Join us in Philadelphia this September for the nation's premier diversity career, education and networking event. Register now for the 2017 Annual Conference and Expo, presented by NBMBAA and Prospanica, and take advantage of early pricing discounts and best hotel locations.

Your skills and knowledge are worth money. Here's how to calculate their value. Everyone has a skill they can teach someone. So whether you’re looking to turn your knowledge into a profitable side hustle or ready to launch a full-time business, here are four steps to turn your expertise into a business. (Black Enterprise)

Here are the most important changes in the tax plan proposed Wednesday by President Trump. (The New York Times)

Spain’s IE Business School has leap-frogged Warwick Business School into top spot in the latest Online MBA Rankings released by QS today. The annual QS Distance Online MBA Rankings grades 40 online MBA programs based on a variety of factors including graduate employability, class diversity, the quality of students and faculty, and the level of interaction between classmates and professors. (Business Because)

Let’s cut to the chase: If your profile isn’t telling hiring managers who you are, what you’re about, and how well you’ll do the job–you could be missing out on your next opportunity (and not even know it). (The Muse)

When it comes to running your day, it’s easy to get swept up in distractions and tasks that don’t move you forward. The average person loses up to three hours each day due to interruptions from phone calls, email and coworkers, according to a study by CareerBuilder. , , , Jones Loflin shares six of the most common things that hold you back from success. (Fast Company)

The election of Donald Trump resulted in highly visible expressions of concern and tensions among a number of specific groups of the U.S. population, leading to questions about the possible impact on issues of worry and inclusion in the workplace. (Gallop)

Diversity is always a hot topic of debate for creating different workplace strategies. The future of workplace diversity is round the corner and in reality it is not what you think, but is based on how you think. Yes, when we think about diversity all the factors like gender, race, and age comes to our mind. For years employers have believed that embracing such differences will help build a diversified workplace. Not only that, they also believe that it helps in increasing creative outcomes. Such beliefs are certainly true, but now some researchers of the Harvard University have found another aspect to workplace diversity. These researchers believe that diversity in thought process i.e., thought diversity at workplace is equally important. In fact, cognitively diverse teams can solve problems more efficiently, Inc.com says. (The HR Digest)

Google's servers in Cuba went live on Wednesday, making the internet giant the first foreign internet company to host content within the long cut-off country. The servers are part of Google's global network of caching servers, called GGC nodes, the servers work by storing popular content — like a viral YouTube video — on a local server. Instead of having to travel the long distance through a submarine cable, which currently connects Cuba to the internet through Venezuela, Cubans will now be able to access content through the nearest Google server in their country. (CNBC)

Fast-food chains continued to be a rare bright spot for Japan during its two-decade-long economic slump. Since 2008 the size of the market has increased from $35bn to $45bn (those figures include convenience stores, or konbini); that of restaurants has declined every year in that period. But fast food is now being squeezed: by a combination of higher wages and still-tepid consumption, and by foreign rivals winning over more Japanese stomachs. (The Economist)

This comes up constantly in discussions on the current house price bubbles in some cities in the US and Canada, and whether a US-style crisis could happen in Canada: The housing bust in the US during the Financial Crisis was marked by banks receiving "jingle mail" from homeowners who saw the value of their homes plunge and their equity turn negative. (Business Insider)

Owning a business comes with many challenges of course; all which are cataloged and analyzed through case studies. Harvard Business School (HBS) professors have been leaders in creating many case studies, but there's been one problem: their studies haven't been diverse enough. Unsurprisingly, white men have been the stars of the HBS case study show. HBS professor Steven Rogers has had enough and thinks it's high time for change. Boston radio station WBUR reports that to fix the problem, Rogers has proposed new case studies featuring black business executives. (Blavity)

Sponsored by the Presidents’ Round Table — an entity of the National Council on Black American Affairs and an affiliate of the American Association of Community Colleges — the Lakin Institute for Mentored Leadership was founded to prepare Black senior-level community college executives for positions as chief executive officers. (Diverse Issues in Higher Education)

Here are three of the most significant trends to be aware of — whether you’re a growing business considering office space, a commercial real estate company, or run a startup capitalizing on the ways technology is changing workspaces. (Black Enterprise)

A new email app is bringing in the big guns to tackle the problem: artificial intelligence. Called Astro, the app essentially offers many of the same features as previous aspiring inbox-zero apps. You can snooze messages you see so they surface at your convenience, mute particular senders, and set a priority inbox that surfaces those emails from VIP senders that otherwise might end up buried amid Bed Bath & Beyond coupons. What makes Astro different is how it creates that priority inbox. (Fast Company)

In a first-of-its-kind report, Comptroller Scott M. Stringer has released a comprehensive neighborhood-by-neighborhood analysis documenting the evolution of New York’s economy since 2000 and the changing business landscape in communities across the five boroughs."The New Geography of Jobs: A Blueprint for Strengthening Our Neighborhoods," report by New York City Comptroller Scott M. Stringer, shows that despite tremendous business growth in the City’s rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods between 2000 and 2015, the benefits of increased economic activity have not been broadly distributed among residents of those communities. (Black Star News)

n certain parts of the country, entrepreneurship is booming. A well-educated creative class clusters in tight networks that easily attract bank loans, birth new businesses and create exciting jobs. But this opportunity paradise is far too concentrated, and even within these areas a whole segment of the population seems forgotten, namely women and women of color. A new Third Way report from economists Susan Coleman and Alicia Robb found that less than 20% of all businesses with paid employees are owned by women. (New York Daily News)

Entrepreneurs launching beauty-supply businesses focused on African Americans have found a surprising obstacle: Korean-American entrepreneurs have all but locked down the market. That's the takeaway from a fascinating piece on Minnesota Public Radio, which looks at the difficulties in starting (and growing) black-owned beauty businesses. (Business Journal)

Middle-class Americans have fared worse in many ways than their counterparts in economically advanced countries in Western Europe in recent decades, according to a study released Monday by the Pew Research Center. . . . The authors of the Pew study found a broader contraction of the American middle class, even as the ranks of the poor and the rich have grown. (The New York Times)

Millennials, the children of the stock-loving Baby Boomers who helped fuel the best-ever bull market in the 1990s, haven't yet developed a good working relationship with the market like mom and dad did. Now mostly in their 20s and early 30s, the people making up the nation's largest generation have yet to embrace the concept of stock investing to meet long-term goals like funding retirement, surveys show. Only one in three Millennials say they invest in stocks, a Bankrate.com survey has found. Six in ten have less than $10,000 saved for their post-working years, according to Ramsey Solutions’ 2016 Retirement in America Survey. (USA TODAY)

Steven Clifford, a retired CEO of King Broadcasting and a serial corporate director who admits to having grabbed his share of the loot, argues that CEO pay is a machine—that is, driven by rote policies that automatically send pay into the stratosphere. (Fortune)

The Trump administration has finally outlined its new tax proposal, which leans heavily on tax cuts. So far, President Trump wants to slash individual tax rates -- cutting the top rate from 39.6% to 35% -- and reduce the number of total rates from seven to three. He also wants to cut the top tax rate for all businesses to 15%, far below the current top rates. (CNN Money)

The head of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission on Wednesday proposed overturning the landmark 2015 Obama-era net neutrality rules that prohibit broadband providers from giving or selling access to certain internet services over others. (Fortune)

U.S. consumers could face dramatic changes in federal financial safeguards enacted in response to the financial crisis and its fallout. Amid sharply partisan Capitol Hill debate, a House committee on Wednesday weighed a sweeping proposal to revise the powers, leadership, funding, and mission of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and roll back other regulatory reforms prompted by home foreclosures, job losses and other repercussions of the 2007-2008 recession. (USA TODAY)