Young African American college graduates say they are more responsibly committed to reaching financial goals than previous generations, according to a study released last week at the NBMBAA 34th Annual Conference & Exposition by Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance. (Black Enterprise)
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How do you introduce yourself? When you feel insecure, do you prop up your courage with your introduction? Do you include titles or accomplishments or "facts" when you don't need to? If so, your introduction is all about you, not your audience. (Inc.)
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Showrooming – the consumer practice of checking out a product in one store and buying it elsewhere at a better price – has always been a challenge in retail. But with the advent of smartphones and the expansion of online retailers like Amazon.com, showrooming has gone from being a headache for bricks and mortar retailers to a full-blown migraine. (Knowledge@Wharton)
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Happiness – in your business life and your personal life – is often a matter of subtraction, not addition. Consider, for example, what happens when you stop doing the following 10 things. (Inc.)
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This is why I worry when senior executives tell aspiring leaders that membership in global elites requires sacrificing an existence grounded in one place. Framing the struggle for home as a private reckoning with loss is simplistic and dangerous. It makes global elites more isolated and disconnected, less intelligible and trustworthy. It puts them in no position to lead. (Harvard Business Review)
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If you and your boss disagree over a course of action but share a solid working relationship, you might be able to respectfully make your case by presenting data and engaging your boss in debate. However, what if your problem with your boss is more serious, resulting from repeated clashes rather than a onetime disagreement? In other words, what if you work for a bad boss? The answer is that you need to take the initiative in solving the problem, because your boss almost certainly won't. (Fast Company)
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Scroll through the titles and subtitles of recent books, and you will read that women have become "The Richer Sex," that "The Rise of Women Has Turned Men Into Boys," and that we may even be seeing "The End of Men." How is it, then, that men still control the most important industries, especially technology, occupy most of the positions on the lists of the richest Americans, and continue to make more money than women who have similar skills and education? And why do women make up only 17 percent of Congress? (The New York Times)
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The crisis in the euro area is beginning to feel like a permanent piece of the world's economic landscape: a great red spot that just churns and churns and never goes away. It isn't, though. One day the crisis will be over, either because the euro zone managed to muddle through or because it didn't, and came apart. To avoid coming apart, the euro zone needs to accomplish three things. (The Economist)
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How much extra would you pay for local food? It's a familiar question. We face it practically every time we shop for groceries, either at the store or at the farmers market. But what about food that can save the lives of severely malnourished children? (NPR)
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Applications for many M.B.A. programs are declining, but it isn't getting any easier to score a spot at a top school. Because of a tight labor market and ballooning tuition costs, many would-be students are trimming their lists of dream schools, turning the admissions cycle into an all-or-nothing contest that leaves applicants – and schools – scrambling into the winter months. (Wall Street Journal)
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A growing number of top-ranked U.S. colleges say they are finding objectionable material online that hurts the chances of prospective freshmen. About a quarter of admissions officers at the nation's top 500 colleges have used websites such as Facebook and Google to vet applicants, according to an annual Kaplan Test Prep survey. Of those, more than one-third say they have found something that has hurt a student's chance of admission, up from 12% last year. (Wall Street Journal)
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NBMBAA would like to thank all of our attendees, members, sponsors, partners and volunteers for making the 34th Annual Conference and Exposition such a great success. We also thank the city of Indianapolis and our Indy chapter for being such gracious hosts. We can't wait to see everyone next year. Mark your calendars now for the 35th Annual Conference, September 10-14, 2013 in Houston, Texas!
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Talented MBA candidates from 23 of the nation's leading business schools competed for $50,000 in scholarships in the 2012 National Student Case Competition, sponsored by Chrysler Group LLC. The National Student Case Competition is a unique, annual event designed to give high-powered student teams an opportunity to demonstrate their knowledge and problem-solving skills in a formal competition.
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Nationwide Insurance proudly announced today it has been awarded the Silver Torch Award from the National Black MBA Association (NBMBAA) for Nationwide’s workplace diversity initiatives encouraging minority professionals to advance in strategic organizational positions. The award is presented annually to the corporation or individual who has made the greatest gains to promote equal opportunities that challenge and encourage minority professionals to develop and advance in strategic positions within their organization.
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Here’s a quiz: Google received more than 1,900 requests from governments worldwide to remove content from its various services last year. Which country led the planet in this dubious category, with 418 such demands? China? Iran? Syria? No. It was democratic, pluralistic, economically vibrant Brazil. (Washington Post)
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When you send a link to someone in a private message on Facebook, just how private is it? A recent online video shows that the social networking site scans the links you’re sending – registering them as though you "Like" the page you sent. It’s just one example of how online messages that seem private are often actually examined by computers for data. (Wall Street Journal)
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When big companies offshore profits to dodge taxes, small business owners say they are left footing the bill – and they're not happy about it. A U.S. Senate panel recently reviewed how Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard shaved billions off their taxes in recent years by moving profits offshore. (Money)
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According to one survey, one-third of us would rather give up sex than our mobile phone. You might not believe this, but it’s all too true. What does that tell us? Well, one of two things: either our love lives are seriously lacking, or our smartphones are more important to us than a primal human need. (Fast Company)
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Gasoline station owners in the Los Angeles area including Costco Wholesale Corp. are beginning to shut pumps because of supply shortages that have driven wholesale fuel prices to record highs. (Bloomberg)
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Birthrates have been declining for the past four years, according to a government report on Wednesday. It's a new phenomenon for a country with rising populations rates since the 1990s. (Christian Science Monitor)
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Saving has never been less rewarding. Interest rates on basic savings accounts haven't crossed 1% in more than a decade, with the average currently yielding just 0.08%, according to the FDIC. That means a $10,000 deposit would earn a measly $8 after one year in the bank. Money market accounts, which yield just 0.12%, are little better. (SmartMoney)
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Tucked into the U.S. Supreme Court’s busy agenda this fall is a little-known case that could upend your ability to resell everything from your grandmother’s antique furniture to your iPhone 4. (MarketWatch)
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The business school of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill expects its new online MBA program will help it recruit more students in emerging economies from Brazil to China. (Bloomberg/Businessweek)
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The $6 billion blunder has turned out to be no more than a minor ding on JPMorgan Chase’s mighty balance sheet. The company’s stock has rebounded strongly, and the financial world has moved on to other obsessions. But for Ina Drew, this is a scorching moment of failure from which it could be hard to recover. (New York Times Magazine)
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T-Mobile USA and MetroPCS have agreed to merge, joining together two of the nation's largest low-cost wireless carriers. Both companies have been struggling. Though each remains profitable, their smartphone offerings are lackluster (i.e., no iPhone), they are far behind the curve on network technology, and both are shedding customers. (Money)
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One of the questions I get asked is whether a win by Mitt Romney or by Barack Obama would be better for the stock market. To which the only honest answer is, "I have no earthly idea." Any competent and dispassionate market analyst will tell you that the financial and psychological states of the U.S. and world economies are the major factors, and that the president’s influence on these matters is far less than most people think it is. (Washington Post)
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Crusading against frivolous lawsuits, the United States Chamber of Commerce has had no shortage of cases to highlight, like the man suing a cruise line after burning his feet on a sunny deck or the mother claiming hearing loss from the screaming at a Justin Bieber concert. Now, the lobbying group’s Institute for Legal Reform is showing a 30-second commercial that uses Blitz USA, a bankrupt Oklahoma gasoline can manufacturer, to illustrate the consequences of abusive lawsuits. (The New York Times)
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In addition to weaving inspiration with real-world corporate mythology, the book offers a rich dataset of strategic decisions – from Ford’s decision to give workers a wage high enough that they could afford a Model T to 3M’s now oft-copied practice of giving engineers time to dream – to study. Here is what I learned from the book. (Fast Company)
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Ellen Kullman is one of the most powerful women in business, coming in at number five on Fortune's 2012 list of the Most Powerful Women. From her perch at the top of the 210-year-old, $38.7 billion chemical company – number 72 on the 2012 Fortune 500– Kullman is engineering a transformation from chemicals into agriculture and life sciences. But during the dark days of the Great Recession, Kullman was a motivator above all else. (Fortune)
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Higher-ups who could give your career a boost sometimes look askance at the need for flexibility, but you may be able to quell their doubts. (Fortune)
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In the 1990s, researchers came up with the phrase "time famine" to describe the feeling many Americans have of feeling overwhelmed by work obligations and the general pace of life. According to "The Quest for the 25-Hour Day," in the Boston Globe, this feeling has a powerful role in people’s underlying happiness: "If time famine can create a state of rolling personal crisis, studies have shown that feeling ‘time affluent’ can be powerfully uplifting, more so than material wealth." (MIT/Sloan Management Review)
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