A stunning government report says the U.S. economy has gone through a frightening structural change since the recession: a reduction in our capacity to grow. Here's what we need to do to turn things around. (Fortune)
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At this point in your work life, you can probably name quite a few people who've given your career a boost. So you know the perks of having a mentor. Being one also has its upsides – and these go beyond self-satisfaction and good karma. (CNN/Money)
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We're all fascinated by new ideas and how they can grab hold of us, influencing how we think and affecting how we take action. How does Atul Gawande (the checklist doctor) get inside my head, when others don't? Why does Gwyneth Paltrow make me adjust my behaviors, when others can't? In business, especially, we're inundated with new ideas – so many we can hardly process or evaluate them. (Harvard Business Review)
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Entrepreneurship, by definition, is the art of creating systems that generate more value for less effort," Contently cofounder Shane Snow writes on LinkedIn. "Startups realize that the opportunity cost of doing mundane tasks adds up quickly, preventing them from doing the high-impact work they have set out to do." So what we want to do as individuals, then, is to borrow from those organizational productivity hacks – giving us more time, better energy, and more chances at success. Let us count the ways. (Fast Company)
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More employers are requiring their new workers to sign "noncompete" agreements, which they say are needed to prevent insiders from taking trade secrets, business relationships or customer data to competing firms when they leave. But with a more than 60% rise over the past decade in the number of departing employees who are getting sued by their former bosses for breaching the agreements, some worry these clauses are having an unintended damping effect on U.S. entrepreneurship, by preventing people from leaving the corporate world to launch their own businesses, or hire workers when they do. (The Wall Street Journal)
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Working from home is great on so many levels. Not having to commute saves money and time and can actually make you happier. A plethora of free tools make it dead simple to check in with office teammates. And if you want to work in sweats or pajamas, you can. But there are challenges, as well. How do you keep from getting distracted with domestic duties? How do you handle a friend who stops by unannounced in the middle of the day? How do you get anything done if you have kids around? (Inc.)
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You've been working hard most of the day, but now there's a lull in the action. Maybe you're waiting for a call in five minutes or a presentation in a half hour. The bottom line: You've got nothing to do. So. . . what do you do? First off: Remember that it's okay you have nothing to do. Obviously you can't be working for eight hours straight--and, in fact, maybe you shouldn't even try. (Fast Company)
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As Western multinationals ratchet up their operations in Asia, there is one glaring omission from the upper ranks of management: Asians. Asians are employed by multinationals in greater numbers than ever before at lower levels, but when it comes to the top roles, companies from food to finance tend to pick Westerners. (The Wall Street Journal)
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The stats below offer a startling glimpse into what work and leadership is like for women around the world. Click or tap the refresh button for a new fact, and share them with your friends, family and colleagues. They're not all depressing. (Harvard Business Review)
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The balance of world economic growth is tipping in another direction. Just as economists have begun lowering their forecasts for China and many other developing economies, the American economy is bouncing back. Japan appears to have turned a corner and is ending almost two decades of grinding deflation. Economic data out of Europe on Wednesday provided the first solid indication that many countries in the euro zone may be escaping the clutches of recession. (The New York Times)
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India’s diaspora of 25m people is something to behold. In colonial times Indian labourers and traders spread across the world, from Fiji to the Caribbean. A second wave of Indians left between the 1970s and mid-1990s, when the economy was in a semi-socialist rut. Migrant workers rushed to the Persian Gulf and South-East Asia, then booming. Educated folk and entrepreneurs fled to the rich world. Plenty struck gold, including engineers in Silicon Valley and Lakshmi Mittal, boss of ArcelorMittal, a giant steel firm. Often they now have little to do with India beyond sending cash to relatives and groaning as the once-vaunted economic miracle fades. (The Economist)
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Business schools are finally paying the African continent the attention it deserves. The number of MBA study trips, recruitment treks, and conferences is growing rapidly, while classes on emerging markets are drawing on the work of the late strategy professor C.K. Prahalad and others to focus on opportunities at the bottom of the pyramid. (Bloomberg/Businessweek)
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Jessica Cheng graduated from UT-Austin’s McCombs School of Business this year with a plum job at Procter & Gamble lined up. How did she land it? Hard work and tenacity, for sure – but Cheng also took full advantage of McCombs’ personalized coaching. When she needed to practice for a phone interview with her future employer, her coach went into a separate room and called her for a rehearsal. When she needed to prep for an in-person interview, her coach reserved a conference room – which he made her re-enter when her arrival wasn’t up to his standards. Cheng describes him as her "right-hand man." (Poets & Quants)
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Your son calls from college, short on cash, and needs $50 – fast. Or when you're out to dinner with buddies, one pal puts the tab on his card and the rest of you agree to reimburse him later. What's the easiest way to settle up? With a quick email or a few taps on your cellphone, you can transfer the money, and your recipient will get it within a day or so – sometimes even in minutes. (CNN/Money)
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As the technology world buzzes with speculation that the next iPhone will have a fingerprint reader, makers of biometric security devices are bracing for a race among smartphone makers to adopt the technology. (Bloomberg)
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I bought my first business when I was 18, a SCUBA diving school and retail shop (some 30 miles from the ocean I might add). I knew how to dive and how to teach other people to dive, but I had absolutely no idea how to run a business. It didn’t take me long to realize that if I was going to survive I had to learn the art of bluff. (Inc.)
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To this day, I read about 100 business plans a year as a member of a local angel investment group, and a judge of several major international business plan competitions. The fundamentals of business planning have been remarkably stable for several decades. But the how, how much and even the whys have changed enormously. (Entrepreneur)
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The U.S. economy has been growing glacially for the last four years. And, by almost all tellings, the overhang of debt from the pre-crisis years is a big part of the reason why. Americans have been paying down debts and building up savings, without using any additional income to buy more goods and services and fuel more economic growth. (The Washington Post)
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After conducting almost 10,000 job interviews during 10 years as a human resources manager, Tom Kaminski says he thought he knew enough about the labor market to keep his own bout of unemployment short. Instead, he wound up out of work for three years before enrolling in Platform to Employment, or P2E, a privately-funded Connecticut program to help long-term unemployed workers land jobs. The attraction for employers: A fully paid-for audition of as long as eight weeks for job applicants who complete the five-week program. (Bloomberg)
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Six years ago, the U.S. housing market plunged off a cliff. Now prices are – sharply in many markets. That has some real estate analysts saying 2013 may mark the turning point – when pent-up demand will revive the housing sector and boost the broader economy. (NPR)
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The cost to raise a child continues to climb – middle-income parents of a child born in 2012 can expect to spend a whopping $241,080, according to the USDA – and wages aren't keeping up. Here's how five families save, plan and get creative to make it work. (CNN/Money)
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To understand how confusing wireless plans have become, just walk into an AT&T Inc. store. The second largest U.S. carrier offers far more plans than its rivals – nearly 30 combinations alone for individuals, and many of its packages contradict one another. For example, customers can sign up for 900 minutes of talk, unlimited texts and 300 megabytes of data for $100 a month. But a "mobile share" plan that is $30 cheaper offers unlimited talk and texts and the same amount of data. (The Wall Street Journal)
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If you need to pass the PMP® or CAPM® exam and want to get the best project management learning experience in just 3 days, then CertifiNOW is the right choice for you. This project management learning program provides the best learning experience in a condensed amount of time, while also satisfying most, if not all, of your professional certification, education, and training needs. The CertifiNOW certification course reduces exam preparation time from an average of nine to twelve months, down to 3 days.
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Kids today! Won’t use the corporate travel policy, want to choose their own rental car company, no respect for "compliance" or "mandates" – and that is a real problem, says Alicia Tillman, vice president of marketing and business services for American Express Global Business Travel. More than half of hotel reservations for business travel are made outside a company-designated booking channel, according to Concur Technologies, a large supplier of corporate travel software. Can you believe? (Bloomberg/Businessweek)
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You're not likely to find many bankers wearing those old stereotypical green visors these days. But at U.S. Bank, some employees sport hairnets – at least when they're serving breakfast. Every Friday morning, a group of U.S. Bank employees stands elbow to elbow at a Minneapolis soup kitchen, doling out French toast, sausage and other breakfast goodies. Most of the people getting free breakfast are homeless men who lug their belongings in plastic bags. (NPR)
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A day after the Justice Department filed a lawsuit to block the merger of American Airlines and US Airways, regulators and industry officials continued to wrestle with a central question: What is the best way to protect consumers? (The New York Times)
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The Federal Reserve has backed itself into a corner and is finding it hard to get out – and President Barack Obama won’t have much more luck trying to reform the big mortgage-buying giants. That’s the view of James Galbraith, the son of renowned economist John Kenneth Galbraith and a progressive economist who teaches at the University of Texas at Austin. (MarketWatch)
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It is 8 a.m. on a summer Friday and AT&T Inc. vice president Ken Fenoglio is trying to pump up a crowd of 400 at the convention center in downtown Dallas. "Who runs this company?" he asks. "We do, right here." The men and women in the audience aren't executives, nor are they on the front lines dealing with customers. They are in between: middle managers on the corporate ladder of a vast organization. And Mr. Fenoglio wants them to feel like that is a good thing. (The Wall Street Journal)
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What is it exactly that makes some people command far more respect and attention, even devotion, than their peers? And if you're not born with the kind of magnetism that compels people to admire and follow you, can you acquire it? "Charisma" comes from a Greek word that means "gift from the gods," which may explain why most of us assume you've either got it or you don't. (Fortune)
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The business model seems gobsmackingly obvious: buy the rights to show sports; show sports; discuss sports; repeat. What’s more, ESPN seems like just the kind of media business our increasingly atomized culture should unravel – and indeed, a vast array of single-sport channels, local sports networks, and team-specific Web sites have proliferated in recent years, many offering deeper, more finely targeted sports coverage. And yet ESPN seems to only grow stronger from year to year. Why has no one found a way to bring it down, even incrementally? (The Atlantic)
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