It was a dream job, the type of assignment that could make or break the career of an ambitious executive with an eye toward the top. "It was my first big promotion," says Bernard J. Tyson, the 57-year-old CEO of Kaiser Permanente, a health care company with nearly $60 billion in annual revenue. The year was 1992, and Tyson, then in his early thirties, had been named administrator of one of Kaiser’s newest hospitals, in Santa Rosa, Calif.  "Everyone knew this was the hospital to lead," he says. (Fortune)

As you advance in your career, you have more experience and more connections to draw on for networking. But chances are you’ve also become a lot busier – as have the really successful people you’re now trying to meet. How do you get the attention of people who get dozens of invitations per week and hundreds of emails per day? And how do you find time to network with potential new clients or to recruit new employees when your calendar is packed? (Harvard Business Review)

In today’s very competitive job market, graduate students, especially those with limited work experience, must develop an array of skills that will help them to stand out in a crowd of freshly minted graduates all competing for the same available jobs. I have seen a common thread – business schools are doing a fine job in preparing their graduates with solid core skills, whether in accounting, finance, marketing, or operations. (BusinessBecause)

Problems at work take many forms, but they are alike in one way: they tend to be repetitive. No one complains because their boss was angry one time or a colleague failed to pitch in once. Almost all the offenders who come to the attention of HR are repeat offenders. And boring meetings tend to be boring in the same way week after week. (Harvard Business Review)

J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. is giving its investment bankers an unusual mandate: Relax, take some time off. The firm launched an effort on Thursday to encourage its investment bankers to take their weekends off, as long as there isn’t a live deal in the works. Carlos Hernandez, J.P. Morgan’s head of global banking, announced the policy Thursday on an internal call, saying the rules applied to everyone from analysts to managing directors, the firm said. (The Wall Street Journal)

When we see an energetic advertisement from Apple that inspires our sense of adventure, or exchange hellos with a Starbucks barista in a way that feels like we're talking to a friend, we fall hook, line, and sinker for the brand. These moments are obviously constructed, but we don't register them as such. (Fast Company)

The world of big business has a big diversity problem. Fortune looks at how Blacks are finding barriers to entry in Corporate America. (Video) (Fortune)

Focusing on differences alone can have its downsides. For one thing, there’s a decent chance you’ll be wrong. The Italian employee you anticipate being late for meetings turns out to be the most punctual person on your team, and the Asian consultant you just hired and anticipated having to mentor about participating in meetings actually ends up being the most outgoing and assertive person in the room. (Harvard Business Review)

The invitation was sent. And then, two weeks later, revoked. The World Economic Forum, which on Wednesday begins its annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, brings together political and business leaders to discuss the world’s most pressing problems. In years past, Vladimir V. Putin has attended. So has Bill Gates. This year, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. will attend. (

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It’s a secret of the vast U.S. Treasury market, a holdover from an age of oil shortages and mighty petrodollars: Just how much of America’s debt does Saudi Arabia own? But now that question – unanswered since the 1970s, under an unusual blackout by the U.S. Treasury Department – has come to the fore as Saudi Arabia is pressured by plunging oil prices and costly wars in the Middle East. (Bloomberg)

A YouTube video of Milton Friedman was cued up on a whiteboard in front of 14 business school students late one morning in 2015. Before their professor pressed play, she turned to the class. "Is my point in playing this for you that Milton Friedman is right and you should all memorize what he said?" she asked. From the room came a chorus of loud "No"s. The professor, Donna LaSala, nodded. "It’s just one opinion among many," she said cheerfully. (Bloomberg)

Of all the educators that taught Lebanon Valley College and Lebanon High School graduate Tito Valdes throughout his educational career, one stands out in his memory: an African-American teacher from the sixth grade. That’s because she is the only African-American teacher Valdes ever had, he said – and he’s concerned that a homogeneous faculty negatively impacts both white and minority students. (Lebanon Daily News)

Malcolm A. Punter, MBA, JSM, Executive Vice President of Harlem Congregations for Community Improvement, Inc., was recently named a VIP member of Worldwide Branding. This special distinction honors individuals who have shown exceptional commitment to achieving personal and professional success. (Blackbird PR)

On February 4, 2004, a handful of Harvard students logged onto a newly launched website called thefacebook.com. Just a dozen years later, some 2 billion people—nearly a third of the planet's population – are social media users. So if companies are having trouble keeping up with that pace of adoption, it's no surprise. Businesses have overcome their earlier skepticism and raced head-on into the social arena, chasing the estimated three-quarters of consumers who now say social media influences their buying decisions. (Fast Company)

The junk drawer in my home used to look just like yours, filled with loose change, batteries and birthday candles. But over the last year, a new category of junk has started to accumulate there: wearable devices. There’s my old Fitbit, a fitness tracker I used for a couple of weeks, forgot to charge and never wore again. (The New York Times)

Small companies often feel as if they're at a disadvantage competing with large businesses. They feel as if customers are likely to consider a larger company more reliable than a smaller competitor. However, a smaller business need not fear a larger rival if customers believe that the smaller company can build and maintain credibility. (Inc.)

From the time you first start thinking about owning your own business to the day you open the doors, entrepreneurship seems like an exciting, challenging, gratifying experience. Even the stressful moments have a bit of magic to them; you go to work, knowing that your mistakes will likely be little more than temporary setbacks that teach you lessons about how to conduct your business. (Fortune)

On a scale of 1 to 10, how worried are you? Richard Quest, CNN's chief international business correspondent, has put that question to a lot of VIPs at Davos. Responses range from 2.5 to 9. The reality is probably somewhere between 5 and 6 – the average of what CEOs and global leaders say. Yes, stocks are off to their worst start to a year in history. China doesn't seem to have the same control over its economy anymore, and oil prices have plunged to "unthinkable" levels as OPEC and the United States engage in a "how low can you go?" price war. (CNN/Money)

Lines of frantic shoppers have mobbed grocery stores in Washington, D.C., after the National Weather Service gently advised residents on Wednesday that an intense weekend storm will pose "a threat to life and property" and impact "you, your family, and your community." (The Atlantic)

We may not be in an official bear market yet – but it sure feels like one. The Dow Jones industrial average plunged by nearly 540 points during the day on January 20, before finishing the trading session off by 249 points, or 1.6%. Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index logged a decline of 1.2%. Nearly 1,300 stocks that trade on the New York Stock Exchange hit new 52-week lows. (Kiplinger's)

Maybe it’s Emily Post’s fault. Nearly a century ago she counseled people to keep their financial affairs private, and Americans have been mum about money ever since. "Only a vulgarian talks ceaselessly about how much this or that cost him," Post wrote in her book of etiquette in 1922. "A very well-bred man intensely dislikes the mention of money, and never speaks of it (out of business hours) if he can avoid it." (Money)

Pennsylvania’s Wharton School has announced it will offer two new online programs through Silicon Valley-based online learning start-up Coursera. The digital courses, focusing on entrepreneurship and financial modelling, are the latest in a stream of tie-ups between elite US business schools and Mooc, or massive open online course, providers. (BusinessBecause)

Early last summer, a team at United Airlines set out to discover what bothered its passengers most. The airline collects 8,000 customer surveys a day, and there was a lot to choose from: Was it extra fees for luggage? The lack of legroom? The sour, thin coffee? Was it being forced to spend 20 hours in a frigid military barracks in Newfoundland (as passengers on a United flight to London did last June)? How about the carrier’s tendency to lose the one bag you really need? (Bloomberg)

How would you feel if your co-workers could see your paycheck? Afraid they’ll think you’re overpaid? Defensive, because you think you make too little? More employers, from Whole Foods Market, with 91,000 employees, to smaller companies such as SumAll and Squaremouth, are opening up companywide salary information to all employees. They generally don’t disclose it to the public – but one company, Buffer, posts all employees’ salaries on its website. (The Wall Street Journal)

Starting Friday, California employers will face the nation’s strictest fair-pay law. Under the state’s Fair Pay Act, which aims to close the wage gap between men and women, employers will have to be able to prove they pay both genders equally for "substantially similar" work. The rules have spurred employers​to reassess the way they pay and classify workers. Some are puzzling over what "similar" means in legal terms, such as whether a marketing manager and a supply-chain manager have roughly equivalent jobs. (The Wall Street Journal)