Tickets Just $150: Buy Tickets Now 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!

HONOREES
Amy Hilliard, President, Fashion Fair Cosmetics
Don Thompson, retired President and Chief Executive Officer, McDonald's Corporation 

ENTERTAINMENT
Terisa Griffin, as seen on season 3 of "The Voice" 

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Nate Kumapayi thought he might have trouble getting into business school. His grade point average was unremarkable, his Graduate Management Admission Test scores were middling, and his résumé consisted of two years of entry-level sales jobs. He's a persuasive talker, though, and wooed interviewers at several top schools. He told them how he’d decided to get a MBA after starting conversations with executives who came into the AT&T retail store where he worked, and discovering how many of them did business with an MBA in hand. He emphasized how selling phones for AT&T honed his knack for getting people to buy things. (Bloomberg)

When I tell people that I work from wherever I want, whether it be home or a friend's office, I am generally met with a bit of scorn or a response that points out how "lucky" I am. Actually, I'm just getting to experience what millions of people are already living: the mobile office. (Inc.)

Leon Trotsky is not often invoked as a management guru, but a line frequently attributed to him would surely resonate with many business leaders today. "You may not be interested in war," the Bolshevik revolutionary is said to have warned, "but war is interested in you." War, or at least geopolitics, is figuring more and more prominently in the thinking and fortunes of large businesses. (The Atlantic)

Some careers seem to maintain a powerful allure. Many people fantasizing about leaving their jobs for careers that seem to offer deep meaning, like teaching or non-profit work, or apparent autonomy, like entrepreneurship. Others are attracted by high-status, high-pay occupations such as law and consulting. Still others want to work in broadcasting or publishing, for example, which maintain a glamorous allure. The irony is that there are probably just as many people itching to get out of these roles as fighting to get in. In any industry, not just these, it’s fairly easy to find people who dislike the work they do. (Harvard Business Review)

An Oberlin College student's Facebook post about the reason she believes a tech company cut her from its job applicant pool has ignited a firestorm of comment about proper interview attire and etiquette. Here's what you can learn from the incident. (Money)

Today, knowledge workers use devices and platforms we wouldn’t have dreamed of 15 years ago, in workspaces we probably didn’t see coming, either (goodbye, private offices; hello, telecommuting). But while work has changed, the training we get about how to manage our time looks pretty much the same as it always has. Traditional time management teaches us to "start every morning making a list of things to do that day." (Harvard Business Review)

Wang Junping worked as a farmer in his native Hebei Province and as a coal miner in Inner Mongolia. But on a recent afternoon, Mr. Wang, 49, smartly dressed in a suit jacket, was awaiting lessons at an employment agency on the proper way to use a broom and mop to clean Beijing’s sprawling subway system. A high school graduate, Mr. Wang quit his job at a mine last year after his pay was cut in half. Still, he decided against the cleaning job because the salary was too low, at around $320 a month. (The New York Times)

Greece, which is quickly running out of cash, pledged to its euro zone partners in February that by the end of April it would agree with creditors on a comprehensive list of actions to unlock its remaining bailout funding. The debt-troubled nation was supposed to present the list to euro zone finance ministers on Friday, but it’s unlikely that a package will be agreed even by the end of the month. (Fortune)

When it comes to college, the central challenge for most Americans in the 21st century is not going; it’s finishing. Thirty-five million Americans now have some college experience but no degree. More Americans than live in Texas, in other words, have spent enough time at college to glimpse the promised land – but not enough to reap the financial bounty. Some are worse off than if they’d never enrolled at all, carrying tens of thousands of dollars in debt, not to mention the scar tissue of regret and self-doubt. (The Atlantic)

Two events on opposite sides of the Atlantic on spring afternoons this year confirmed the growing appetite for luxury markets at top business schools. At the Silicon Valley headquarters of Airbnb, the disruptive, $13 billion flat sharing site, alumni of INSEAD gathered to discuss the creative economy; at London Business School, the Retail & Luxury Goods Club convened executives to debate the latest trends and challenges facing the luxury industry. (BusinessBecause)

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.

Visit Conference Website
Register Now!

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Google has detailed its plan to run a mobile phone network in the US. The firm will rent voice and data capacity from two existing operators – Sprint and T-Mobile – and use existing wi-fi hotspots, rather than build new infrastructure from scratch. Initially, Project Fi will only be offered to Nexus 6 handset owners. (BBC News)

Mark Zuckerberg is going to need to find some more pinball machines and rock-climbing walls. The social networking company, known for its many perks that make it a regular on the hottest-places-to-work lists, is increasing headcount at an incredible pace. (Bloomberg)

Some people simply can't leave a relationship--no matter how bad it is – until they're certain they have the next one locked down. This leads to sometimes months of overlap, "should I or shouldn't I?" internal debates, and tiptoeing over blurry lines. That's time when they are not giving 100 percent to anyone (including themselves). The same can be true of entrepreneurs. Yes, it's scary to let go of your other sources of income and dive headfirst into startup territory. But you have to take risks if you want to fly. (Inc.)

Here’s a secret for budding entrepreneurs using crowdfunding platforms to finance their projects: It pays to go back for seconds. Consider the success rates on Kickstarter, the New York-based online platform where users make contributions on projects in exchange for rewards, like an early version of the product. (The Wall Street Journal)

Connections are changing the world. The connectivity enabled by the Internet has huge implications for the very structure of the global economy. While estimates of the Net’s contribution to economic output vary, it’s generally thought that it exceeds individual industry sectors like education, agriculture, and energy. The total value of transactions occurring today online are more than all but three or four of the world’s largest national economies. (Forbes)

Toppers Pizza Inc. wanted to open four new stores in the Chicago area this year, but it sliced those plans because of higher labor costs it would have to pass on to its customers. With the U.S. unemployment rate at 5.5% and salaries rising, many companies are in similar straits. Competition for workers has prompted major employers such as Wal-Mart Stores Inc., McDonald’s Corp. and others to raise pay. Those increases have rippled across the economy, forcing finance chiefs, economists and even the Federal Reserve to readjust their forecasts. (The Wall Street Journal)

People often say that they don’t necessarily wish to be rich, they just want to make enough money not to struggle financially. But how much does a person really need to reach that point? One-in-three people in households earning more than $75,000 say they still live paycheck-to-paycheck at least some of the time, according to a survey by SunTrust Bank that I reported on last week. One-in-four people earning $100,000 said they felt the same. (The Washington Post)

Time for one last push to get you where you want to be. By the time you hit 60, you’ve hopefully built up a significant savings balance. But even if the number is big, you have to be careful about protecting what you’ve built, while still taking advantage of opportunities where you can find them. Here are some ideas to help you get the retirement you want. (Money)

Most of the initial stages on the road to wealth involve making sure that you’re moving forward, not slipping backward. Unfortunately, many of us are too consumed by day-to-day life to focus on the countless instances of small-scale back-sliding: completely unnecessary waste, extra money we could have if we just reached for it, fees we could avoid if we just made a little effort. (Money)

Just days after Under Armour's sponsored star golfer Jordan Spieth won the Masters, the sportswear giant was hefting its weight into a very different sports arena: the Boston Marathon. As the company-endorsed elite runner Nicholas Arciniaga on Monday battled the 26-mile course, his pace updated directly to his Twitter and his profile on Under Armour Record, the company's new fitness-tracking app. (The Washington Post)

With the stock market scraping against record highs, big-company CEOs are moving into cash. Cash compensation for chief executives rose at its fastest rate in at least four years in 2014, swelling to 37.3% of total CEO compensation, higher than it has been since 2010, according to a survey of early proxy filings by the Hay Group for The Wall Street Journal. (The Wall Street Journal)

We’ve all been there. We’re sitting in back-to-back hour-long informational meetings. We try to sit attentively as waves of information are poured over us in report after report. Eventually, we realize the meeting is coming to a close and no decisions are being made. We’re bored, we’re tired, and we think: "This whole meeting could have been an email." Not so fast.(Harvard Business Review)

Be honest. How many times have you said this to your 5-year-old: "Hold on a sec, honey, I just have to answer this email from work." Ever missed an anniversary dinner or spent a day or two of your vacation fielding calls from the office? While a majority of people say they have at least a somewhat good work-life balance, 89% say it's important for employers and clients not to contact them outside of work. (CNN/Money)

Today, the idea that organizations have cultures is rarely questioned by the media, by corporate executives, or by the consultants who make a living helping organizations improve their "cultures." Organizational culture is assumed to be important to making sure that employees are happy and productivity is good. At the same time, the concept, meaning, and function of culture rarely garners much thought. When I ask business people to define culture – or even when I ask students in my class on organizational culture to do so – it turns out to be difficult. (Harvard Business Review)

Can trauma, stress, and even nightmares be passed down from generation to generation? Scientists say yes. A number of research finds that those who have been traumatized around the time of conception can pass on a DNA code to their offspring that results in a higher vulnerability to stress in their molecules, neurons, cells, and genes. Furthermore, this gene expression – a chemical coating upon the chromosomes – is strong enough to be passed on to a third generation, which means grandchildren have "a kind of biological memory" of what their grandparents experienced, according to studies. (Fast Company)