These are the home health aides, the fast-food workers, the janitors, the teachers’ aides, the delivery people, the manicurists, and countless others who are making more than minimum wage but less than enough to meet the soaring cost of living – not just in New York, but in cities around the country. These people, increasingly, are falling off the shaky ladder of economic viability, and many are being pushed into homelessness. (The Atlantic)
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Too big to fail. Those four words loomed large in 2008, as a crisis in the banking world threatened the global economy. Fears that the failure of large financial institutions would undermine the entire economic system led Congress to step in, passing a $700 billion bailout package. (NPR)
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An admission of ignorance – saying, "I don’t know" – is an indication of intellectual honesty. But obviously many people do know some things, and a few people know many things. The challenge here is sorting wheat from chaff: How can you tell when they really do know something and aren’t just making false claims? (Harvard Business Review)
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A growing percentage of middle-class Americans say they have saved so little for retirement that they expect to work into their 80s or even until they either get too sick or die, according to a recent survey. (CNN/Money)
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By now, most of us know the signs of burnout: loss of motivation for the job, minor illness, listlessness and feeling down, a bad attitude toward work, needless squabbles with coworkers and bosses, and a feeling that every day we go to work is another miserable, boring day closer to retirement. (DiversityInc.)
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After getting his M.B.A. from the College of William and Mary, Chris Perry knew he'd have to venture beyond Williamsburg, Va., to find a good job in marketing and branding. The best jobs in his field are in big cities like New York, and industry recruiters weren't coming to his university. So, through the career website LinkedIn he started reaching out to people who worked at companies that he had an interest in. His first few introductions didn't get much response. (The Wall Street Journal)
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An internal battle rages inside many high performers who advance from positions where they thrived as individual contributors to positions that require them to depend on others. On the one hand, they pride themselves on knowing more than anyone else about their area and like feeling confident in their abilities to deliver exceptional work. On the other, the scope of their new responsibilities no longer makes keeping up on all the details possible – or even preferable. (Harvard Business Review)
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Should you ask for a raise during bad economic times? The answer is yes, but only if you deserve a raise and you've developed a carefully thought-through strategy. Even in bad times, asking for more money likely can tell you where you stand within your company and what the future might hold. (CareerCast)
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Has the euro been a disaster, or what? It seems pretty self-evident that it has been. Unemployment is 27.6 percent in Greece, 26.2 percent in Spain, 16.5 percent in Portugal, and 13.6 percent in Ireland, which, remember, is supposed to be the austerity success story. What's happened? Well, exactly what euro-skeptics feared would happen from the time the common currency was just an idea: a shock hit some parts of Europe worse than others, and there hasn't been any easy way to adjust. (The Atlantic)
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Britain’s banks, heirs to empire, have long coveted the riches of China. On October 15th their hopes of reaping them rose greatly when the chancellor of the exchequer, George Osborne, announced a deal with China that is intended to make Britain the main offshore hub for trading in China’s currency and bonds and for foreign institutions investing in China’s fast-growing economy. (The Economist)
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When 41-year-old Krishna Kumar takes charge as the new CEO and MD of Philips India in December, he will become the latest in an elite club of top bosses who have one – or more – MBAs from leading B-schools abroad. (India Times)
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Take, for example, a $4 beer. That beer costs four dollars right? Nope, not if you’re paying with student loan money. Let’s just say, for example, you’re buying that beer with money from a subsidized Stafford loan from the Federal Government. So your beer fund carries a 6.8% interest rate that started accruing before you bought a drop. You’ll pay that loan over 10 years. Assuming that "$4 beer" was funded by such a loan, it actually cost you around $7.72 of your future earnings. (Poets & Quants)
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"Business school is a waste of time and money. If you want to blow $100K, go to Vegas." That’s what one disgruntled Class of 2008 MBA alum from New York University’s Stern School of Business told Forbes when surveyed for the magazine’s latest return-on-investment ranking of the best business schools. (Poets & Quants)
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As our government debates on what is the best of course of action for the country, local business owners surge on amidst an uncertain economic climate. Many aspiring and current entrepreneurs attended a panel discussion held at the prestigious Cox Business School on the beautiful campus of SMU to hear industry superwomen, co-sponsored by the Dallas Chapter of NBMBAA. (The Dallas Weekly)
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Flint native Keith Edmonds and his team from Clark University in Atlanta snatched the $25,000 first-place prize from top-tier schools during an annual marketing competition in Houston. "We had lofty expectations," Edmonds said. "(Winning) was an indescribable feeling." (M Live)
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With tablet sales projected to pass personal computers at the end of this year, the popularity of these devices cannot be denied. Sure tablets are excellent for entertainment, music and leisure activities, but can they cross the line into being a functional work device? After a few weeks of working from my tablet, here are the processes, apps and accessories that I have found helpful to drop your laptop or PC and work strictly from a tablet. (Inc.)
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As cell phones have become an increasingly ubiquitous part of our day-to-day lives, they've had the effect of unleashing a kind of epidemic of spontaneity. As a result, many of us have become exceptionally bad at planning, preferring to set vague parameters for meetings and work out the finer details later. Lately, our last-minute mania has started to shape how we make hotel reservations. (CNN International)
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Apple revealed its updated iPad and, as has long been rumored, it is thinner and lighter and takes a lot of design cues from the existing iPad Mini. Apple says it's such a big change that it's no longer just worthy of the name iPad, and they've rebranded it the iPad Air. (Fast Company)
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Entrepreneurs who have been chomping at the bit to launch equity crowdfunding campaigns since President Obama signed the JOBS Act into law in April 2012 should regard news of a Securities and Exchange Commission vote on the subject today with measured optimism. Yes, the agency agreed on a proposal outlining how private ventures can use the online fundraising model to sell shares to individual investors. No, the final rules won’t likely take effect for a while. (Bloomberg/Businessweek)
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As an investor, I spend a lot of time coaching CEOs on the critical and essential talent of managing their board of directors. I am amazed how many otherwise brilliant CEOs get this wrong. They make errors that undermine the board’s confidence or even lead them to question the CEO’s competence, and this happens all the time. I know. When I was an entrepreneur, I made many of the same boneheaded mistakes. (Inc.)
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A majority of Americans with 401(k)-type savings accounts are accumulating debt faster than they are setting aside money for retirement, further undermining the nation’s troubled system for old-age saving, a new report has found. (The Washington Post)
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The temporary-help business notched respectable gains in September but the industry is feeling businesses’ reluctance to commit to even short-term workers. taffing firms accounted for 20,000 of the 148,000 jobs the nation added last month, the Labor Department reported Tuesday. The September jobs report – initially due for release Oct. 4 – was delayed because of the federal government shutdown. (The Wall Street Journal)
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Home buyers can’t catch a break. Not only is it becoming harder to get a mortgage, but real estate prices have risen so much this year that buyers – much like during the housing bubble – can no longer afford the home in the first place. (MarketWatch)
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After the Great Recession laid waste to the housing market, decimated portfolios and cost Kaylene Murzin's father his construction job, the 15-year-old found another way that she, like many teenagers, didn’t want to emulate her parents: financially. (Bloomberg)
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The 16-day government shutdown circus has claimed another victim . . . well, actually, about 100 million of them: Taxpayers who are looking forward to tax refunds next spring. The IRS says locking the doors to employees in October will delay the opening of the tax filing season in 2014 by up to two weeks. And, if you can’t file your return, you can’t get your refund. But there’s a way to mitigate the damage: Adjust withholding from your paychecks, NOW, to limit the size of your potentially delayed refund. (Kiplinger's)
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The UpTake: The next phase of a business education is upon us as graduate schools like Stanford follow the model of disruptive startups and tap into technology and embrace the world of Massive Open Online Courses. (Upstart)
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Thirteen billion dollars requires some perspective. The record amount that JPMorgan Chase has tentatively agreed to pay the U.S. Department of Justice, to settle civil investigations into mortgage-backed securities it sold in the runup to the 2008 financial crisis, is equal to the gross domestic product of Namibia. (Bloomberg/Businessweek)
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Merger hopefuls American and US Airways claim that consolidation would lower prices and increase service. Delta's stellar results – driven by higher ticket prices – prove otherwise. (Fortune)
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As the world prepares for Twitter’s potential IPO, many startups, founders, and investors are looking to Twitter to understand parallels to other Silicon Valley successes and want to know how it got here and what the growth potential is going forward. How did Twitter grow from a small 140-character posting service to a tech giant with more than 200 million users? Can it grow all the way to a billion users like Facebook? Can Twitter grow its revenues and international business as fast as LinkedIn? What metrics can we look to that help us understand its user growth potential? (Fast Company)
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As technical failures bedevil the rollout of President Obama’s health care law, evidence is emerging that one of the program’s loftiest goals – to encourage competition among insurers in an effort to keep costs low – is falling short for many rural Americans. (The New York Times)
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In Detroit on Wednesday, a federal trial begins that will determine whether that city is eligible for the nation's largest-ever municipal bankruptcy. Hundreds of the city's creditors are lining up to oppose the bankruptcy, arguing that Detroit is violating Michigan's Constitution and that if officials tried harder they could find enough savings to pay the city's bills. (NPR)
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The most motivated and productive people I’ve seen recently work in an older company on the American East Coast deploying innovative technology products to transform a traditional industry. To a person, they look astonished when I ask whether their dedication comes from anticipation of the money they could make in the event of an IPO. (Harvard Business Review)
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Information theft by departing employees isn't what it used to be – it's much easier. But there are ways for companies to guard against it. Workers who wanted to take confidential corporate information with them when they left a company used to have to sneak paper documents out the door. Now, in a few clicks, corporate secrets can be downloaded to a mobile device or uploaded to an online storage service. (The Wall Street Journal)
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The technology to see very small things up close showed us we had much wrong about health. The technology to see big things far away showed us we are not the center of the universe. More recently, a technology called fMRI, that lets us collect images of oxygen use inside an active brain, has shown us that some of our long-held beliefs about human motivation may be wrong. (Fortune)
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