Treasury Secretary Jacob J. Lew implored Congress on Thursday to raise the debt ceiling, warning of potentially severe market and economic repercussions if it did not. In testimony before the Senate Finance Committee, Mr. Lew stressed that the Treasury Department would run out of "extraordinary measures" to free up cash in a matter of days. (The New York Times)
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Janet Yellen’s official interview to become the nation’s economist in chief lasted less than an hour. The academic from Brooklyn had visited the White House only one other time in the three years since she was appointed vice chairman at the Federal Reserve, according to visitor logs. She had not testified before Congress since her confirmation hearing. She thought her interview with President Obama early this summer was unexpectedly brief, according to two people familiar with the discussion. Both left the meeting without an expectation that she would get the job. (The Washington Post)
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Strategic decisiveness is one of the most vital success attributes for leaders in every position and every industry, but few leaders understand where it comes from or how to find more of it. It is not surprising that picking one strategic direction and then decisively pursuing that direction are hallmarks of good leadership, if not boilerplate management skills. The big mystery is why these obviously important skills are still rare enough to distinguish excellent leaders from average managers. (Harvard Business Review)
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Having 20 tabs open on your laptop while Snapchatting with your best friend, eating a sandwich, and listening to music is overwhelming. And makes you mean. (Fast Company)
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Office workers are being treated to a new game: musical chairs. By shifting employees from desk to desk every few months, scattering those who do the same types of jobs and rethinking which departments to place side by side, companies say they can increase productivity and collaboration. (The Wall Street Journal)
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Why do people who consider themselves good communicators often fail to actually hear each other? Often it’s due to a mismatch of styles: To someone who prefers to vent, someone who prefers to explain seems patronizing; explainers experience venters as volatile. This is why so many of us see our conversational counterparts as lecturing, belaboring, talking down to us, or even shaming us (if we are venters and they are explainers) or as invasive, out of control, and overly emotional (if we’re an explainer and they’re a venter). (Harvard Business Review)
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Your column on how to recover from a failure recommended accepting the responsibility for what's gone wrong. I report to a boss who never does that. Instead, and especially when he's talking to higher-ups in the company, he hogs all the credit for our successes, while pointing the finger at me or at one of my eight teammates for things that haven't gone so well. (Fortune)
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The recession and General Motors' bankruptcy filing gave the automaker an inadvertent but timely opportunity to restructure itself to better reflect the country's diverse and changing population, said Mark Reuss, GM's president of North America. (Automotive News)
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Chris Leatherwood is a seventh-grade math teacher at Gateway Middle School, and he is part of the two percent of teachers nationwide who are African-American males. He understands that there is a growing need for more black male teachers, he said. But that’s not why he chose to join Teach For America, a national organization that trains professionals to become teachers in low-income communities. (St. Louis American)
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The combined fortune of Africa’s 55 billionaires is $143.88 billion. The average net worth of the members of this exclusive club is $2.6 billion, while the median age of the richest people in Africa is 65 years. (Ventures)
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Global finance chiefs chastised the U.S. for the political gridlock they identified as the biggest threat to the world’s economy and financial markets. Arriving in Washington for the annual meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, policy makers expressed concern that failure by U.S. lawmakers to end a government shutdown and raise the nation’s debt ceiling could trigger default and recession, imperiling already historically sluggish growth around the globe. (Bloomberg)
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The University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business has topped the The Economist’s full-time MBA ranking for the second consecutive year. The new global ranking out today (Oct. 10) by the British magazine follows yesterday’s publication of Forbes’ biennial MBA ranking. (Poets & Quants)
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The M.B.A. graduating class of 2008 entered the job market in the teeth of the Great Recession. It was slim pickings for jobs for those outside the elite programs. Even grads of top schools got whacked. "My post-MBA career started with a nightmare, as I joined Lehman Brothers and the bank imploded within three weeks," says Petr Ostapenko who earned a degree from the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business. He ended up on the street and Lehman reclaimed his signing bonus. (Forbes)
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Stephanie is the Owner of Swimintheincomestream.com, a company dedicated to providing individuals with the tools to pursue multiple streams of income in order to become successful in the 21st century. In the new millennium, it is imperative that entrepreneurs have multiple streams of income to survive in the changing economy. Swimintheincomestream.com provides information on developing those multiple streams of income through passive, active, and residual income streams. (PR Newswire)
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The technology you've come to expect in computers and smartphones will increasingly be found in devices worn on your wrist or on your head. Or on your back or even on your feet. The market for wearable technology – such as Google Glass, the Samsung Galaxy Gear smartwatch or FitBit, a wearable fitness device – is poised to explode over the next few years, according to a recent report from Swedish telecom market researcher Berg Insight. (Entrepreneur)
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Let's say you want to tour New York City: visit Central Park, catch The Lion King in Times Square, grab a drink in Greenwich Village, and maybe take a leisurely stroll along the High Line. You can now plug all those destinations into Google Maps at once and have Maps work out your route for you, thanks to a new update rolling out to U.S. users. (Fast Company)
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In this week's issue of The New Yorker, columnist James Surowiecki weighs in on the Obamacare debate, with a column called "The Business End of Obamacare," which makes the case that "the likely benefits of Obamacare for small businesses are enormous." Is Surowiecki's assessment correct? Yes and no. (Inc.)
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Whether you've been in business one week or five years, an infusion of funds is always welcome. But what type of financing is best for your business? There are so many factors to consider – from the stage of your business to how much it'll cost to get the money – that just choosing a path to follow can be overwhelming. (Entrepreneur)
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When it comes to history, never say never. If you go back far enough, almost everything has happened at least once – and sometimes several times. And that’s how it is with U.S. defaults. (The Atlantic)
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As the federal shutdown drags on, some workers who depend on a steady government paycheck are moonlighting. During his furlough last week, Mike Ferrigno from Ashaway, Rhode Island, picked up extra shifts fueling airplanes at the local airport. (CNN/Money)
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After 5 years of self-imposed austerity, now is the time to think about upgrading rather than cutting back. When it comes to home, travel, finances, or your career, the key is still to find the best value for your money. (Money Magazine)
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It’s a midlife conundrum that’s becoming increasingly common: You’re not ready to retire, but you’re tired of what you’re doing. Enter the second-act career. These encore occupations offer a chance to pursue a lifelong passion, start a business or make a difference in your community. Often, second careers aren’t as lucrative or prestigious as first-act professions, but they’re less stressful and more emotionally satisfying. The people we profile here have strayed far from their original career paths – and they’re not looking back. (Kiplinger's)
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Harvard Business School is quietly developing its first online learning initiative, which it hopes will make HBS the world’s top provider of high quality online business education. The move has the potential to shake up the nascent online education market and give the elite business school a toehold in the world of MOOCs, or massive open online courses. (Bloomberg/Businessweek)
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In the early 1990s, Judith Bouvard, now dean of Grenoble Graduate School of Business, took a distance-learning marketing course with Henley Management College. "It came in a beautiful suitcase," she remembers, "and it was nicely packaged and sequenced. There were VHS and audio cassettes, a workbook and a textbook. You sent in your assignment by post and back it came, graded." (The Independent)
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Nearly everyone on the list is striving to reinvent her business. Meet a group of executives who don't sit still. (Fortune)
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Google’s Android grows stronger and is moving beyond smartphones to power cars, home electronics and wearable accessories. A thriving Amazon.com and Kindle are transforming publishing. In the hotel industry, AirBnB is disrupting the market. Now Twitter, with an ecosystem of more than one million apps, has filed its IPO to raise $1 billion. (MarketWatch)
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Amazon.com rivals Wal-Mart as a store, Apple as a device maker, and IBM as a data services provider. It will rake in about $75 billion this year. For his book, Bloomberg Businessweek’s Brad Stone spoke to hundreds of current and former friends of founder Jeff Bezos. In the process, he discovered the poignant story of how Amazon became the Everything Store. (BloombergBusinessweek)
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An estimated 7 million people have been shut out at 12 of the busiest and biggest U.S. national parks, costing parks and nearby communities about $76 million in lost visitor spending for each day the partial government shutdown drags on. (NPR)
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Insurance exchanges set up by the Affordable Care Act are open, and Blacks and Latinos are expected to make up the majority of new enrollees in the healthcare marketplace. But governors in nearly half the states in the country have been able to exclude their residents from parts of the law, leaving millions – mainly low-income Blacks and single mothers – with no way to find health coverage. (DiversityInc.)
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Ask your employees this: "How would you like to be rewarded for your efforts and performance, in addition to your fixed salary?" They will likely respond by asking for a cash reward in the form of a raise or bonus, which they can then spend on themselves. They might even convince you that spending this extra cash on the newest tablet on the market, or Daft Punk’s next album, will motivate them to work "harder, better, faster, stronger." Take what they say with a grain of salt. (Harvard Business Review)
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It sounded more like a Mean Girls taunt than political discourse: "We're not going to be disrespected," Marlin Stutzman, a Republican congressman from Indiana told the Washington Examiner last week. "We have to get something out of this. And I don't know what that even is." (Fortune)
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