No one will ever erect a statue honoring Jeremiah G. Hamilton. As an African American broker in the mid-1800s, Hamilton was part of no one’s usable past: Wall Street in that time was completely white, and New York’s black leaders disdained him for his brashness. But his death, in 1875, attracted national attention, and scores of newspapers reported that Hamilton was the richest non-white man in the country and that his estate was worth about $2 million, or about $250 million today. (The Atlantic)

Imagine an economy without friction – a new world in which labor, information, and money move easily, cheaply, and almost instantly. Psst – it’s here. Is your company ready? The new realities begin at capitalism’s foundation, capital. In a friction-free economy, a company doesn’t need nearly as much as it used to. Consider the world’s most valuable company, Apple. Unlike Google and Microsoft, the second and third most valuable firms, Apple gets most of its revenue from selling physical products. Yet the company says "substantially all" of its products are made by others. Because it can coordinate vastly complex global supply chains, it can pay those firms, mostly Foxconn, to make its products and get them where they need to be on time. (Fortune)

Before Dan Price caused a media firestorm by establishing a $70,000 minimum wage at his Seattle company, Gravity Payments... before Hollywood agents, reality-show producers, and book publishers began throwing elbows for a piece of the hip, 31-year-old entrepreneur with the shoulder-length hair and Brad Pitt looks... before Rush Limbaugh called him a socialist and Harvard Business School professors asked to study his radical experiment in paying workers... an entry-level Gravity employee named Jason Haley got really pissed off at him. (Inc.)

For over a year, I worked almost exclusively from my tiny apartment in Harlem. Aside from trips into an office every six weeks or so, my work schedule and surroundings were mostly left up to me. On some days, I would fly through assignments and personal tasks with unusual efficiency. But on other days, telecommuting meant working from the time I woke up until the wee hours of the morning with no breaks, or spending entire days seemingly accomplishing nothing other than making headway on my Netflix queue. (The Atlantic)

We recruit from a variety of different methods: Our website, various job boards, referrals from existing employees, and professional MBA associations, such as the National Black MBA Association and the National Society of Hispanic MBAs. We want smart and driven people, and will find them anywhere. We take pride in building a diverse workplace with passionate people who want to make a difference.(Cosmopolitan)

At some point in your professional life, you’ve probably felt like a fraud. Maybe you were praised for something you thought wasn’t worthy of the accolades, or you maybe you were recognized in front of peers but felt unworthy, certain you’d soon be exposed as undeserving of the attention. You’re not alone. Imposter Phenomenon (IP) is a well-known concept, first introduced back in the 1970s to describe high-performers who felt anything but on the inside. And despite years of research on IP, not much was known about the underpinnings of IP – what traits led to it and what people were more likely to suffer from it. (Harvard Business Review)

As far as investments go, business school is an unimpeachable bet for young professionals who can muster $100,000. MBAs, who are typically in their early 30s and have already spent a few years in the workforce, saw their salaries triple within eight years of graduation. They also report consistently high levels of job satisfaction and career growth, according to a survey of thousands of alumni conducted by Bloomberg Businessweek as part of the magazine’s annual ranking of business schools. But that general contentment hides a troubling divide: Within a few years of graduation, women with MBAs earn lower salaries, manage fewer people, and are less pleased with their progress than men with the same degree. (Bloomberg Business)

Women still have a long way to go when it comes to joining the ranks of senior management. A recent study by my company, Weber Shandwick, shows that the proportion of women in top management teams in Global Fortune 100 companies is only 12.5%. Nearly three out of 10 companies in our Index have no women at all on their senior management teams (29%) and not a single one is gender-balanced. This is the meager state of affairs after decades of women demanding equal representation. (Harvard Business Review)

In the spring of 2010, as the United States and other developed nations were just emerging from the financial crisis, The Economist characterized Canada in a way that meshed perfectly with the country’s well-advertised sense of modesty: "The least-bad rich-world economy.’’ The numbers backed up that judgment. Canada was the top performer among the G-7 industrialized nations during the crisis years of 2008 and 2009, as measured by the trajectory of gross national product, according to International Monetary Fund data. While Canadians didn’t entirely escape a recession, theirs was the mildest and shortest in the group.

Revelations over egregious behavior by corporate leaders, including at VW, have prompted fresh criticism of MBA students and business school ethics. But is it merited? Are business schools sending "moral midgets" out into the world to recklessly plunder without regard for honesty and human decency? Certainly, recent news suggests that’s the case. Blaming B-schools for failing to teach students to behave ethically is nothing new – many commentators laid responsibility for the global financial crisis at the doorsteps of MBA programs, for instance. (Fortune)

Will there be public universities in 20, 50, 100 years? The question was posed Tuesday night during a dinner of journalists and university presidents, including those from Arizona State University, the University of California Riverside, and Georgia State University. For most of the dinner, presidents equivocated on issues such as paying adjuncts fairly and keeping tuition costs low, defending their universities while expressing optimism about the future and not necessarily saying anything new. But for the question of the long-term future of public universities, at least one president didn’t dress things up. (The Atlantic)

On August 25th, Slack unveiled a new way for developers to connect to Slack, the "Add to Slack" button. It was the culmination of a great deal of work from many Slack employees, and just the beginning of what we have in store for Slack in the near future. Today, though, I want to talk about a seemingly small detail that has been more important to me than I would have expected: the skin color of the hand in the launch graphics. (Fast Company)

Wednesday, a red Tesla Model S P85D with the license plate "UBER QIK" arrived at a parking garage on East 31st Street in Manhattan. This is noteworthy only because that very car was at the Portofino Hotel in Redondo Beach, California, just two and a half days earlier. The Model S crossed the country in record time for an EV – and drove itself nearly the entire way. (Wired)

At 74, Lowell Wood has been an inventor-in-residence at Intellectual Ventures, a technology research and patent firm, for about a decade. He’s paid to think and orchestrate international teams to develop products such as anticoncussion helmets, drug-delivery systems, super­efficient nuclear reactors – anything, really, that might address some pressing need. In the 1980s he led the development of the space lasers that were meant to shield the U.S. from Soviet missiles as part of the "Star Wars" program. He’s an astrophysicist, a self-trained paleontologist and computer scientist, and, as of a few months ago, the most prolific inventor in U.S. history. (Bloomberg Business)

Troy Carter made a name for himself in the music industry having helped to establish the careers of several recording artists, most notably Lady Gaga. An angel investor who has backed such companies as Uber, Spotify, DropBox and Warby Parker, Carter will now be in the spotlight as one of three new quest judges of ABC "Shark Tank." Today Carter is the founder and CEO of Atom Factory, a talent management and media production company in Culver City, California, whose clients include Grammy Award winning R&B singer John Legend. Atom Factory also has a VC investment arm. (Black Enterprise)

More American companies are turning to a new way of convincing employees to save more for retirement: make them do it. Companies from Apache Corp. to Google Inc. to Credit Suisse Group AG have boosted the percentage of worker paychecks automatically diverted to 401(k) plans well above the long-held standard of 3%. Some are setting aside as much as 10% of their workers’ money or automatically increasing the amounts by 1% a year unless employees opt out. But not all are matching the increased savings with company contributions. (The Wall Street Journal)

At this point, we can safely say the "minimum wage" is misnamed. There's no way someone can earn the federal minimum of $7.25 an hour – or even the slightly higher amounts 29 states require – and live a decent life. Not after housing, utilities, child care, and leaving aside something for emergencies, and savings. A new report from the Alliance for a Just Society, a coalition of progressive nonprofits, says the average minimum wage worker needs to work an average of 93 hours a week to earn a living wage (there are 168 total hours in a week). In each state, the number is slightly different: In Virginia, they need to work 103.2 hours, and in Hawaii, 110.7 hours. (Fast Company)

It’s that time of year again – time to pick the health insurance plan you’ll rely on for the next 12 months. People who need an Obamacare plan can start shopping on November 1; workers who get health insurance from their employers often hear from HR around this time. For most people, open enrollment inspires a lot of questions – not least of all, what is open enrollment anyway? How much time do you have to decide on a plan? What’s a deductible? What’s a co-pay? What’s the best way to compare plans? And once you have a plan, which doctors can you see? To cut through the confusion, MONEY reporters Taylor Tepper and Kara Brandeisky explain it all. (Money Magazine)

You don't need to be a harried investment banker or a pampered celebrity to hire a personal assistant. Thanks to a growing number of small firms catering to older clientele, you can pay someone by the hour to take your mother to the doctor. Or if your full-time job leaves little time to spare, you can enlist help to do your shopping or arrange for home repairs. (Kiplinger's)

Rather than paying its lawyers out of pocket, Miller has turned to a private firm to front the money for its legal costs: the Illinois-based Arena Consulting, which is headed by two brothers, Herbert and Douglas Lichtman. If Miller loses, Arena gets nothing. If it wins, Arena will get a share of the proceeds, which could run well into the tens of millions of dollars. This new form of lawsuit funding is called litigation finance. It lies at the crossroads of two Anglo-American tendencies. (The New York Times)

If men’s apparel chain Jos. A. Bank needed any confirmation that its sales strategy had become something of a national punchline, "Saturday Night Live" served up some hard truth last year. Cast member Vanessa Bayer, sporting a soccer-mom-sensible cardigan and haircut, bemoans all the kitchen messes created by her clumsy kids and her gawky husband. And then she lets you in on her marvelous clean-up secret: Suits from Jos. A. Bank. "With their innovative ‘buy one get three free’ pricing, a suit from Jos. A. Bank is effectively cheaper than paper towels," Bayer says, swiping a suit coat across the counter to soak up spilled orange juice. (The Washington Post)

The central dilemma of a modern leader is to balance apparently conflicting virtues and beliefs without choosing sides between them. Decisiveness, for example, is widely and rightly perceived as crucial to effective leadership. It’s the opposite of uncertainty and insecurity, which are paralyzing. But decisiveness overused eventually congeals into certainty. The balancing opposite is openness. (The New York Times)

Among executives, humility "is the flavor du jour," says Fred Hassan, a former CEO of Schering-Plough Corp. and author of a book on leadership. Companies increasingly prize humble leaders because they listen well, admit mistakes and share the limelight, recruiters and coaches say. "The servant leadership model promotes collaboration," says Dale E. Jones, chief executive of recruiters Diversified Search Inc. (The Wall Street Journal)