The NBMBAA® 34th Annual Conference & Exposition is 19 days away, September 25-29 in Indianapolis! Visit the Conference website for our new Pre-Conference Planning Guide and get all the information on why Conference is for you, what you get for your registration, costs, hotels, programs and more! But time is running out, so don't delay!
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When was the last time a corporate worker scheduled time for a project not to be worked on? Even if some appreciate the idea of taking a break, they look sideways at those who actually take one. (Fortune)
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European economies are diverging in competitiveness, according to a report published Wednesday that highlighted a growing north-south divide as one of the factors at the heart of the continuing euro zone crisis. (The New York Times)
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The newspaper boy and the milkman might not come around as often as they used to, but the days of subscription and delivery aren't over. The Internet and overnight delivery have combined to make a new type of subscription business possible. The sales pitch is part convenience, part price and part cool factor. (NPR)
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Chris Gentile was managing the design and engineering for advanced nuclear plants when his brothers asked him to help them with a different kind of engineering challenge: how to mass-produce holograms for use in toys. That challenge – which he solved, by the way, to thrill of millions of action-figure fans – reset his career’s course. (Fast Company)
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In the first two articles in this series, I outlined the physical and mental benefits of meditation, explaining how the practice will help you better navigate the MBA-application process and become a better leader. I’ve saved perhaps the best for last: the "touchy feely" benefits of meditation, which I contend are more important than you may think. While highly educated, hard-driving business professionals often hold "hard" skills – such as financial modeling, statistics, research, and strategy – in greater esteem than emotionally oriented "soft" skills such as listening, empathizing, and working with conflict, the truth is that EQ (emotional intelligence) competency is highly correlated with professional success at the top. (Poets & Quants)
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"Did you see this?" Kumkum Bhatnagar asked incredulously. She held up a printout of an article by Will Sonenberg, the CEO of GlobeBank. It had appeared in a special online supplement of Businessweek on the subject of diversity, and it concerned the company's efforts to increase female and minority representation in management. Charles Begley, GlobeBank's managing director of diversity recruiting, was already reading it onscreen, dumbfounded. (Harvard Business Review)
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After working six years as a senior executive for a multinational payroll-processing company in Barcelona, Spain, Mr. Vildosola is cutting his professional and financial ties with his troubled homeland. He has moved his family to a village near Cambridge, England, where he will take the reins at a small software company, and he has transferred his savings from Spanish banks to British banks. (The New York Times)
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European Central Bank president Mario Draghi outlined the details of a plan to buy euro area government bonds, reiterating his pledge to do "whatever it takes" to preserve the euro. Following a meeting of top ECB officials in Frankfurt on Thursday, Draghi said the ECB is prepared to make "outright monetary transactions," or OMTs, in the secondary bond market. (CNN/Money)
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The classroom experiment serves as one lesson in the pitfalls of the scientific method: It often seems to distract us from considering the full implications of our calculations. The point isn’t that it’s necessarily immoral to fire an employee – Milton Friedman famously claimed that the sole purpose of a company is indeed to maximize profits – but rather that the students who were encouraged to think of the decision to fire someone as an algebra problem didn’t seem to think about the employees at all. (Slate)
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Last Saturday morning, Aug. 26, I called my old friend Bill George for two reasons, mainly to wish him a happy birthday on his 70th –I was two weeks early – and to discuss an unlikely article in that morning’s Financial Times, "The Mind Business." (Bloomberg/Businessweek)
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Join the Indy Chapter for an amazing welcome event as they Showcase Indy, Wednesday, September 26, following the Welcome Reception at the 34th Annual Conference. Kick off your event with an night of networking with friends and colleagues at the Indiana History Center. Tickets are required and space is limited, so click the link below to secure yours today!
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While the Kindle Paperwhite is Amazon's answer to the Barnes & Noble Nook Simple Touch with GlowLight, the new Kindle Fire HD must be the answer to Apple's iPad. (ZDnet)
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Apple Inc.'s competitors are racing to promote their newest smartphones ahead of next week's expected unveiling of the iPhone 5, but in their haste they're leaving out some key details. (Wall Street Journal)
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Your cellphone is a tracking device collecting a lot more information about you than you may think, says ProPublica investigative reporter Peter Maass. "They are collecting where we are – not just at one particular moment in the day, but at virtually every moment of the day," Maass tells Fresh Air's Dave Davies. "They are also taking note of what we are buying, how we're purchasing it, how often we're purchasing it." (NPR)
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LevelUp's Seth Priebatsch says interactions are more valuable than transactions. Here's how he's tying his own business's success to the success of his clients. (Fast Company)
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The days are getting shorter, geese are flying in formation, and the fall seasonal microbrews are on tap. It's back-to-school time, and as children head back to the classroom and young adults set off for university, I would challenge us all to get in the spirit with a fall reading list. (Inc.)
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A few years ago, Peter Frew came to New York with an important professional skill. He was one of maybe a few dozen people in the U.S. who could construct a true bespoke suit. Frew, who apprenticed with a Savile Row tailor, can – all by himself, and almost all by hand – create a pattern, cut fabric and expertly construct a suit that, for about $4,000, perfectly molds to its owner’s body. (The New York Times)
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The Labor Department includes anyone who works an hour a week in its calculation of employed Americans, but a new measurement by Gallup strips out part-timers – that number is much more unsettling. (Fortune)
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This much we know: College pays. You can lose your house to foreclosure, but never your education. Four-year college graduates’ pay advantage over high school grads has doubled over the past 30 years. If money for tuition is tight, the advice goes, borrow what you need. Students have been listening. (Bloomberg/Businessweek)
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Shoppers can be reasonably confident that the price of a box of their favorite cereal will not budge in the time it takes to push a cart down a supermarket aisle. But that may change as stores begin to experiment with the kind of minute-by-minute price adjustments made online. (MarketWatch)
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No matter what your line of work, it’s only getting harder to avoid death by PowerPoint. Since Microsoft launched the slide show program 22 years ago, it’s been installed on no fewer than 1 billion computers; an estimated 350 PowerPoint presentations are given each second across the globe; the software’s users continue to prove that no field of human endeavor can defy its facility for reducing complexity and nuance to bullet points and big ideas to tacky clip art. (Bloomberg/Businessweek)
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For much of the 1980s, Apple battled Microsoft in court, trying to prove that early versions of Windows illegally copied the look and feel of Apple’s Macintosh operating system. Steve Jobs lost that fight, a defeat that at the time seemed like an industry-defining event. History proved otherwise. (Bloomberg/Businessweek)
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The Web-services company Automattic Inc. has 123 employees working in 26 countries, 94 cities and 28 U.S. states. Its offices? Workers' homes. At Automattic, which hosts the servers for the blogging platform WordPress.com, work gets done wherever employees choose, and virtual meetings are conducted on Skype or over Internet chat. (Wall Street Journal)
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The financial services community swooned for President Obama four years ago and opened its collective wallet to offer him more than $16 million in campaign cash. This cycle its well-heeled members have ponied up far less for the president – contributions to the Obama campaign have barely reached $4 million, according to the Center for Responsive Politics – and many who backed the president last time say they don't plan to again. (The Atlantic)
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Charlotte, N.C., host of the 2012 Democratic National Convention, is the nation's biggest financial center outside of New York. But Charlotte and surrounding Mecklenburg County have the highest foreclosure rates in the state, and many thousands of homeowners owe more on their homes than the properties are worth. (NPR)
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Bill Clinton has decades of public-speaking experience, a deep well of charisma, and record high favorability ratings. But even mere mortals can borrow a few of his simple techniques to make our own presentations shine. (Fast Company)
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Let's get this out of the way. By "leaders," I'm not referring to the guy who doubles the stock price in six months or the gal who coerces local officials into approving incredibly generous tax breaks and incentives. Those are examples of leadership – but those are examples of leadership that tends to be situational and often short-lived. (Inc.)
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This is a question I spend a lot of time turning over. To be clear, the other magazine was The New Yorker, which, I think, has two black writers on staff. I can't think of a black woman who's regularly publishing long-form magazine articles. I can think of a few other African Americans who freelance regularly (Howard French over here, or Gwen Ifill's Obama profiles at Essence, for instance) but the depressing fact is that there just aren't that many of us. (The Atlantic)
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