Most of us focus on how much we know, but the ability to connect and be present in the midst of tasks is what sets leaders apart. (Fast Company)

The European Central Bank took steps to expand its stimulus of the eurozone economy on Thursday, extending its money printing program by six months and changing a key interest rate to encourage banks to lend more. (The New York Times)

As you finalized your year-end giving, consider supporting NBMBAA's LOT® Endowment Fund, a campaign that aims to improve scholastic opportunities through funding for Black youth between the ages of 15-18, through charitable support from the NBMBAA’s members, along with its corporate partners, friends and advocates. Help us to foster financial and educational assistance for Black students across the nation through undergraduate scholarships, with the goal of sending them to college at no or reduced cost.

Some companies are hiring first and figuring out jobs for these recruits much later. Amid a fierce market for college recruits, companies like Facebook Inc. and Intuit Inc. are making offers to dozens of hires without having a particular job waiting – or even, sometimes, a starting salary. (The Wall Street Journal)

While expert advice is divided when it comes to quitting a job without a new offer in hand, the fact remains that plenty of people do. For many of them, it’s only time that tells whether or not that was a smart move. So Fast Company asked a few such quitters to think back on their experiences and explain what made it worth it – or not. (Fast Company)

Research shows that people who believe that abilities and talents can be developed – a "growth mindset," in Carol Dweck’s terms – are on average more successful than people who believe that abilities and talents are fixed – a "fixed mindset." A growth mindset allows people to respond more adaptively to challenges and setbacks. (Harvard Business Review)

Tech industry leaders are constantly talking about the so-called "pipeline problem." On corporate stages and at academic conferences, CEOs and activists pledge their commitment to "fixing the pipeline for STEM"—the acronym for science, technology, engineering, and math – by which they mean they want to get more young women and people of color into the coursework (and, ideally, the internships) that will eventually turn them into attractive job candidates for tech companies. (The Atlantic)

China's economy is slowing down - but are there any other economic casualties? The short answer is: "Yes." Africa has been adversely affected, although not so much as to snuff out the real improvement over the past two decades. Economic growth in sub-Saharan Africa is, according to IMF projections, slowing to 3.8% this year, the slowest since 1999. Slower, in other words than during the global financial crisis. (BBC News)

The International Monetary Fund has added the Chinese renminbi to the world’s basket of reserve currencies, an acknowledgment of China’s economic importance. (The Atlantic)

It's chaos in Brazil. President Dilma Rousseff's chief political opponent, Eduardo Cunha, has started the ball rolling on her impeachment. "Members of Congress are expected to take weeks until they reach a final decision, meaning that high levels of political uncertainty will continue to pose a significant challenge." (Business Insider)

Plenty of MBA hopefuls are thankful to get an acceptance letter from any of their top-choice schools (most of them applied to three or four, Bloomberg data show). Some lucky students, however, get accepted to more than one of the country’s best schools. We asked thousands of 2015 MBA graduates which schools they had applied to, and where they enrolled, as part of our 2015 business school rankings. (Businessweek)

When legendary General Electric Co. CEO Jack Welch hired a headhunter to search for new deans of curriculum and faculty for his online management institute, he had an unusual requirement. "Jack didn’t like pie-in-the-sky academic types," says Michael Kirkman, a search consultant with Lochlin Partners. (Poets & Quants)

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Owners of Apple iPhones and iPads are known for bringing their personal devices to work, whether or not IT departments want them there. That bring-your-own-device movement drove Apple and IBM into each others arms last year in a partnership ballyhooed by IBM chief executive Ginni Rometty and her Apple counterpart Tim Cook to ensure a steady supply of business-focused apps for Apple gadgets.(Fortune)

When Chinese President Xi Jinping met with top U.S. and Chinese technology executives in Seattle two months ago, they posed for a now-famous group photo. But one thing was missing: women from China. This defies the conventional wisdom in China that compared with Silicon Valley, China’s tech industry has less of a gender-inequality problem. (Fortune)

Financial institutions normally decide loan eligibility based on factors like your credit score, cash flow, and the amount of collateral you have. On Kiva Zip – the micro-lender's platform for U.S. entrepreneurs – it's different. What matters is whether you're trusted by the community, whether you're willing to "pay it forward," and whether you're prepared to do some fundraising yourself. (Fast Company)

Rachel Cohen, co-founder of Snowe, says business school connected her to a crucial network of peers and professors.(Video) (Inc.)

Central bankers have long talked about the problem of the "zero lower bound." That’s the idea that interest rates can’t be set below zero. It is an important concept because it would mean there is a limit on how much an economy can be stimulated using monetary policy. The New York Times)

Without the financial support that many white families can provide, minority young people have to continually make sacrifices that set them back. (The Atlantic)

In what has become a pretty much annual ritual, taxpayers and tax preparers are waiting on Congress to renew dozens of expired tax breaks. The deductions and credits, some of which are commonly used by consumers and small business owners, expired at the beginning of the year. (The Washington Post)

Financial planner Barry Eckstein has heard a lot of extravagant spending stories. But when clients were chatting with him about the holidays a couple of years ago, he couldn't believe his ears. The couple had bought a mink coat. Not just any mink coat, mind you – a mink coat for the their precious little Yorkie. (Daily Finance)

Looking back, the 2008 financial crisis seems so long ago. Much of the wealth lost has been recovered. And the hundreds-of-thousands who lost their jobs have moved on. But the event was a reminder of just how powerless we truly are against larger global economic forces. Sure, we learned the value of transparency and regulation and the dangers of complexity and risk. (Poets & Quants)

Right now, thanks so social media, we have a connection with customers that we’ve never had before – instant feedback on how a company is doing. As a result, you’re going to see a tighter connection between what people do and who they serve. We’re not going to have silo departments within a company that operate on their own and never see the outside world. And we need to educate our employees accordingly by teaching them how the entire business works and how they fit into the machine. (The Wall Street Journal)

It is easy to make the case that modern business is too frenetic. This week 10 billion shares of America’s 500 largest listed firms will have changed hands in frenzied trading. Their bosses will have been swamped by 750,000 incoming e-mails and a torrent of instant data about customers. (The Economist)

There are some companies we look at, admire, and say, "Wow, I really want to work for them." These companies understand that employees are as important as the paying customers who consume the products and services they sell. And they know that the transparency of social media means the company’s reputation is highly dependent on what its employees say. (Harvard Business Review)

"The only way to do great work is to love what you do," Steve Jobs famously said. We’ve certainly had the idea drummed into our heads ever since. The phrase "follow your passion," for instance, now appears in nine times as many English-language books as it did in 1990. This pervasive belief in pursuing a passion "paints a dismal picture," the authors observe, for people who don’t have one or who haven’t discovered it yet. (Fortune)