chosen for the corner office: He led the company's Russian operations and has spent the past two years in a role current chief executive officer Tony Hayward likened to acting as a foreign secretary - a globe-trotting corporate fixer.
Business concerned over census changes
When consultant Linda Pickard advises small businesses on their five-year strategies, the first place she turns is Statistic Canada's reservoir of data from the long-form census. Ms. Pickard combs through StatsCan's databases in search of population trends, local economic indicators, ethnic make-up and education levels - important pieces of market information in planning a company's expansion. For Ms. Pickard's clients, and for hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs across Canada, the census is both a direct and indirect source of reliable information, and helps to form a road map for where they want to go. Now, the small and medium-sized businesses who lack the marketing muscle to conduct their own private surveys stand to be among those most affected by the plan to drop the mandatory long-form census.
RIM aims to take bite out of Apple
Canada's most important technology company is launching its biggest attack yet on the consumer market, with one rival squarely in its sights. In a direct assault on Apple's popular iPhone, Research In Motion is expected to unveil a new version of its BlackBerry operating system, as well as a new smart phone, the BlackBerry 9800, at a launch party in New York next week.