The Gelato Fiasco on Maine Street in Brunswick has expanded to Portland’s Old Port — with help from a competitor. With help from the Starbucks Foundation’s Create Jobs for USA program, Gelato Fiasco, which also sells the Italian ice cream to more than 150 grocery stores and restaurants, procured the loan that made the second store possible. And, oh yeah, it’s around the corner from a Starbucks. Bobby Guerette ’07, Gelato Fiasco’s director of marketing and public affairs, gave us the heads up about the recent national media blitz that includes attention from Bloomberg, Fortune and The New York Times.
Brunswick ME May 18, 2012, 4:40 am  38°F wind speed: 0 mph N |  Ken Chenault '73 Barron’s profiles Ken Chenault ’73, in its latest CEO Spotlight, praising the chief executive of American Express for leading the company “with a sure hand through some of the most horrific episodes in recent American history,” including the 9-11 attacks and the credit crisis of 2008-09. Throughout this turbulent decade, the company has maintained stability and profitability. AmEx earned $4.9 billion, or $4.12 a share last year, on revenue of $30 billion. “Under Chenault’s leadership, American Express shares have returned 26.8%, dividends included, endowing the company with a current market value of $61 billion,” according to the article. Barron’s characterizes Chenault as “elegant and polished, yet down to earth. … [He] counsels other executives to ‘stand for something’ and be clear about their values.” He also pushes them to change. He tells the magazine, “One of the lessons I often talk about, both inside and outside the company, is that you can become very complacent with success, and success can become a rut.” Chenault says he is also a big believer in constructive confrontation, which he encourages in meetings. “Borrowing a famous phrase from Napoleon, he says the role of a leader is ‘to face reality but give hope,’” the magazine states. After Chenault graduated from Bowdoin magna cum laude with honors in history, he attended Harvard Law School and went to work for Rogers & Wells, a New York law firm, before heading to Bain & Co., the management consultant. He has been CEO of American Express since 2001.
Working in Silicon Valley doesn’t just net you an average salary of $100,000 these days. In the race for the best employees, companies like Google are going to great lengths to create remarkable workplaces with unusual perks. As a Google employee, you not only get fed three meals a day for free, you have access to onsite doctors, haircuts, laundry facilities, car washes, dry cleaning, an outdoor volley ball court and a lap pool.
Talk of college endowments tends to prompt a fair amount of armchair quarterbacking, replete with comments suggesting that with “so much money, students should attend free of charge!” or “they’re doing so well, certainly they don’t need a gift from me.” Not true, writes Andrew J. Rotherham, co-founder of the nonprofit Bellwether Education Partners. Rotherham’s Time magazine piece, “College Endowments: Why Even Harvard Isn’t as Rich as You Think,” offers five reasons that “the reality of how college endowments work is different from the rhetoric.” Social media has changed the way advertisers roll out their most expensive, and hopefully most talked about, ads of the year. No longer banking on the element of surprise, companies are pre-screening their game day ads, aiming to build early buzz, like Honda with their Ferris Bueller spoof, “Mathew’s Day Off,” below.
 Gerald Chertavian '87 Gerald Chertavian—a member of the Bowdoin Class of 1987 and a current trustee of the College—has been mentoring young people for most of his adult life. Today, his Boston-based company, Year Up, provides a one-year, intensive training program for urban young adults, all aimed at building opportunity. As he tells The New York Times, it’s “a matter of social justice.”
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