After years of gridlock in Washington, American business is gearing up for a major push on long-sought goals like an overhaul of the corporate tax system, building the Keystone XL oil pipeline, lighter environmental and financial regulation and winning congressional backing for trade deals with Asia and Europe. Business interests face a much more receptive audience now that Republicans are poised to control both the House and Senate next year. (The New York Times)

Even the reddest of red states backed increases to the minimum wage during the Republican triumph in Tuesday’s midterms. And behind that surprising result is waning business opposition, particularly among retailers, says Paul Sonn, general counsel and program director at the National Employment Law Project, an advocacy organization. (Businessweek)

Being unhappy at work is such a cliché, and unfortunately for companies it also looks like an expensive one. Research on worker happiness has linked it to 12 percent more productivity, and businesses with happy employees beat their peers by 3.8 percent in the stock market. A Gallup report tallies up the cost of unhappy, disengaged employees to the U.S. economy at $350 billion annually due to lost productivity. (The Atlantic)

You hear a lot of advice about how to reduce stress at work. But most of it is about what to do over the long term – take up yoga, eat a healthy diet, keep a journal, or get more sleep. But what do you do when you’re overcome with stress in the moment – at your desk, say, or in a meeting? Perhaps you’ve heard bad news from a client or were assigned yet another project. How can you regain control? (Harvard Business Review)

By now you’ve probably heard the cardinal rule of networking a million times: If you want to make a killer impression, you need to know exactly what to say when you meet someone new. And we’ll bet that’s why you’ve spent hours brushing up on answers to common yet surprisingly tough questions like, "Tell me about yourself!" An equally important networking commandment you may not have considered? Letting your perfectly crafted elevator pitch devolve into a 10-minute monologue is a big turnoff. (Fast Company)

Which would you rather have: More flexibility at work or a higher salary? Given the choice, workers say they would choose better work-life balance over a pay raise – up to a point, according to a recent survey from banking giant Citigroup Inc. and social media site LinkedIn Corp. (The Wall Street Journal)

Last year, when Maxine Williams started her new job as Facebook’s global head of diversity, her first priority wasn’t to eradicate hiring bias or make compensation more fair. It was to have people not turn around and walk the other way when they saw her coming down the hallway. (Forbes)

Women, who continue to be underrepresented at most levels in the workforce, are not progressing in their careers despite the past two decades of organizational efforts to achieve gender diversity and equality, according to new global research from Mercer, When Women Thrive, Businesses Thrive. Among survey participants, if current approaches continue unchanged, only one-third of executive positions will be held by women over the next 10 years. (MarketWatch)

Last week Canada stopped issuing visas to travelers from the three West African countries battling Ebola, echoing a decision Australia made days earlier. The new policies are the biggest travel restrictions yet from wealthy countries. They are intended to keep the virus from spreading, and they probably won’t work. (Businessweek)

Hundreds of companies have saved billions of dollars in tax thanks to deals with a small country at the heart of the European Union. A report by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, representing a team of 80 from 26 countries, claims that companies such as Pepsi (PEP) and AIG (AIG) obtained assurances from Luxembourg that plans to minimize tax would be viewed favorably by officials. (CNN/Money)

B-school students can’t get enough of big data. Neither can recruiters. Interest in specialized, one-year master’s programs in business analytics, the discipline of using data to explore and solve business problems, has increased lately, prompting at least five business schools to roll out stand-alone programs in the past two years. (The Wall Street Journal)

The student guinea pigs who recently completed Harvard Business School’s first online business program seem pretty ecstatic. "Thank you for an earth-shattering summer," wrote one participant. "It’s been intense beyond belief, but I have learned an incredible amount." *(Poets & Quants)

KeyBank and The Ohio State University Fisher College of Business have announced the 11th Annual Minority MBA Student Case Competition, February 27-March 1, 2015 in Cleveland, OH. Ream registration is open now through December 19.

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What is the most courageous thing you will do today? I ask myself this every morning. Sometimes I forget, and sometimes I just can’t muster the guts to really push myself, but many (even most) days I do. And when I do, it makes all the difference.In my practice working with organizational leaders and teams to Put Courage to Work, I find that it is rare that people don’t have the skills, or talent or smarts to get the job done. (Albany Times Union)

A trio of leading US MBA programs have graduated students into the technology sector in huge numbers, according to new 2014 employment data which mirrors a wider trend in business education recruitment. At Michigan’s Ross School of Business Amazon hired a record 27 MBA graduates, twice as many as last year. The e-commerce giant surpassed Deloitte, the consultancy, Ross’ typical biggest recruiter. (Business Because)

Following up on its blockbuster release of Office for iPad earlier this year, Microsoft on Thursday unveiled new Office apps for iPhone and said consumers using any of its mobile apps will be able to create and edit Office documents for free. (USA Today)

Benjamin Franklin put it simply, "Time is money." These days, there's an app or service for pretty much everything and anything, but the big question is, how can it save me time and money? Here are five new efficient solutions that save you both valuable time and money. (Inc.)

Just like that, Washington’s political landscape has shifted again. Republicans expanded their majority in the House of Representatives and captured enough seats in the Senate to seize control of Congress, splitting political power between the Capitol and the White House. And while it remains to be seen whether single-party control of the Capitol will diminish or deepen the gridlock in Washington, it has changed the outlook for some of the legislative items that tend to matter most to employers and entrepreneurs. (The Washington Post)

San Francisco. It’s gotten that you can’t swing a corporate-logo-splashed swag bag in this town without hitting someone working on a startup. Since around the time of Facebook’s IPO in 2012, but most intensely following the social media behemoth’s multi-billion-dollar acquisitions of WhatsApp and Oculus VR earlier this year, San Francisco has thrummed – and occasionally shuddered – with startup fever. Everywhere you go, the conversations you overhear are about runways and burn rates; Uber and Lyft drivers unspool elevator pitches at their passengers. (Fast Company)

It's hard to believe, but there was a time when wealth was growing faster for the bottom 90 percent than for the top percentile in the United States. This remarkable period in American history was called... the twentieth century. Between 1929 and 1986, the bottom 90 percent saw its wealth grow at real annual rate of 3 percent, compared with 0.3 percent for the top percentile, according to new research released last month. (The Atlantic)

The yawning gap between the dearly held ideal of the self-made man and the difficulty of actually improving your station in America, particularly if you’re poor, made me wonder about the utility of the rags-to-riches story. Is it a healthy myth that inspires us to aim high? Or is it more like a mass delusion keeping us from confronting the fact that poor Americans tend to remain poor Americans, regardless of how hard they work? (Slate)

Saving money is tough. So it’s no surprise that we come up with all sorts of reasons we just can’t save as much as we should. But are these legitimate excuses, or rationalizations? To see, I checked out the section of BlackRock’s 2014 U.S. Investor Pulse Survey that deals with reasons people find it difficult to save scrutiny. (Money)

For the first time, Thanksgiving, not Black Friday or Cyber Monday, could be the best day for finding deals online. Prices online likely will be discounted an average of 24% that day, better than the average of about 20% on Cyber Monday or about 23% on Black Friday, according to Adobe Systems Inc.’s 2014 Digital Index Online Shopping Forecast. (MarketWatch)

This month, you’ll find a series of big data-themed MOOCs. To learn the basics, you can enroll in the University of Texas’ "Foundations of Data Analysis," which provides an undergraduate grounding in statistics coupled with modeling basics. From there, the Eindhoven University of Technology takes it a step further with "Process Mining: Data Science in Action," taught by Wil van der Aalst, one of the most cited scholars in information technology. (Poets & Quants)

It’s been almost one month since the 2014 Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit, and as I think about the questions and topics that really resonated, I keep returning to a panel I moderated on ‘The New Emerging Workforce.’ The three women on the stage – Mellody Hobson, President of Ariel Investments; Gisele Ruiz, EVP and COO at Wal-Mart North America; and Wendy Kopp, founder of Teach for America – are young women themselves, although Generation Xers rather than millennials. (Fortune)

A generation ago, many companies offered a straightforward career ladder. If you performed well, you could count on a steady climb in salary, job title, and responsibilities until receiving a gold watch for 25 years of loyal service. Today, organizations freely reassign and fire employees as needed. Management ranks that were clogged with Baby Boomers before the Great Recession are now even less likely to see turnover, as the organization’s oldest employees seek to rebuild their retirement savings. (Fortune)

Few expected the Democrats to be victorious in this year’s midterm elections, but even fewer predicted such a blood bath. Propelled by economic frustration, fledgling voter turnout and outright disdain for President Obama, Republicans successfully seized seven Democratic U.S. Senate seats to gain control of the Senate for the first time since 2006. On top of expected victories in states such as Montana, West Virginia, South Dakota and Arkansas, it was upsets in North Carolina, Virginia, Colorado and Georgia that pushed Republicans to the biggest political landslide since 1994. (DiversityInc)

While it’s clear that the Republican Party won big on Tuesday night, the election wasn’t a win for either party in terms of convincing the American public that they have the answers for what ails us. What’s worrying Americans most? The economy. In exit polls, 7 in 10 Americans said they were "concerned" about economic conditions in America. (Fortune)

The odds are pretty low that you’ll like everyone you have to manage. And while you may think that disliking an employee or two isn’t something to be concerned about (after all, making friends isn’t the point of being a manager), it can actually interfere with your job. A caring manager is key to employee engagement. When you have negative feelings toward an employee, chances are that person will feel less motivated. That disengagement can, in turn, affect your entire team and the outcome of important projects – which ultimately reflects badly upon you. (Harvard Business Review)

Brad Smith, P90X fan and CEO of software company Intuit, said there were two moments when he knew he was a leader. "First, it hit me coming up through karate," said Smith, who has a black belt. "When you hit a brown belt, you become a student-teacher. At that moment, it shifted my mind. It became about teaching others and the capabilities in others. I was as responsible for their progression as I was my own. That really let me know I love management and leadership." (ABC News)

Do you know what makes a remarkable leader remarkable? In today's highly technical and globally competitive business world, it might seem that remarkable leaders need to have a heightened understanding and appreciation of technology, multi-national cultures, and global business trends. While all of these are important and incredibly useful, separating yourself as a remarkable leader simply comes down to better executing a few traditional leadership characteristics. (Entrepreneur)