Cough, sore throat, body aches, fever. If you've typed these words into Google recently, you're not alone. This year's flu season is off to a fast and furious start. The chart above shows data from Google's influenza tracker, which analyzes how often people are searching for flu-related terms on Google to estimate how many people have fallen ill. (Bloomberg)
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As the earliest flu outbreak in years reaches epidemic levels, businesses are taking a hit, too. They're faced with an unsolvable problem: If they tell too many sick employees to stay home, the work doesn't get done. But when people sick with flu and other bugs show up, they're spreading illness through the workplace. (NPR)
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At a recent job interview at Summit Partners, a private equity firm in Boston, an applicant was asked, "If you could pick one person to play you in a movie, who would it be?" An audit staff applicant at New York accounting firm Ernst & Young was asked, "What are the top five cities you want to go to and why?" An online magazine asked an editor, "Where do you vacation in the summer?" (Bloomberg/Businessweek)
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Using some unusual analysis of global wealth demographics not typically seen in a stock report, Pacific Crest Securities makes a case against owning Apple by theorizing that just about everyone in the world who could pay for an iPhone already owns one. (CNBC)
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In its 16th year, Fortune's ranking of the best workplaces in corporate America welcomes five list debutantes, and what's more, 78 of them are looking to fill nearly 67,000 jobs. (Fortune)
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Too old for the job and time to make room for the younger generation? Jack Ma thinks so. He's the CEO of Alibaba Group, the e-commerce conglomerate who said Tuesday he's stepping down from his post in May. (CNBC)
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Here’s a tip: If you list something on your résumé, assume your interviewer is going to verify it. Sounds like common sense, but for many job seekers, it’s clearly not. CareerBuilder recently surveyed 2,500 hiring managers and discovered that 30  percent regularly find false or misleading references on applicants’ CVs. (Bloomberg/Businessweek)
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Academic institutions are churning out ever-more female graduates. But the very skills that propel women to the top of the class in school are earning us middle-of the-pack marks in the workplace. Indeed, a recent study found that women account for 51.4% of middle managers in the U.S. but only 4.2% of Fortune 500 CEO's. Based on our experience, the CEO statistics will continue to improve, but only incrementally, until women recognize that the boardroom is not the schoolroom. To be successful, we must now do the very thing we were always taught not to: be disruptive. (Harvard Business Review)
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As France’s socialist government raised taxes on the wealthy and threatened to nationalize a steel plant last year, neighboring Spain reveled in the news that exports were rising and several auto plants would be expanded by their owners. (Washington Post)
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Zhang Xiaoping’s mother dropped out of school after sixth grade. Her father, one of 10 children, never attended. But Ms. Zhang, 20, is part of a new generation of Chinese taking advantage of a national effort to produce college graduates in numbers the world has never seen before. (The New York Times)
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First-year MBA students have been put through the paces to prepare for on-campus interviews. This time of year is full of excitement, but also a lot of anxiety. Students put a tremendous amount of pressure on themselves before the summer internship interview process. (Bloomberg/Businessweek)
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It was four days before last year’s graduation at the Harvard Business School when Dean Nitin Nohria received the anguished phone call at his home on a Sunday afternoon. Two distressed MBA students had some rather tragic news: an MBA classmate had gone missing in Portland, Maine. (Poets & Quants)
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Millions of computer users who run the most recent versions of Oracle's Java software should disable the product owing to security flaws, says the cybersecurity section of the Department of Homeland Security. The agency says, "Web browsers using the Java 7 plug-in are at high risk." (NPR.org)
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Myth-busting has never been an easy task, particularly when it seems that the latest game in business is feigning that excellent people of color do not exist in a particular industry. The resulting excuse for their absence is that, therefore, they cannot be included. (The Grio)
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Fun. Friendly. Inspiring. Collaborative. Productive. If you wouldn't define your workplace with any or all of those terms, you may have to ditch your own desk and take a seat at a coworking space near you. Even if you aren’t an entrepreneur or freelancer, the benefits of coworking, according to Deskmag’s annual Global Coworking Survey, are pretty hard to ignore: 71 percent of participants reported a boost in creativity since joining a coworking space, while 62 percent said their standard of work had improved. (Fast Company)
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Very few people lead charmed lives. Careers, even great ones, almost never shoot straight up and to the right. Instead, they behave a lot like roller coasters, reflecting the ups and downs of eventful lives. And if you take a snapshot at any point in time, the ride may very well look as if it's going to crash. (Inc.)
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In October 2009, New York Times reporters Tara Siegel Bernard and Ron Lieber compared a hypothetical married couple with an equivalent-earning unmarried gay couple, to see just how much difference those extra privileges made. Here's what they found: In our worst case, the couple's lifetime cost of being gay was $467,562. But the number fell to $41,196 in the best case for a couple with significantly better health insurance, plus lower taxes and other costs. (The Atlantic)
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The White House budget office has asked federal agencies to "intensify" preparations for massive cuts, should Congress not be able to come to a deal to avert them before March 1. The Office of Management and Budget released a memo on Monday asking the agencies to identify ways to shrink their budgets. (CNN/Money)
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A Web site from an arm of the credit bureau Experian now offers a free tool that can help you see how different financial steps, or missteps, can affect your credit score. There are a couple of caveats, though. The site, freecreditscore.com, does indeed offer the tool free. But it also peppers you with offers for free credit scores, which require signing up for trial subscriptions that will end up costing a monthly fee unless you cancel within a specific time. (The New York Times)
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Amid the ever-increasing cost of health care, it’s essential to be constantly vigilant in looking for chances to claim tax breaks for medical expenses. Unfortunately, changes taking effect this year make that more difficult. Here’s the story on those changes, along with suggestions on how to beat the system. (MarketWatch)
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The manufacturer 1888 Mills produces most of its sheets and towels overseas, in part to keep costs low for retailers like Walmart. But after Walmart gave 1888 Mills a long-term contract for towels made in the United States, 1888’s chief executive said the company expected to produce more goods here. (The New York Times)
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You might have noticed that Starbucks (SBUX), the company known for its dark, burnt roast (and derided as Charbucks), is promoting a lighter coffee these days. It has been offering free samples of its Blonde Roast and Vanilla Blonde outside some stores and giving away hot Tall Blondes (sorry!) online via Facebook (FB). (Bloomberg/Businessweek)
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The chief postal watchdog has warned that the troubled US Postal Service will go out of business this year unless Congress acts to rescue it. David Williams, the inspector general of the USPS, says the service is in "very serious trouble", after five years lumbered with heavy debt and falling revenues. (The Guardian)
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Most business leaders don't understand what makes innovation so different from everything else they do at work – and they haven't adjusted their behavior to accommodate these differences. (CNN/Money)
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Being fit matters. New research suggests that a few extra pounds or a slightly larger waistline affects an executive's perceived leadership ability as well as stamina on the job. While marathon training and predawn workouts aren't explicitly part of a senior manager's job description, leadership experts and executive recruiters say that staying trim is now virtually required for anyone on track for the corner office. (The Wall Street Journal)
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As we work, we sit more than we do anything else. We're averaging 9.3 hours a day, compared to 7.7 hours of sleeping Sitting is so prevalent and so pervasive that we don't even question how much we're doing it. And, everyone else is doing it also, so it doesn't even occur to us that it's not okay. In that way, I've come to see that sitting is the smoking of our generation. (Harvard Business Review)
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