People to Watch in 2000
Who will make big news in the business world this year? Who will emerge from relative obscurity to become a major player? To start the new year, Times business reporters selected people from their beats who they believe will be among those to watch in 2000--in Southern California, across the country and around the world. Some are well known, having made big news in previous years. Others are not exactly household names but nevertheless are likely to make a major impact in their fields.
Of course, there’s no way to predict just what’s going to happen in the next 12 months. Nor can any such list be complete--there’s always the come-from-nowhere phenom who’ll surprise everyone. But it’s a good bet that if you follow the fortunes of these 22, you’ll see the top business stories of 2000 unfold.
Cynthia Harriss of Disneyland
Southern California is betting on travel and tourism. In Hollywood, a huge entertainment mall is planned beside Mann’s Chinese Theatre. In Long Beach, the Queensway Bay redevelopment project is anchored by a new aquarium. In Buena Park, Knott’s Berry Farm is adding a water park and upgrading an adjacent hotel.
The biggest wager is on Anaheim, where Walt Disney Co. and the city together are spending $2 billion to expand Disneyland, the Convention Center and nearby areas. At stage center is Disneyland President Cynthia Harriss, a longtime retail executive who moved from Disney Stores to the park in 1997 and got the top job last January.
Harriss, 47, gets high marks for restoring the luster of Walt Disney’s original theme park. Hours of operation were lengthened for many rides, maintenance was improved and computer-ticketing programs were introduced to cut the wait for popular rides.
But the challenges of opening a second park, a luxury hotel and a retail, dining and entertainment zone by 2001 are of another magnitude entirely, given the unusually tough demands on Harriss and other top executives to control costs to bolster Disney’s lagging stock price.
Longtime Disney observers say the temptation to exceed budgets will be great as detail work begins on a park that inevitably will be compared with the original next door.
Like Harriss, most of Disneyland’s top executives are relatively recent hires untested at opening new parks, hotels and malls. Any stumbles by Disney, the region’s best-known attraction, will raise questions about tourism’s future not just in Anaheim but throughout Southern California.
