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EDITOR'S
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Even
with NATO troops preparing to occupy Kosovo and
U.S. Marines practicing urban maneuvers in
Richmond, I was surprised to see four Virginia
Business employees wearing combat fatigues in our
conference room last month. Casual Fridays are
great, but I'm not ready for camouflage
Thursdays. Yet there they were -- business
manager Mike Thomas, Richmond sales manager
Hunter Bendall, production manager Kevin Dick and
graphics coordinator Ed Gorham -- all decked out
in military attire. Now combat fatigues are
designed to help soldiers blend in with their
surroundings, but in a corporate environment,
these guys were easy marks. All four got shot
before 10 a.m. -- not by Serbian snipers, but by
free-lance photographer Mark Rhodes (no
relation). |
| The idea was to create a camouflage background to make this month's cover subject stand out -- something she does quite well in military circles. Mary Ann Elliott, founder and CEO of Arrowhead Space & Telecommunications, was ranked last August among the 40 most influential people involved in defense, aerospace and national security. She and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright were the only women to make the list, which was compiled by Defense Daily magazine. |
Elliott has top-secret security clearance at the Pentagon, and she is widely recognized as a world-class expert in satellite communications -- not bad for someone who dropped out of school in the eighth grade to get married and have kids. We first profiled Elliott in our April issue, when her Falls Church-based firm ranked as the top technology company in the Fantastic 50, an annual list of the fastest-growing private companies in the commonwealth.
When Elliott's Fantastic 50 profile hit my desk this spring, I asked the writer, Bill Edwards, to double-check his research. "She's too good to be true," I told him. "But if you can verify her story, we'll put her on the cover." And so she is. The deeper Bill dug, the more Elliott's story amazed me. It begins here with a hard-to-get picture of her briefing the brass at the Pentagon.
Our cover photo, however, was even more difficult to stage. We initially tried to shoot Elliott with some enlisted men at the Dahlgren Naval Surface Warfare Center, but we got tangled up in red tape and decided to fake it in our conference room. We bought some camouflage shirts and drafted Mike, Hunter, Kevin and Ed. I wondered whether we could really make these guys look like GIs, but that wasn't a problem. It turned out that two of them have had military training. Mike served six years in the Virginia Army National Guard, and Ed logged one year of active duty in Vietnam.
You can't win a purple heart for getting shot by a photographer, but our men in uniform should get some sort of medal for consenting to be captured on film, and so should Mary Ann Elliott. Rhodes photographed her against a white background at her Falls Church headquarters. Then our graphics coordinator merged the two images on his computer.
We went to a lot of trouble for this month's cover, but I think it was worth it. Now all I need to do is convince our internal auditors -- a $160 charge for "camouflage clothing" is sure to attract their attention.
Karl
Rhodes
Executive Editor
© JULY 1999, Media General Business
Publications Inc.,
publisher of Virginia Business Magazine