When Mark Dixon got his first job after graduating from university, he was slim.
By the time he'd worked his way up to regional manager at the firm, he was in his 50s and obese.
Concerned for his health, his employer persuaded him to go on a one-week intensive exercise and healthy eating programme, at its expense.
A year on, Mr Dixon is 95lb lighter, and credits that week with "changing his life forever".
While his employer, Whole Foods, may seem exceptionally generous, the programme, on offer to all employees with health issues, is one of the ways it aims to make the firm a more attractive place to work.

Visit http://www.bbc.com/news/business-27184875 to view the full article online.

 

Are you a Life Hacker? Have you Self-Actualized? The way you talk says a lot about your work life. Different industries have their own vocabularies. Some of today’s most popular buzzwords, like corporate culture and synergy were created in the 1960s by academics who believed that work should make us happy. The bottom line goes back the Wall Street lingo of the 1980s. Contemporary tech terms, like capacity and bandwidth, suggest people are essentially creative computers. Corporate jargon may sound meaningless, but it actually reveals a lot about how we think about our lives.

Visit http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/04/quiz-what-kind-of-office-speak-dominates-your-brain/361177/ to view the full article online.

 

How stressful is business travel? Very. Especially if you’re a female vice president. We know this because Michael Segalla and Dominique Rouziès of HEC Paris teamed up with Catalin Ciobanu and Vincent Lebunetel of Carlson Wagonlit Travel to survey thousands of business travelers about the stress they felt at every stage of a trip.

Visit http://blogs.hbr.org/2014/04/the-7-stages-of-business-travel-stress/ to view the full article online.

 

How much time does your organization squander? My colleagues and I gathered data about time use at one large company and found that people there spent 300,000 hours a year just supporting the weekly executive committee meeting.

Visit http://blogs.hbr.org/2014/04/how-a-weekly-meeting-took-up-300000-hours-a-year/ to view the full article online.

 

How many hours do you work a week?
If you’re like a lot of managers, including many who attended the recent "Maximizing Your Personal Productivity" program at MIT Sloan Executive Education, your estimate might be between 49 hours and 58 hours.
Robert Pozen, a senior lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management and leader of the session, said when he speaks to groups, there’s usually a large cluster of people who say their work hours fall in this span. Some outliers claim as few as 80 hours a week for sleep and personal time, meaning they work 88 hours.

Visit http://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/own-your-time-boost-your-productivity/ to view the full article online.

 

I trained as a statistician and first joined Bell Labs in the network performance group. A year or two after I started, it was time for my first big presentation at AT&T Headquarters. I completed my prep well in advance and rehearsed carefully. Then I was off to the big meeting.
It could not have gone worse. The only impressions I left were bad ones. Young hothead that I was, I blamed everyone but myself, including the audience: "The average manager up here can’t even understand a pie chart!"
An established veteran of many such presentations looked me square in the eye and said, "Of course not, Tom. It’s your job to make it so they don’t have to."

Visit http://blogs.hbr.org/2014/04/data-doesnt-speak-for-itself/ to view the full article online.

 

The traditional explanation is sexism, but even those who genuinely want to see more equality sometimes fail to speak out.The percent of women in executive-officer positions at Fortune 500 companies has stagnated at less than 15. As more women "lean in" and we collectively continue to fight sexism, there’s another barrier to progress that hasn’t been addressed: Many men who would like to see more women leaders are afraid to speak up about it.

Visit http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/04/why-men-dont-stand-up-for-women-to-lead/361231/ to view the full article online.

 

Business schools are good at raising money. Eight U.S. B-schools attracted individual gifts of $25 million or more in 2013. A handful of business schools at state universities are so well-endowed that they’ve turned down public money.

Visit http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-04-29/harvard-business-school-to-raise-1-billion-it-doesn-t-truly-need#r=bus-ls to view the full article online.

 

To have their best shot at staying in the game, today's aspiring business leaders must learn to move swiftly from one idea and to another. The Business Plan Competition held by Florida Atlantic University's College of Business in Boca Raton was created to help these potential entrepreneurs find their passion.

Visit http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/233559 to view the full article online.

 

Thank You for Making Our 1st NBMBAA® Regional Symposium a Success! Join us for our 2nd event in Chicago, July 17th

Visit http://www.nbmbaa.org/events/regSymposiums.aspx to view the full article online.

 

Register now through June 30 to take advantage of the early-bird registration rate.

Visit http://www.nbmbaaconference.org/ to view the full article online.

 

Microsoft is releasing a security update for Internet Explorer that closes a gap that allowed attackers to take complete control of a computer. It also issued the update to Windows XP users, despite dropping support for the older operating system last month.

Visit http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=308698314 to view the full article online.

 

Social networks are now commonplace in sales, marketing, and general business communications. Unfortunately, some people still don't know how to use social media in the workplace without landing in hot water.
Here are the rules, loosely adapted from IBM's social networking policy with an extra dollop of common sense.

Visit http://www.inc.com/geoffrey-james/13-social-media-rules-to-live-by.html to view the full article online.

 

Join the Small Business Revolution as BLACK ENTERPRISE holds its 2014 Entrepreneurs Conference + Expo hosted by Nationwide Insurance on Wednesday, May 14 through Saturday, May 17, at the Hyatt Regency Columbus in Columbus, Ohio, with a powerhouse line-up of some of the nation’s most accomplished and celebrated entrepreneurs.

Visit http://www.blackenterprise.com/small-business/shark-tank-judges-open-casting-call-ec/ to view the full article online.

 

I’ve seen several dozen business pitches in the last few weeks. That includes pitches for the angel investment group I’m in, plus pitches for two international business plan competitions. I’ve been doing this since the 1990s. Styles have changed, expectations have changed, but the fundamentals haven’t.

Visit http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/233547 to view the full article online.

 

For an entrepreneur looking to quickly scale a startup, balance is everything. There’s the balance between expanding too fast and too slow; spending enough to grow and saving enough to stay afloat; embracing ambition and staying realistic. But perhaps the most important balance is that between the young, hungry entrepreneurs and the seasoned startup veterans.

Visit http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/233518 to view the full article online.

 

As has happened so many times since the recovery began nearly five years ago, the economy turned in another disappointing quarterly performance, surprising even the most pessimistic observers as growth in the first three months of 2014 slowed to a near-standstill.
But looking past the weak report from the Commerce Department on Wednesday morning, policy makers at the Federal Reserve said they believed that activity was already rebounding from the deep winter dive, and are sticking with their plan to gradually reduce monthly bond purchases aimed at stimulating the economy.

Visit http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/01/business/economy/us-economy-barely-grew-in-first-quarter.html?ref=business&_r=0 to view the full article online.

 

U.S. consumers ramped up their spending in March at the fastest pace in 4½ years, a sign that the economy is gaining momentum after its winter slowdown. The Commerce Department said Thursday that consumer spending rose 0.9 percent, the largest monthly gain since April 2009. The department also revised up its estimate of the spending increase in February to 0.5 percent from 0.3 percent.

Visit http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/us-consumer-spending-surged-09-percent-in-march/2014/05/01/99ca79de-d12d-11e3-a714-be7e7f142085_story.html to view the full article online.

 

The U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) reports that personal income increased $78.4 billion, or 0.5%, and disposable personal income (DPI) increased $68.0 billion, or 0.5% last month. In addition, personal consumption expenditures (PCE) increased $107.2 billion, or 0.9%. In February, personal income increased $54.3 billion, or 0.4%, DPI increased $47.6 billion, or 0.4%, and PCE increased $54.7 billion, or 0.5%.

Visit http://www.blackenterprise.com/money/consumer-affairs/personal-income-on-the-rise/ to view the full article online.

 

Why would anyone want to buy a bond that lasts longer than they do?
These ultra-long-dated assets fell out of favor in the fallout from the financial crisis, as investors shifted to shorter-duration bonds to protect them against unpredictable spikes in interest rates. But now the "century bond" is returning to prick investor interest.

Visit http://www.dailyfinance.com/2014/05/01/investing-century-bond/ to view the full article online.

 

The US Federal Reserve has announced a further reduction of its economic stimulus efforts, after a two-day meeting in Washington.
The central bank said it would continue trimming its monthly bond-purchases by an additional $10bn (£5.9bn) to $45bn.
The bank has been buying bonds to keep long-term interest rates low and stimulate economic activity.
Fed chair Janet Yellen said the bank will continue to support the US economy for as long as it deems necessary.

Visit http://www.bbc.com/news/business-27230632 to view the full article online.

 

Imagine you’re a bright, inquisitive person working for a company with long-established policies and work processes in place (or maybe you don’t have to). Now let’s say you’ve noticed one of those processes is not as efficient or effective as it might be, which leads you to reasonably ask: Why are we doing it this way? Is there a better approach?
What happens next in this scenario could be a good indicator of whether your company has a culture of inquiry or one of acceptance and conformity. If it’s the former, that question you raised will be carefully considered and may trigger ongoing discussion — and possibly action — by the company’s managers and leaders. You might be praised and even rewarded, just for asking it.

Visit http://blogs.hbr.org/2014/04/become-a-company-that-questions-everything/ to view the full article online.

 

Say you’re in the early stages of planning your department’s budget for the next fiscal year. Your management team meets to establish short-term priorities and starts to think about longer-term resource allocation. You identify next steps and decide to reconvene in a week—but when you do, you find that very little progress has been made. What’s the holdup?

Visit http://hbr.org/2014/05/get-your-team-to-do-what-it-says-its-going-to-do/ar/1 to view the full article online.

 

In the previous extract from Do Lead, I concluded with a definition of leadership which I've honed from 35 years of working with leaders (heroic and otherwise), and from engaging in occasional acts of leadership myself--which we'll use as a working definition for the rest of the book.

Visit http://www.inc.com/les-mckeown/are-you-looking-for-leadership-in-all-the-wrong-places.html to view the full article online.