Celebrating 45 years of Black professional development and executive leadership, The National Black MBA Association® (NBMBAA®), the nation's premier organization for Black business professionals, today announced early bird registration is open for  the upcoming NBMBAA® 37th Annual Conference and Exposition at the Orange County Convention Center, Orlando, FL where more than 9,000 attendees are anticipated to convene for networking, leadership development, and career opportunities.

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Ever get to the end of the workday and wonder where the time went? At 4:54 p.m., I'm having that experience myself right now. It turns out that the way our workplaces and work lives are structured saps our creativity, energy, efficiency, and even our health. To help us all fight back, the folks at TED have assembled a playlist on life hacks, offering a number of clever ways we can help both ourselves and the people who work for us get more done in a day. (Inc.)

If you feel like you never manage to check everything off of your to-do list, you're not alone. Only 11% of professionals around the world accomplish all the tasks they'd planned to do on an average workday, according to a LinkedIn survey. Writing down your goals makes you more likely to achieve them, but many of us struggle with a never-ending to-do list: pick up the dry cleaning, finish that presentation, call the dentist, book a flight, order a wedding present. (Fast Company)

For the many taxpayers who wait until the last minute to file their tax returns, the relief that comes on April 16 after another tax season is over can't come fast enough. One thing you can learn from a difficult tax-preparation experience, though, is that by using some forethought, you can get your finances in order and boost the chances of a more favorable outcome when you file your taxes next year. (Daily Finance)

When a manager has been successful at a job for a long time, it’s easy to assume she should stay where she is. Leyla Seka, 41, nearly quit her vice president job at a software company because she assumed her bosses didn’t believe she could handle a more demanding role. With help from those same bosses, though, she was able to recognize her self-doubts and land an executive job more challenging than any she had imagined. Here’s how she did it. (The Wall Street Journal)

Dual-career couples especially struggle with tradeoffs, not only between work and personal life, but between each of their careers (and most don’t have the option of chucking it all to travel the world together). Their lives are filled with negotiation. Whose career will take priority? If one partner accepts a job opportunity that requires the other partner to leave a good job and move elsewhere, for example, will the sacrifice be compensated in some way? How will domestic work (which may detract from career building) be divided up? And what if one or both partners become unhappy with the deal they’ve created? Can they renegotiate? (Harvard Business Review)

Q: I was recently being interviewed for a job, and it seemed to be going well. But then the interviewer asked if I was planning to have children. Is she allowed to do that? A: If the question made you uncomfortable, there’s a good reason. It’s illegal to ask – and the person interviewing you may not even know it. One in five hiring managers say they have asked a question in a job interview only to find out later that it was a violation of federal labor laws to ask it, according to a CareerBuilder survey. (Money)

Alison Davis-Blake, dean of the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, is used to being lonely. "I have been the first at everything I’ve done in academic leadership," says Davis-Blake. She adds that she was the first woman to be the chair of her department at the University of Texas at Austin’s McCombs School of Business, the first female senior associate dean at McCombs, the first female dean of the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota, and now the first woman to run Ross. (Bloomberg)

With today’s global workforce, it’s becoming increasingly important to understand and work more effectively with people across cultures. But what happens when cultural differences about managing time interfere with the work we’re trying to accomplish? That was certainly the case for an American manager I spoke with recently who worked for a firm that had merged with an Italian company. (Harvard Business Review)

The day-to-day data coming out of China are sometimes reminiscent of the classic Zen riddle about listening to the sound of one hand clapping. They’re puzzling, even a little baffling. The world’s second-biggest economy is decelerating. The government reported Wednesday that first-quarter gross domestic product grew 7 percent, the slowest pace since the 2009 global recession. (Bloomberg)

More than a quarter of people globally still do not have access to banking facilities, a report shows. The World Bank's Global Findex report said more than half of adults in the world's poorest areas still have no access to the financial system. This is despite a global increase of 11% in the last three years of adults owning bank accounts. (BBC News)

Wharton junior Sandhya Jetty’s first contact with Teddy Daiell, a first-year MBA, began over e-mail, when he introduced himself as her mentor and asked her to reflect on what she hoped to gain out of their relationship. In many ways, the two were an unusual match. Jetty, a finance and operations and information management major, is a soft-spoken self-described introvert, while Daiell, who hails from the consulting world, has an outgoing and charismatic personality. (Poets & Quants)

Progress on pay parity and bridging the gender divide has been promising but a striking gulf still exists between the careers of women and men at the top. Business schools are promoted as champions for slashing gender inequality but the debate about diversity at the world’s leading schools and top blue chip companies continues to rage. The two are linked, believes Cristina Sassot, admissions director at ESADE Business School in Spain. (BusinessBecause)

Entertainment Announced: Take Advantage of Discounted Tickets for the NBMBAA 45th Anniversary Celebration, June 12 in Chicago

As a valued supporter of the National Black MBA Association’s legacy, we invite you to join us on Friday, June 12, as we celebrate 45 years of creating economic, educational and employment opportunities for Blacks in the business world. Plan now to attend this extraordinary event. Buy early and take advantage of $150 tickets before the price goes up!

HONOREE
Don Thompson, retired President and Chief Executive Officer, McDonald's Corporation

ENTERTAINMENT
Terisa Griffin, as seen on season 3 of "The Voice"
Mae Ya, 13-year-old singing sensation!

 

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When Marissa Mayer was named as president and CEO of Yahoo in July 2012, she arrived at a company which had long made most of its money from traditional display advertising: big, splashy banners plastered on web pages. It was a business in decline. And it was in decline in part because "native advertising" – ads which take on the format of the content they accompany, such as one on a Tumblr blog with a blog post-like presentation – were on the rise. To take advantage of the native-advertising trend, Yahoo would need technology to sell and display such ads. That infrastructure had not been built under Mayer's predecessors. (Fast Company)

The new Apple Watch won’t be the only way you can make payments on your wrist. American Express is looking to bring mobile payments systems to wearable health trackers, Engadget reports. The credit card company is working with Jawbone to bring a mobile payments service to a yet-t0-be announced fitness band, allowing wearers of the device to use it to make payments at checkout counters. (Fortune)

What would you do if a complete stranger asked you for $100, or offered you an apple in a parking lot without explanation? These are only two of the 100 challenges Chinese-born, American-based Jia Jiang put himself up to when he decided to blog about "100 Days of Rejection", a project he launched after he quit his comfortable six-figure job to follow his dreams of being an entrepreneur at the age of 30, just weeks before his first child was born. (CNN)

A report by the Center for Women’s Business Research found that Hispanic and African American women are the fastest growing entrepreneurial groups in the U.S, rising at rates of 133.3% and 191.4%, respectively, from 1997 to 2007. To promote the economic and entrepreneurial progress of women, BlackEnterprise.com lists five resources that provide varying services to female-led businesses. (Black Enterprise)

German workers are getting a raise, which could give a bump to the rest of Europe – and eventually the U.S. and other parts of the world. Economists have long criticized Germany’s export-driven economic philosophy and large trade surpluses. The country’s strategy, they say, comes at the expense of its struggling neighbors and has exacerbated the region’s debt crisis by sapping demand. (The Wall Street Journal)

By PricewaterhouseCoopers' projection, the biggest sectors of the "sharing economy" – including transportation and travel companies like Uber, Zipcar and Airbnb – could be pulling in as much as $335 billion in global revenue by 2025. That's a massive number (PwC puts it today at about $15 billion), and it reflects according to a market analysis the company published this week some fundamental shifts in consumer behavior. "Access is the new ownership," and such. (The Washington Post)

A decade ago, when home values were soaring, many homeowners financed all sorts of spending using home equity lines of credit, often borrowed in addition to a mortgage. Many of these credit lines have a 10-year draw period, during which borrowers may use the money as needed and make interest-only payments. After the draw period, the loans typically become regular installment loans, with terms of 10 to 20 years – meaning the principal must be repaid as well. (The New York Times)

Red-state lawmakers have been on a rather unnecessary crusade lately to stop welfare and food stamp recipients from spending their government aid on luxuries like cruises and supermarket king crab legs. This has, thankfully, led to some discussion about how low-income families actually use their money—which is to say, not all that differently than the rest of us. (More of their budgets generally go to food, because people have to eat.) (Slate)

LinkedIn is to acquire online learning company Lynda.com for about $1.5 billion, as the social networking platform expands its services for professional users. LinkedIn will host Lynda’s courses on its platform, which include instructional video tutorials to develop business, technology, software and creative skills – in what could be the latest push by technology companies into online business education. (BusinessBecause)

The idea began percolating, said Dan Price, the founder of Gravity Payments, after he read an article on happiness. It showed that, for people who earn less than about $70,000, extra money makes a big difference in their lives. His idea bubbled into reality on Monday afternoon, when Mr. Price surprised his 120-person staff by announcing that he planned over the next three years to raise the salary of even the lowest-paid clerk, customer service representative and salesman to a minimum of $70,000. (The New York Times)

Today’s twentysomethings find themselves in an in-between place: they’re out working in the world, but unlike previous generations, they’re not yet considered full-fledged adults. Most don’t have the assumed perks of adulthood, like a stable paycheck, a place of their own, or a life partner. And yet, they feel the first hints of age catching up to them – suddenly, it's harder to lose weight, shake hangovers, bounce back from all-nighters. Many report feeling like their skin is quite literally losing its youthful glow. (Fast Company)

Marco Rubio's toughest political opponent may be math. That's because his economic agenda has a simple arithmetic problem. He wants to balance the budget – in fact, he wants to amend the Constitution to make that mandatory – but at the same time he wants to cut taxes by $4 trillion or so, increase defense spending, and keep antipoverty spending where it is. That doesn't leave a lot of places to find savings. (The Washington Post)

Medicare’s troubled physician payment formula will soon be history. As expected, the Senate Tuesday night easily passed legislation to scrap the formula, accepting a bipartisan plan muscled through the House last month by Speaker John Boehner and Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi. The Senate vote came just hours before doctors faced a 21% Medicare pay cut. (Money)

Pope Francis has made no secret of his intention to radically reform the administrative structures of the Catholic church, which he regards as insular, imperious, and bureaucratic. He understands that in a hyper-kinetic world, inward-looking and self-obsessed leaders are a liability. Last year, just before Christmas, the Pope addressed the leaders of the Roman Curia – the Cardinals and other officials who are charged with running the church’s byzantine network of administrative bodies. (Harvard Business Review)

Years ago I attended a course at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, where, among other things, I learned that leadership is a constant tug between assertiveness and empathy. Assertiveness vs. Empathy. First, let's define our terms. Assertiveness is the quality of being self-assured and confident without being aggressive. Empathy is the ability to understand what others are thinking and feeling. (Inc.)