A meteor fireball lit up the morning sky over Chelyabinsk in central Russia, producing a shock wave that shattered windows and injured an estimated 500 1,000 people.** Although much of the parent object likely burned up in the atmosphere, Russian authorities say that several meteorite fragments have already been recovered, according to the Interfax news agency.

A preliminary analysis posted to the Web site of the Russian Academy of Sciences estimates that the object that struck Earth’s atmosphere was a few meters in diameter, “the weight of the order of ten tons (and) the energy of a few kilotons,” according to a Google translation.* That  would make the Chelyabinsk event a fairly common occurrence, although such strikes usually occur over less-populated regions, not cities of more than a million people. On average, a four-meter asteroid hits Earth every year, delivering five kilotons of energy, Southwest Research Institute senior scientist Clark Chapman found in a 2004 analysis.

In 25 years of HR work, I’ve met very few executives who didn’t agree that better feedback between a manager and employee drives better employee performance, development, and engagement – and thus, better business results.

Feedback gaps occur when employees need more frequent and/or higher quality feedback than they get. Scores of articles and studies, not to mention common sense, suggest that Corporate America’s performance is being held back by feedback gaps.

The long decline in the number of American workers belonging to labor unions accelerated sharply last year, according to data reported on Wednesday, sending the unionization rate to its lowest level in close to a century. 

The Bureau of Labor Statistics said the total number of union members fell by 400,000 last year, to 14.3 million, even though the nation’s overall employment rose by 2.4 million. The percentage of workers in unions fell to 11.3 percent, down from 11.8 percent in 2011, the bureau found in its annual report on union membership. That brought unionization to its lowest level since 1916, when it was 11.2 percent, according to a study by two Rutgers economists, Leo Troy and Neil Sheflin.

Fifteen years ago, exits for venture-backed companies were split about equally between IPOs and acquisitions. Now IPOs make up roughly 10% of exits, and acquisitions dominate the dreams of investors and company founders.

Agence France-Presse/Getty Images Investment banker Paul Deninger warns that the IPO decline isn’t happening in a vacuum. It’s hurting acquisitions too.

“Who are you going to sell to if there’s no one out there that’s public?” said Deninger, the senior managing director of Evercore, an investment banking and advisory firm. “We need to repopulate the buyer base.”

The best place in the world to run a business is Singapore and the worst is Venezuela, according to the Global Dynamism Index.  The highly reputed survey, quoted by publications such as Forbes and Business Insider and studied by investors and economists all over the world, contains a wealth of important information.  But, if you’re an entrepreneur about to launch a new business in 2013, your place of residence is not as important as your state of mind.

Your informed state of mind.

Although attitude is critical to success, it takes more than chanting mantras in the lotus position and sticking affirmations to your mirror to create and sustain business success.   Confidence leads to financial victory if it stems from reality and not wishful thinking.

Last week, Samsung announced a new strategy and innovation center with offices in Silicon Valley, Korea and Israel, and a big pot of money to support new companies.

Mobile health is on the company’s list of initial priorities, along with cloud infrastructure, mobile privacy and a human interface for the Internet of Things.

This is a gold mine for healthcare startups. Samsung is not interested in apps or late-stage companies. The company sees more opportunity in hardware and infrastructure. The new $100 million Catalyst Fund will be looking for early stage companies and components and subsystems. Launching later this year, theSamsungCreate Challenge is designed to promote Samsung’s Device Solutions Architecture Platform and will award $10 million in seed investments.”

Can you see the forest for the trees? If you can’t, and you’re an entrepreneur seeking out seed money for your business, it’s likely you won’t succeed.

Recently, an investor friend of mine approached me and asked that I review a company slide deck for him. He said he was considering an investment in the company, but wanted my perspective on the business plan and whether or not I thought it had legs.

It's the stuff of button-down nightmares: sitting across the table from your never-takes-lunch boss, listening to him tell you how "difficult" it is for him to eliminate your position, with the company lawyer standing sentry nearby lest you flip out.

You're getting fired. Or, more precisely, Amy Shouse is. And the marketer-turned-writer--like noted badasses Kash Sree and Dennis Litky--handled it with aplomb.

Sensing that the axe was coming after her company was taken over by Bain Capital (and her charming new boss was installed), she slowly started ferrying her belongings back home via Trader Joe's bag. That preparation--and the getting canned itself--turned the termination into something much less terminal.

Google is close to becoming the top dog in yet another business sector: venture capital.

The search giant’s 4-year-old financing arm, Google Ventures, has quietly become the country’s No. 3 most active venture-capital firm, according to a recent report.

Google Ventures, which has $300 million a year to invest, participated in 71 funding rounds in 2012, according to data from CB Insights.

“Google has become a favored destination for entrepreneurs,” said Anand Sanwal, CB Insights’ CEO.

What do you do when you're a scientist and you have no job and no money for your research? If you're Ethan Perlstein, you try crowd funding. He raised $25,000 to investigate where the drug methamphetamine is stored in the brain.

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LINDA WERTHEIMER, HOST:

You've heard of entrepreneurs raising money online to start a business. Well, say you're a scientist studying how drugs affect the brain. You need money for the research so you make a video asking for donations and post it to YouTube. That's not exactly how science is supposed to work.

Nine years ago, Boeing Co. executives decided to take the biggest leap in airliner technology in a generation and develop the 787 Dreamliner. They promised it would burn less fuel while flying farther and offering more passenger comfort than existing models.

Bruno Mallart The plane would be "a true game-changer for the industry and traveling public," said Boeing's then-chief executive, Harry Stonecipher. The 787 also showed Boeing's "commitment to innovation."

Airlines, eager to save money and woo fliers, ordered a record numbers of Dreamliners, now totaling 848 planes. Rival Airbus remade its product line in response.

The experienced business owner is no stranger to signing personal guarantees. It has become standard practice for lenders to require owners, and even their families, to sign a personal guarantee (PG) to secure a commercial loan.

While this is often the price of doing business, what does a personal guarantee mean to business owners, partners and even family members? What, if anything, can be done about them?

While they are nothing new, PGs have become commonplace as tight credit conditions have forced banks to become increasingly conservative in their lending practices.

There is always a vibe in the Valley. Something is in, something is out. Someone is the shit, someone is shit. It doesn’t matter what reality is, the vibe overcomes all in its way… I wrote a piece in 2010, briefly summarizing the web then, and subsequently wrote something on the supposed re-inflated internet bubble. The question is: What is the vibe today? Ecommerce, collaborative consumption and enterprise software. These are the top three hot categories.

Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D) dropped by Rockville on Monday for lunch with the Montgomery County Council, where much of the hour-long meeting focused on the looming federal government sequester. Mikulski said she realized the effect across-the-board spending cuts and furloughs of federal workers could have on the county, home to 17 agencies, 32,000 employees and the many contracting firms that work with those agencies. There has been little recent movement on avoiding the sequester on Capitol Hill.

Startup accelerator 500 Startups is serious about growing its presence in emerging markets. According to the accelerator, “big things are happening” in the South American country, which is why the programme has “been so passionate about supporting Brazilian startups and entrepreneurs”. In a recent post on its site, 500 Startups noted that Brazil’s mobile landscape is worth paying attention to saying that it is “seeing Silicon Valley in Brazil”. “Mobile’s massive as well, with more than 1.4 phones per person, with 22-million of those being smartphones,” says the post. “And these numbers are going up faster every year.”

When it comes to building a healthy environment for startups, the conversation almost always comes down to capital. As I report in today’s print edition of The Business Journal, Wisconsin is taking steps to give entrepreneurs more access to capital. Gov. Scott Walker has proposed nearly $6 million for seed accelerator and capital investment programs, and there’s rumblings of new venture capital legislation. But advocates tout academic research and developing talent as other important pieces of Wisconsin’s entrepreneurship puzzle. Between the research juggernaut that is the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the strong partnerships in southeastern Wisconsin between its bevy of universities and large corporations, Wisconsin has a lot going for it in that regard.

Successful entrepreneurs are usually hard-driving, and highly focused on some specific goals, like being the dominant player in a given domain, or the low-priced provider of their product. Yet other entrepreneurs will talk for hours about all their ideas, and how they intend to change the world, but I don’t hear any specific goals or milestones.

Many people are very hesitant to set specific goals, due to lack of self-confidence or whatever. The result is that they don’t ever get anywhere, because they never really knew where they wanted to go. If you find yourself in this category, try the following simple steps highlighted by Brian Tracy in “No Excuses: The Power of Self-Discipline”:

CURIOUS RITUALS IS A FASCINATING DESIGN STUDY THAT ILLUSTRATES ALL OF THE STRANGE WAYS WE BEND OUR BODIES (AND OUR PSYCHES) FOR THE TECHNOLOGY WE HOLD SO DEAR.

We pull a smartphone from our pocket, and it seems to squeeze perfectly well into our life. It fits in our hand. It works on a table. But is the smartphone accommodating us, or are we accommodating the smartphone?

Our annual Most Innovative Companies list isn’t simply a ranking; it is constructed to represent the state of innovation in our economy. In the Age of Flux, continuous improvement, speed of change, and breadth of ambition are more important than ever--as you’ll see by the way these companies succeed. They offer many lessons that cross industry: social is now a layer for everyone; software is the “wow” factor; data makes a big difference; and in a world of instant gratification, long-term investment still matters. You’ll no doubt find many other lessons for what works right now. Act fast: By next year, the state of innovation--and what it takes to succeed--could change again.

The Cambridge Innovation Center, a longtime fixture of the Boston-area startup scene, is expanding its entrepreneur-friendly office space business to new cities—just as it continues to build a larger footprint in its hometown.

The CIC, which rents office space and related services to more than 500 companies in seven floors of a building near MIT, has been advertising for a general manager at a new Baltimore location. And CEO Tim Rowe says that’s not the only place the CIC is eyeing for a possible expansion.

“We’re excited about it,” Rowe says. “We are actually interviewing candidates that might lead the operations for us in a couple cities. So it’s pretty serious, but it’s not done yet.”