Every social feed flows with evidence of just how clever the world has become, leaving you paralyzed with indecision. In reality, you know you have not actually tried everything – yet you feel it deep in your soul. Here's how to fix that feeling and move forward with another breakthrough. (Fast Company)
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Join us next week in Indianapolis for the 34th Annual Conference & Exposition!! Visit the Conference website for events, details, costs and more. Not registered yet? You can do it in person on-site. Keep up with last minute changes and put the Conference at your fingertips by downloading the Conference App. See You in Indy!
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Making too many decisions about mundane details is a waste of a limited resource: your mental energy. In the late 1990s, Roy Baumeister (a professor at Florida State University) and colleagues performed several experiments showing that certain types of conscious mental actions appeared to draw from the same "energy source" — gradually diminishing our ability to make smart decisions throughout the day. (Harvard Business Review)
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Email. You probably know it as that lovely little tool that pretty much rules your life. In my eyes, it’s both the greatest – and also the worst – innovation impacting business today. (Inc.)
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Books are no longer simply books, they are branding devices and credibility signals – not to mention the reason their authors command large speaking or consulting fees. (Fast Company)
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Generation Y, of which I'm a member, is entering the job market in record numbers, and according to many commentators things are not going well. To many, the core problem of this generation is clear: we're entitled. I don't deny these behaviors, but having recently finished researching and writing a book on career advice, I have a different explanation. The problem is not that we're intrinsically selfish or entitled. It's that we've been misinformed. (Harvard Business Review)
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Goldman Sachs Group Inc. is doing away with two-year contracts for most analysts hired out of college, according to communications reviewed by The Wall Street Journal and confirmed by a Goldman spokesman. Analysts also won't get bonuses for completing the program, which has been around for a quarter of a century and has been viewed as a meal ticket to a lucrative Wall Street career. (Wall Street Journal)
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New research confirms that black women suffer from "double jeopardy," experiencing more negative leader perceptions than black men and white women when organizations fail. When organizations succeed, all three of those groups are evaluated less positively than white men. (Duke Fuqua School of Business)
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Even if Greece receives yet another lifeline from its European partners, many Greeks have reached their own conclusion: It doesn’t matter. While the economics of everyday life continue to erode, the big concern is that Greece’s leaders are doing almost nothing to root out deep-seated problems that hobble a return to growth, including bureaucracy and bribery. (The New York Times)
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A slew of luxury goods retailers are leaving Argentina in response to import barriers, currency controls and soaring inflation. American designer Ralph Lauren was the most recent departure when it announced last month that it was closing three of its stores in Buenos Aires, including its flagship in the upscale Recoleta district, as draconian measures on imports have all but left it unable to stock its shelves. (Fortune)
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The world’s college business students have spoken: The single, most coveted job in the world isn’t with some big-name consulting firm or high-flying investment bank. For the fourth consecutive year, it’s with Google (GOOG), whose incomparable perks and startup-like culture have catapulted the search giant to a seemingly permanent place atop Universum‘s annual list of the most highly desired employers. (Bloomberg/Businessweek)
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Earlier this year, the University of Chicago awarded an M.D. to its youngest student ever – a 21-year-old who had become a college freshman at the age of nine. When Kurt Ahlm, the 38-year-old associate dean of student recruitment and admissions for Chicago’s Booth School of Business, is asked if he would ever admit a teenager to the school’s MBA program, he laughs. (Poets & Quants)
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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 now!
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The arrival of the original iPhone in 2007 was a quantum leap for cellphones. Phones had never worked or looked like that. The iPhone 5 that Apple introduced last week with only incremental changes seemed to signal that the industry has entered an era of technological bunny hops. (The New York Times)
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Imagine every thousandth blood cell in your body has a tiny radio transmitter in it. Imagine that 10 times a second that transmitter sends each cell's location to a computer storing the data. Along with position, it also sends the concentration of a list of 10 chemicals encountered at receptors distributed at 10 sites over the surface of each cell. Now imagine following all those blood cells for an hour. That makes a billion blood cells being sampled 10 times a second for 3,600 seconds. Now imagine its your job to sort through all those numbers and extract something meaningful about the human body. (NPR)
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Companies don't need to wait until the beginning of next year and new federal rules to start raising money over the Internet. And they don't have to offer perks or products to supporters. (Upstart Business Journal)
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While many entrepreneurs would give their left toe to be on "Shark Tank," Mr. Tice and Ms. Hadeka declined. And they did so for an intriguing reason: In order to proceed, they were required to enter into an agreement with Finnmax, the show’s producer, that would have given Finnmax the option either to receive a 2 percent royalty on the operating profits of the company or take a 5 percent equity stake. (The New York Times)
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More than 12 million people in the United States are pounding the pavement, searching for a job without luck. This is fewer than a few years ago – we had a high of nearly 16 million unemployed in 2010 – but far more than at any point in recent memory prior to the Great Recession. Why are people out of work? Some economists have been arguing that today's high unemployment is explained by a mismatch between the skills that employers are looking for and the skills that the unemployed have. (The Atlantic)
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"The best countercyclical indicator of the health of capital markets is when investment banks cut staff," says a senior banker at a large American investment bank. "We always cut just before the cycle turns." But what if the cycle doesn’t turn? An industry that once seemed to offer banks the opportunity to earn juicy returns and expand internationally is now in retreat almost everywhere. (The Economist)
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Thanks to the so-called Bush tax cuts, lots of folks qualify for a 0% federal income tax rate on long-term capital gains and dividends. You read that right: 0%. Even if your income is too high for you to benefit, you may have children, grandchildren or other loved ones who can. However, the 0% deal will automatically expire at the end of this year unless Congress takes action. Here's what you need to know to take advantage before it's too late. (SmartMoney)
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As the economy continues to sputter – along with the balance sheets of many families – the Internet has supplied an abundance of online tools to help repair the damage. We've scoured the offerings and chosen our favorites for a variety of money-management styles. (Kiplinger's)
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Besides our choice of words and the volume and tone of a voice, gestures, posture and facial expressions all convey powerful messages to the people we are talking to, which is precisely why everyone pays close attention to other people's body language. What's more, some research suggests that your body language can even affect your hormones, which affects your decisions and attitudes to risk. In other words, how we say what we say to people is at least as important as what we say to them. (Harvard Business Review)
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She's earned the No. 1 spot in Fortune's annual ranking of the Most Powerful Women in Business. But to keep Big Blue growing, Rometty will have to sell IBM like never before. (Fortune)
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The defense industry is remaking itself in the face of changing technologies and shrinking budgets, with companies rushing to buy or sell vast lines of business to better position themselves for an uncertain future. (Washington Post)
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The great American tax debate may feel like a stale, perennial feature of our politics. But it is important. The controversy is not merely about how much we pay in taxes. An equally important question is about who pays them. (The New York Times)
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The city that’s defined in the public imagination as the great auto-centric counterpoint to the traditional cities of the Northeast has quietly emerged as a serious mass transit contender. It’s no New York and never will be – Los Angeles was constructed in the era of mass automobile ownership, and its landscape will always reflect that – but it’s turning into something more interesting, a 21st-century city that moves the idea of alternative transportation beyond nostalgia or Europhilia. (Slate)
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Upton Sinclair once wrote, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something if his salary depends upon him not understanding it." If your business objectives aren't linked to employee compensation, it sends a strong message that they aren't a real priority, and motivation is adversely affected. The flip-side, however, isn't true. When business objectives are linked to compensation, motivation to drive for results is rarely meaningfully enhanced. (Harvard Business Review)
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Reggie Aggarwal is the founder and CEO of Cvent, which he used to describe as something like "Evite for conferences." (He doesn’t say that anymore, with Evite mostly obsolescent among young Facebook users.) It may sound esoteric, but the "meetings industry" is considered to be a $650 billion dollar industry – think of all those hotel expenses – and Cvent, which has 1100 employees and is profitable, has been doing a good job carving out its share of that cash. Before the fat times were extremely lean ones, though, as Aggarwal explains. And retaining habits learned in those lean times has made him all the more successful. (Fast Company)
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