Leader Garden-Helping firms Cultivate and Grow their Leaders

Infrastructure Corporation of America said it has acquired a Paducah, Ky.-based engineering services company to expand beyond maintaining roadways, bridges and welcome centers into planning and design of such projects.

The acquisition of Florence & Hutcheson doubles Brentwood-based ICA to 600 employees and expands its geographic reach.

via Acquisition of Ky. firm will expand Infrastructure Corporation of America’s scope | tennessean.com | The Tennessean.

I’ll be watching to see how this influences the local civil engineering market, especially from a transportation and water resources perspective.

Democrats and Republicans are trading barbs amid news that state and federal agents are investigating former state Revenue Commissioner Reagan Farr’s handling of tax cases involving a prominent Middle Tennessee furniture store chain and other businesses.

The Tennessee Democratic Party is calling on Republicans to return donations from A.J. McCall, president of Carthage-based D.T. McCall & Sons and a prominent political donor.

via TN Revenue Department investigation triggers partisan fight | tennessean.com | The Tennessean.

Seems to me that no one here has unclean hands.

Let’s get over it and move on!

A fast-growing Colorado company wants a piece of Nashville’s data center business. Zayo Colocation announced today that it will operate a 9,000-square-foot data center at 209 10th Ave. S — a spot that it notes “was unaffected by the flooding earlier in the year.”

The company is part of the Zayo Group, a 3-year-old company focused on Internet infrastructure. Since its founding, it has bought 17 regional telecom companies. One of its earliest buys was Memphis Networx in 2007. It also established a foothold in Nashville by purchasing American Fiber Systems, a move announced last week.

via Fast-growing Zayo enters Nashville data center business – Nashville Business Journal.

Data centers are a fast growing business throughout the country and it is good to see that kind of growth locally.  The biggest challenge will be continuing to grow and import the necessary technical talent to staff such entities.

Hemlock Semiconductor, LLC, whose $1.2 billion Clarksville facility is still under construction, will host a career fair Oct. 14.

The company plans to hire 500 full-time employees before the facility begins manufacturing polysilicon, the key material of solar panels, in late 2012.

Hemlock Semiconductor employees in manufacturing and production operations roles can earn an annual salary in the range of $37,000 to $58,000. Details for job seekers are highlighted below.

via Hemlock to host job fair for 500 positions at $1.2B plant – Nashville Business Journal.

This will be a great opportunity for many of you to learn more about working for a cutting-edge firm here in the Clarksville area.

I encourage you to read the rest of this article by clicking on the link above.

Nashville will experience a worker shortage starting in the middle of this decade, according to a report released today by the Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce.

The shortage will be caused by retiring baby boomers, a smaller crop of workers to replace them, and continued job growth, according to the “Leveraging the Labor Force for Economic Growth” study, which projects that unemployment will return to pre-recession levels in 2015 or 2016.

via Study: Work force shortage looms in Nashville – Nashville Business Journal.

I am seeing many signs of this now and the greatest areas of need, the largest shortages, will certainly be in any technology-driven field such as IT developers, Project Managers, Engineering Project Managers and a wide variety of Healthcare Technology related fields.

As a geek who speaks, it is a great time to be a geek!

Three months after making grants available to businesses looking to invest in solar power, the Tennessee Solar Institute has awarded more than $9 million to 108 applicants across the state.

‘We were overwhelmed with the response all across the state,’ said Stacey Patterson, a director of research partnerships at the University of Tennessee, where the solar institute is based. ‘We didn’t know what the response would be.’

via Solar proposals net $9M statewide » Knoxville News Sentinel.

When Jay Gogue became president of Auburn University in 2007, he sought feedback, and one particular suggestion kept coming back to him.

“We created workshops and groups with small numbers of people all over the state of Alabama to say if you were running Auburn University, what are some of the things we ought to do differently or better,” Gogue said Wednesday.

“A grouping of those (comments) fell around research. And one of the very specific comments that came out in different locations was that there were tremendous opportunities for Auburn to figure out a way to link, partner and work closer with Huntsville.”

via With new Huntsville research center, Auburn University eager to join high-tech research | al.com.

Nashville ranks 16th on a list of the nation’s most social media-savvy cities, edging out Columbus No. 17 and Cincinnati No. 22, and finishing far ahead of Memphis No. 42.The study, conducted by NetProspex, based its Twitter-savvy rankings on the average number of Twitter accounts, tweets and followers. New York and San Francisco ranked as the top two Twitter towns in the nation. Washington, D.C., Sacramento, Calif., and Phoenix round out the top five.The report also ranked cities on overall social media use by companies. The top 10 are: San Francisco; San Jose, Calif.; New York; Austin, Texas; Boston; Seattle; Denver; Salt Lake City; Los Angeles and Atlanta.

via Nashville 16th most social media-savvy city – Nashville Business Journal.

On one hand I am surprised to see this, but on another I am not as surprised.  We have some really interesting and innovative Social Media minds in this region and I learn something new every day from the people I see and hear in the Social World.

The National Science Foundation awarded University of Alabama in Huntsville a $1,176,470 grant to develop inter-campus and intra-campus cyber connectivity at the HudsonAlpha Institute of Biotechnology (HudsonAlpha), Alabama A & M University (AAMU) and Alabama State University (ASU) campuses.

Dr. Sara J. Graves (Professor, Director ITSC Ph.D., University of Alabama in Huntsville), Dr. Christopher Lawson (Center Director), University of Alabama at Birmingham), and Dr. Karen Boykin (Outreach Coordinator EPSCoR) are responsible for acquiring and administrating the grant.

via University of Alabama in Huntsville gets million dollar nanotech grant from NSF – Birmingham science news | Examiner.com.

Congrats to UAH for this achievement!

Huntsville is fast becoming a regional, if not national, technology hub in the eyes of DOD and now the Life Science community.

UAH is helping to lead the way!

Senior Obama administration officials concluded the federal moratorium on deepwater oil drilling would cost roughly 23,000 jobs, but went ahead with the ban because they didn’t trust the industry’s safety equipment and the government’s own inspection process, according to previously undisclosed documents.

via Administration Foresaw 23,000 Lost Jobs from Drilling Ban – WSJ.com.

Just one more example of the short-sighted thinking of many political and governmental types.

They don’t like oil and say they are afraid.  The problem is they have no solution in hand to make up the difference in energy except for greater dependence on inputs from unstable governments in the Middle East and South America.

When will these people learn…