Top News
The sentiment on Wall Street may be that our long national fiscal nightmare is finally over, but the stock market is just one barometer of prosperity, many economists and consumer experts argue. And the problems that have plagued the United States in recent years – declining household income, surging prices for many key goods and services, low interest rates for savings – remain very much in place, they say. (Marketwatch)
Visit http://www.marketwatch.com/story/dows-back-on-top-but-are-you-2013-03-05?link=SM_hp_featStory to view the full article online.
There are many signs that the US economy is improving, but the most important one, the unemployment rate, remains stubbornly rooted in recession territory. We had jobless recoveries coming out of the last recessions in 2001 and 1992, but this one put the budget squeeze on recruiting and has gone on for a very long time. Does it mean there is something really different this time? (Harvard Business Review)
Visit http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2013/03/why_employers_arent_filling_th.html to view the full article online.
On Capitol Hill, there are two ways that people tend to talk about the sequester -- a slate of automatic federal spending cuts that are difficult but necessary, or a blunt tool that will inflict tremendous suffering. But a growing chorus of researchers, political analysts and economists say that the cuts are poised to inflict particularly intense pain on people of color and impede the country’s ability to prosper as these populations grow. (Huffington Post)
Visit http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/13/sequestration-inequality_n_2866565.html to view the full article online.
Diversity in the Workplace
Why aren't more women running things in America? It isn't for lack of ambition or life skills or credentials. The real barrier to getting more women to the top is the unsexy but immensely difficult issue of time commitment: Today's top jobs in major organizations demand 60-plus hours of work a week. (The Wall Street Journal)
Visit http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324678604578342641640982224.html to view the full article online.
International
Picture the following: Greg O'Leary, a 32-year-old mid-level manager, is in Shanghai for the first time to negotiate a critical deal with a distributor. To prepare himself for the trip, Greg has learned some key cultural differences between China and the U.S. — about how important deference and humility are in Chinese culture, and how Chinese tend to communicate more indirectly than Americans do. He also has learned about how important it is in China to respect a person's public image or "face." Finally, Greg also learned a few Chinese words, which he thought could be good potential icebreakers when starting a meeting. Greg quickly realizes, however, that learning cultural differences in theory does not always translate into successful behavior in practice. (Harvard Business Review)
Visit http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2013/03/when_crossing_cultures_use_glo.html to view the full article online.
Since its launch in Kenya in 2007, M-PESA has emerged as a standard for mobile money in developing markets. The service, developed by Safaricom, Kenya’s dominant mobile carrier, allows customers to pay hard cash to a physical agent in return for a code. The code can then be given to one of 20,000 Safaricom agents anywhere else in the country, and redeemed again for cash. And by 2011, four years after launch, a little more than one in three Kenyans had registered an account. (Bloomberg/Businessweek)
Visit http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-03-13/one-good-paper-monopoly-power-in-mobile-money#r=nav-fs to view the full article online.
Education
Each year, middle-class American high-school seniors with good grades go through a familiar ritual of the college application process. They file a bunch of applications – perhaps after visiting several schools – submitting test scores, grades, essays, and letters of recommendation. But it doesn’t work for poor kids. It turns out that over and above all the other disadvantages one faces growing up poor in America, the majority of high-achieving kids from low-income backgrounds fail to apply to any selective colleges. (Slate)
Visit http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2013/03/undermatching_half_of_the_smartest_kids_from_low_income_households_don_t.html to view the full article online.
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Technology
Apple tightly controls its software and hardware, and is fiercely competitive in battling its rivals, especially in the mobile market. And yet, while the company never creates apps for anyone else's mobile system or device, each of its major mobile-platform foes – Google, Amazon and Microsoft – make many of their apps available for Apple devices. That makes those devices the sort of Switzerlands of the mobile world. (The Wall Street Journal)
Visit http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323826704578356283893015710.html to view the full article online.
Entrepreneurship
Giving up the security of a full-time job to start your own business is a risky, often stressful move. "The biggest reason people don't end up quitting is the fear of uncertainty. They don't know what might happen and they don't want to give up the security that they already have," says Sean Ogle, who quit a job in finance to live in Thailand and run a virtual search engine optimization and Web consultancy. (Entrepreneur)
Visit http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/226035 to view the full article online.
Leadership
Because employees can’t be trusted, we have put in place a massive system of policies and controls to make sure no one steps out of line. It costs hundreds of millions of shareholder and customer dollars to manage this system, but it must be worth it because we’re so certain our employees are untrustworthy – notwithstanding the fact that we hired every one of them ourselves. (Bloomberg/Businessweek)
Visit http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-03-12/because-employees-cant-be-trusted#r=nav-f-blog to view the full article online.
Leaders who are detached from the messy process of managing fail. They need to recruit board members, executives, and managers who are doers, not just joiners. The headlines scream about leadership failure after failure around the globe every day – at the world’s biggest companies, in government agencies, at venture-backed startups, and even in organizations such as the Vatican. So why does leadership fail? (Fast Company)
Visit http://www.fastcompany.com/3006868/youre-only-strong-your-weakest-manager to view the full article online.
Lifestyle
If you have watched and shared PSY's "Gangnam Style" video or gone into an unknown restaurant simply because it was full of people and appeared to be popular, you have the basis for understanding what makes things go viral. In Wharton marketing professor Jonah Berger's new book, Contagious: Why Things Catch On, he identifies six principles that cause people to talk about and share an idea or product. Knowledge@Wharton recently sat down with Berger to learn more about his findings, including why people share cat memes, which organizations and individuals have conceived and implemented the most successful viral campaigns – from Blendtec to 'Movember' – and why making something contagious does not have to be expensive. (Knowledge@Wharton)
Visit http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=3206 to view the full article online.
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