Crain’s Chicago Business, January 11, 2018 — Working in the early 2000s for Click Commerce, Adam Robinson noticed something about the franchise businesses and dealerships using Click’s software. “Turnover rates were so high,” he recalls. “Turnover was really crippling our effort to train our users on how to use the software.” A decade later, he co-founded Hireology, selling software to solve that problem. …
Read my story at Crain’s Chicago Business.
Photo: Kendall Karmanian
Make It Better, January-February 2018 — Read my recommendations for Chicago-area plays.
Crain’s Chicago Business, November 16, 2017 — David Rabie was leading the busy life of an MBA student at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, but he still made time for cooking healthy meals. It was a chore.
Read my story at Crain’s Chicago Business.
Photo: Kendall Karmanian
Crain’s Chicago Business, November 2, 2017 — Read my recommendations for the season’s best concerts, plus my contributions to a preview of holiday shows.
Photo: Robert Loerzel
Make It Better, November-December 2017 — Read my recommendations for Chicago-area plays.
Playbill, November 2017 — The first time Jimmy Buffett saw a rehearsal of Escape to Margaritaville, the new musical based on his songs, it was pretty obvious that he was having a good time. “He was smiling and laughing,” recalls Greg Garcia, co-writer of the musical’s book, who was sitting just in front of Buffett. “I kept looking back at him, and he was just loving it. Afterward, I go, ‘That’s the first Jimmy Buffett concert that you’ve ever been to, isn’t it?’ And he looked at me and smiled and said, ‘Yeah, man! I see what the fuss is all about!’” …
Photo: Matthew Murphy
Crain’s Chicago Business, October 12, 2017 — Experimenting in her University of Chicago laboratory, Cathryn Nagler says she’s on to a way to prevent allergic reactions to foods like peanuts by mimicking the behavior of certain bacteria that live inside us. But how does a professor of food allergies and pathology transform lab results into an actual drug that people can buy at pharmacies?
Read my story at Crain’s Chicago Business.
Photo: Kendall Karmanian
Crain’s Chicago Business, October 5, 2017 — As Dan Michelson sees it, few hospital executives know how much medical procedures actually cost. “The dirty little secret in health care is that everybody’s flying blind,” says Michelson, CEO of Strata Decision Technology. He has a tool that is giving more and more of them clearer vision—a cloud-based software platform called StrataJazz, which helps hospitals and health care systems keep track of how much everything costs—and which treatments are effective. …
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Photo: Kendall Karmanian
Playbill, October 2017 — People love to root for the underdog. And who’s more of an underdog than a ragtag kid shouting “Extra!, Extra!” as he sells newspapers on the crowded streets of a big, dirty city? That’s a big part of the appeal of Newsies.
“It is an immigrant story,” says Aaron Thielen, artistic director of the Marriott Theatre in Lincolnshire, which is producing the regional premiere of Disney’s Newsies, the stage adaptation of the 1992 Disney film. “You root for those kids because you see yourself—or your grandparents. There was a time when every family that came here had to fight to survive.” …
Photo: Amy Boyle
Pioneer Press/Arlington Heights Post, September 21, 2017 — Two filmmakers are working on a documentary about Jay Bennett, the multitalented musician from Arlington Heights who died in 2009, eight years after leaving the Chicago band Wilco. …
Read my story for Pioneer Press.
Photo: Michael Walker/Chicago Tribune