Last Chance for Tickets: Join us Next Week for the NBMBAA 45th Anniversary Celebration 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
William C. Brooks, Retired Vice President, General Motors Corporation
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" 

Buy Tickets!

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Collaboration is basically the grownup word for "playing nice together." That makes it easy to assume that more collaboration has got to be better than less. Unfortunately, collaboration doesn't always work. Sometimes, it actually shackles your ability to solve a problem. A new study shows that when you really need to solve a tough problem, collaboration is not the answer. You – and your employees – will have better luck closing the door and duking it out on your own. (Inc.)

Vacations are the things that dreams and cruise commercials are made of. Ideally, you come back refreshed, recharged and ready to go. But sometimes, the exact opposite is true. Who among us hasn’t said at some point, usually the day before we leave, "Trying to take this vacation is so stressful, it would have been better not to go at all!" Sometimes vacation stress is unavoidable, but most times it’s manageable if we’re simply more strategic. (Harvard Business Review)

Rick Ridgeway, the vice president of environmental affairs at the outdoor apparel company Patagonia, has summited K2, traversed Borneo by foot and boat, and trekked the 300 miles from Mt. Kilimanjaro to the sea. But at the company, where impressive physical feats are practically de rigeur among employees, he is revered for a different reason. (The Atlantic)

You may have heard the saying, "When you’re in love, smoke gets in your eyes." Well when you’re talking, smoke gets in your eyes and ears. Once you’re on a roll, it’s very easy to not notice that you’ve worn out your welcome. You may not even realize that the other person is politely trying to get a word in, or subtly signaling that they need to be elsewhere (possibly, anywhere else if you have been really boring). (Harvard Business Review)

When my coach asked me that question, it stopped me in my tracks. More than 15 years later, it remains the most meaningful and impactful coaching question I’ve ever been asked. When she asked the question, I was a Fortune 500 vice president in my thirties and, by a lot of external standards, a success. I never felt that way though. My modus operandi was a cycle of self-criticism and self-judgment. (Fast Company)

Career coach Ashley Stahl guides millennials through tricky professional situations to help them land promotions. But one of her clients recently asked a question she doesn’t often get: How do you turn a promotion down? As an entry-level manager at an advertising firm, the client received a base pay of $40,000 a year, plus overtime. The promotion would mean a 25% raise with no overtime. (Fortune)

In almost every market that the app-based car service Uber has entered, it has been met with some form of resistance. This has been especially pronounced in Europe over the past year, after the introduction of UberPOP, an inexpensive version of the service, comparable to UberX in the United States. Uber’s flagship product is a high-end black-car service that happens to function over an app. But UberPOP is different. It enables drivers without any kind of professional license to freelance as cabbies. (The New York Times Magazine)

The Warrington College of Business Administration has been named the official academic sponsor of the 37th Annual National Black MBA Association (NBMBAA) Conference and Exposition. The conference, one of the nation’s largest professional development and job recruitment events, takes place Sept. 22-26 at the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando. "The first step to increase diversity in U.S. corporate boardrooms is to increase diversity in the nation’s premier graduate business programs," said Dr. S. Selcuk Erenguc, Senior Associate Dean of the Warrington College of Business Administration and Director of the Hough Graduate School of Business. "NBMBAA’s commitment to advancing this cause is exceptional, and we’re proud to support its efforts by sponsoring this important event." (University of Florida)

To b-school or not to b-school? For aspiring buyout barons, that’s the million-dollar question. The rising cost of business school, coupled with fatter-than-ever salaries for private-equity recruits, has prompted young financiers and some of the firms that employ them to rethink the industry’s tradition of pushing employees out after two or three years to pursue M.B.A.s. (The Wall Street Journal)

Register Now for The National Black MBA Association® 37th Annual Conference and Exposition 

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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Patient satisfaction, long ignored by the health-care industry, is a strategic priority for another simple reason: It’s playing a more important role in determining how the federal government pays hospitals. In the last three years the government has been taking into account patient satisfaction data when determining how much to reimburse hospitals for Medicare patients. (The Washington Post)

If there’s one target market every media outlet wants to own, it’s millennials, those twenty- and thirty-somethings who are going to be running the world soon and have all kinds of disposable income and fickle tastes. Companies like Vice Media, Fusion, Vocativ, and Mic all claim that they are the best route to this user base, which advertisers seem to covet – but newcomer OZY Media says that it plans to be the long-term winner in this market, and it is spending $1 million of its venture financing cash on an advertising campaign designed to shout that message from the rooftops. (Fortune)

LinkedIn enters into every conversation I have about personal branding. It comes up in the daily conversations I have about content marketing and new media advertising. And whenever I’m tasked with helping people get started with social media marketing, the discussion always includes LinkedIn. (Entrepreneur)

The social-news site Reddit.com has a tip for new hires expecting to negotiate their pay: Don’t even try it. The San Francisco-based Web company, which has about 169 million unique monthly visitors and is known as the launchpad for viral Web phenomena, has a take-it-or-leave-it policy for starting salaries. Other firms, including e-commerce startup Jet.com Inc. and test-preparation firm MagooshInc., have similar rules in place. (The Wall Street Journal)

Americans are broadly concerned about inequality of wealth and income despite an economy that has improved by most measures, a sentiment that is already driving the 2016 presidential contest, according to a New York Times/CBS News poll. The poll found that a strong majority say that wealth should be more evenly divided and that it is a problem that should be addressed urgently. (The New York Times)

Denver's housing market is on fire. Home prices have shot up by double-digits, inventory has fallen dramatically and multiple offers with bidding wars have become common. One factor driving the demand: pot. The budding industry has impacted home prices since the state legalized marijuana in 2012. (CNN/Money)

You’ve probably seen them crowding your mailbox. Crisp checks sent over by your credit card company are marketed as a "convenient" way for you for pay bills, consolidate debt and access more of your available credit. To the untrained consumer, it might seem no different than any other credit card purchase. (The Washington Post)

In 2003, Adam Beverly borrowed $30,000 from Bank One, now owned by JPMorgan Chase, to help cover the cost of attending Ohio State University. He never graduated. Three years later he found himself being sued by National Collegiate Student Loan Trust, which claimed he owed more than $45,000 with interest and penalties. After a two-year court struggle, Beverly prevailed. In September a panel of Ohio judges said the collector had no evidence that it owned the debt and vacated the judgment. (Bloomberg)

We could all stand to be more frugal. After all, who doesn’t like to save money? But it isn’t always easy to curb our spending habits, and sometimes trying to find the best deal can feel like a chore. Unfortunately, entering the frugal lifestyle isn’t the easiest thing to do. Thankfully, there are some steps you can take to help make it a smoother transition. With that in mind, here’s my advice on how you can break into frugal living. (Money)

When deciding how much to pay their senior executives, the directors at Jarden Corp. – the owner of brands including Yankee Candle, Rawlings sports equipment, and Bicycle playing cards – use what might seem to be an unlikely measuring stick: the top managers at Oracle Corp., the world’s largest data-base maker. Oracle is one of 14 companies Jarden identified in 2011 as a "peer"to help it gauge the going rate for executive pay – a common practice among boards when setting compensation for top managers. (Bloomberg)

We’re in the midst of a trendy office design renaissance. Swings, picnic tables, moss-covered walls, and carpet-covered bunk-bed nooks are replacing the stale cubicles, sterile walls, and uncomfortable, rolling chairs. Employers are finally starting to recognize that physical space matters not only to the quality of our work, but also our engagement. And this makes a lot of sense—we’ve always sensed that our physical location impacts our energy, mood, and spirit; why wouldn’t your workspace impact your productivity, quality of work, ability to collaborate, and, for some industries, the ability to attract and retain key talent? (Fast Company)

Calculating the exact return on investment for specific employee benefits can be tricky. After all, it’s tough to know whether that weekly yoga class had an actual impact on morale or if shifting the work day a couple of hours had a measurable impact on productivity. But the bigger-picture numbers are sobering. (Fast Company)

Emotional intelligence is widely known to be a key component of effective leadership. The ability to be perceptively in tune with yourself and your emotions, as well as having sound situational awareness can be a powerful tool for leading a team. The act of knowing, understanding, and responding to emotions, overcoming stress in the moment, and being aware of how your words and actions affect others, is described as emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence for leadership can consist of these five attributes: self-awareness, self-management, empathy, relationship management, and effective communication. (Inc.)

American customers hate cable and the Internet. At least, that’s what the American Customer Satisfaction Index found in its latest survey, released Tuesday. Across the 43 industries the ASCI surveyed, TV and Internet companies tied for last place.Among the lowest of the low: Comcast, which also came in dead last in the annual Temkin Group Customer Service Ratings earlier this year. (Slate)