If newly-minted MBAs want a good shot at quick employment and salary jumps, they may want to turn their aspirations toward factory floors and away from trading floors. A survey of more than 3,000 graduate business students around the world, released Wednesday by the Graduate Management Admission Council, shows that grads seeking jobs in the manufacturing and healthcare industries were most likely to get early offers this spring. (Bloomberg/Businessweek)
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Big data is a big part of your daily life whether you like it or not – or even realize it. When you visit the doctor, go to work or get directions on your mobile phone, there's a good chance there's software out there quietly collecting and analyzing that information. And depending on the situation, that could be a good or bad thing. Here are 10 examples of how technology is trawling your life, combing your digital refuse for something valuable. (Bloomberg)
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When a company’s planning and decision-making process involves a lot of meetings, discussions, committees, PowerPoint decks, emails, and announcements, but very few hard-and-fast agreements, I call that "decision spin". Decisions bounce around the company, from group to group, up and down the hierarchy and across the matrix, their details and consequences changing as different stakeholders weigh in. Often, the underlying problem isn’t an inability to make decisions – it’s a tendency to avoid conflict. (Harvard Business Review)
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If you’ve been reading the same papers I have this week, then you’ve likely noticed a slew of housing headlines: Mortgage rates are falling. Home equity lines are booming. Hybrid loans are back. And sellers are chomping at the bit. This column is a round-up of sorts as we take a dive into each of them and explore what they mean to you. Is it really a buyer’s market? (Fortune)
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Part charisma, part gravitas, with a dash of the ineffable, it may seem that true leaders are just born with it. Not so, says a new book. (Fortune)
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There is a growing digital divide in workplaces – between twentysomethings with social-media savvy and tech-impaired older managers. To address it, more companies are trying reverse mentoring, pairing young employees with older colleagues to work on tech skills. (The Wall Street Journal)
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With more than 40% of women taking some kind of break from their careers to care for their families, trying to jump start that career can be a daunting prospect. So how can they make the transition? One option is a paid internship. That's right – they're not just for college students anymore. (CNN/Money)
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The technology industry is frequently thought of as a place that’s heavily white and male, and often unfriendly, if not hostile, to women. Google took a look at its own diversity record and released the data to NewsHour and in a blog post, and it confirms many fears. (The Atlantic)
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How Christine Day, the former CEO of Lululemon, learned how to stand up for herself and created polices that improved the working lives of both men and women. (Fast Company)
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The European Central Bank cut its benchmark interest rate to a record low on Thursday and, in an unprecedented attempt to stimulate the euro zone economy, said it would begin charging interest on deposits held by the bank. (The New York Times)
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French authorities are pushing back against the possibility of U.S. authorities hitting BNP Paribas SA with hefty penalties for alleged evasion of U.S. sanctions, saying an overly harsh punishment could have repercussions on trans-Atlantic trade discussions. (The Wall Street Journal)
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Over the past few years, business school administrators — like other university officials – have been losing sleep over Massive Open Online Courses (or MOOCs), worrying that these low-cost digital alternatives will cannibalize their business model. As elite business schools have started to offer their own courses through platforms like Coursera, commentators have pointed out that it’s now possible to cobble together an elite MBA for free. (Harvard Business Review)
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The going is tougher for new graduates who are black, even if they studied high demand fields like engineering. A recent report from the Center for Economic and Policy Research titled "A College Degree Is No Guarantee" says that last year, about 12 percent of black college graduates between the ages of 22 and 27 were unemployed. For all college graduates in the same age range, that's graduates of all races, the unemployment rate was about half that. (NPR)
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Every so often we find ourselves in all sorts of quandaries. It’s simply a part of life’s course. Join NBMBAA® as we provide practical steps to reset, refocus and recalibrate your reality and navigate the everyday compromises, sacrifices and adjustments across the eco-system of life.

The next NBMBAA Regional Symposium takes place July 17 at the Chicago Cultural Center. Tickets are $35 for students and $50 for members. Non-Members can attend at a special early bird rate of $75 until July 7. Tickets are limited, so register today!

 

Companies can buy info on your health, political affiliations, financial stability, and more. Here's how to keep data brokers in the dark. (Money Magazine)
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Pew’s new survey report on the Internet of Things (IoT) and wearable computing, reveals growing concern about the technology sector’s cognitive privilege – a set of unrestrained assumptions, often based in power and influence, about how the world should operate. Many of the Pew survey’s expert respondents argue that there’s considerable risk to societal well-being if these privilege-based assumptions from the tech sector were to guide the design and development of the Internet of Things over the next decade. (Harvard Business Review)
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It was a disaster. We had different styles, work ethics and visions of what we wanted to achieve. I hated it, and within two years we went our separate ways at considerable cost of time, money, energy, and reputation. I promised myself that I would never make the same mistake again. The New York Times)
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What's the key to making a startup business a reality a long way from Silicon Valley, in the Albany, N.Y. area? Here are some tips from investors and entrepreneurs who have been there. (Upstart Business Journal)
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On Friday, the U.S. Labor Department is slated to release its monthly snapshot of the health of the labor market. Calculating the number of people who are unemployed seems like a pretty straightforward task. But the years since the Great Recession have highlighted the complexities of one of the country’s the most critical economic indicators. The Washington Post)
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There’s no denying that something weird happens when a country slips into recession – all the same factories and offices and people and ideas are there, but suddenly people aren’t producing as much stuff. Why? John Maynard Keynes, Friedrich Hayek and Irving Fisher wrestled with this question in the 1930s, and their work kicked off a decades-long quest to understand what we now call the business cycle. But almost a century later, despite sending some of our best brains up against the problem, we’ve made frustratingly little progress. (Bloomberg)
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If middle-class goals – buying a house, putting the kids through college, having a secure retirement – haven’t changed over the past few decades, achieving them has gotten harder. Middle-class incomes have stagnated while the costs of higher education, health care and housing have skyrocketed, and private pensions have slowly disappeared. The recession wreaked havoc on jobs and home equity, the latter one of the biggest sources of middle-class savings. More than three-fourths of middle-class adults believe it is more difficult now than it was a decade ago to maintain their standard of living, according to a 2012 study by the Pew Research Center. (Kiplinger's)
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Fortunately, times are changing. Moms still make up the vast majority of stay-at-home parents, but fathers represent a growing share, according to a new Pew survey. In 2012, 16 percent of stay-at-home parents were dads, up from just 10 percent in 1989. That’s a somewhat positive storyline, but these dads’ reasons for being at home aren’t as uplifting. (The Atlantic)
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A few months ago, online shoe retailer Zappos did away with job titles for its 1,500 employees. Now, the company is taking the ax to job postings. Zappos, based in Las Vegas, plans to hire at least 450 people this year, but candidates won't find out about those jobs on LinkedIn.com, Monster.com or the company website. Instead, they will have to join a social network, called Zappos Insiders, where they will network with current employees and demonstrate their passion for the company – in some cases publicly – in hopes that recruiters will tap them when jobs come open. (The Wall Street Journal)
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Over the past several months, what started as a quiet trade dispute has intensified and become public as the largest bookseller in the world, Amazon, and one of the biggest publishers, Hachette, battle over their next contract. You may have noticed little things, like that book you wanted from Amazon was going to take weeks to reach you – rare for a retailer that puts service to customers above all. (The Atlantic)
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Major General Marcia Anderson joined the military by accident 35 years ago, when she signed up for a Reserve Officer Training Corps class because she needed a science credit as a student at Creighton University. She decided to make it her career roughly eight years later, after an incident illustrated to her how much the military needed more female leaders. (The Washington Post)
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When thinking about the qualities of great leaders we might use terms like vision, ambition, discipline, and inspiration. But leadership is also about restraint and knowing when to quit. As a young Navy SEAL, my first combat deployment was to Iraq in the spring of 2003. No one in my platoon had any combat experience. Before moving into Iraq we spent a few weeks of preparation at Ali Al Salem Air Base in Kuwait. (Inc.)
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Nearly half of people surveyed who say they're retired are working or have worked in the recent past. And nearly three quarters of baby boomers say they plan to stay on the job past retirement age. (Audio) (NPR)
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Mental rest is like a dose of super foods for your brain. Without it, you may survive, but you will never excel. We all have an awareness of this fact, but when we know that working has resulted in success, it can be difficult to impossible to choose to stop working, even if we know that doing so would be good for us. (Entrepreneur)
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