Hurricane season won't end until Nov. 30, but four major hurricanes — Category 3 or greater — have already churned through the Atlantic. And meteorologists say more are likely on the way, raising a question of how this hurricane season compares to past years. For an answer, we turned to the National Hurricane Center, which began tracking damage caused by hurricanes in 1900. The figures only reflect fatalities and damage for the mainland U.S., so the following tables don't capture the full extent of the destruction caused by this year's storms.

I’m sure that every one of us who has been out in the business world for a few years can look back with perfect hindsight and name a few college courses that we should have taken. What’s more disconcerting to me is that I can name a few that aren’t usually even offered, resulting in more than a few students graduating ill-prepared for the real business world!

I won’t even try to cover here the ones you didn’t find for your personal life, like managing personal finances and credit. But on the business side, here is my list of useful courses that we wish existed, but as far as I know, still aren’t generally available:

Image: http://blog.startupprofessionals.com - WIKIPEDIA

The Big Four are the world’s largest consulting firms, accounting for nearly 40% of the industry's $150 billion global market. PwC, Deloitte, EY and KPMG are followed by US strategy giants McKinsey & Company and The Boston Consulting Group.

The global consulting market is currently approaching an estimated worth of nearly $150 billion, up from $122 billion in 2012. According to Consultancy.uk analysis on data from a leading analyst firm, the 10 largest consulting firms retain a firm hold on the majority of market activity – which looks set to experience steady growth for the following two years. Judging from present rates of expansion, by the end of 2017, the global consulting industry is forecast to top a worth of $155 billion, with the industry having booked consistent 5% growth for the previous two years.

There’s a cartoon that’s often referenced in the literature on professional confidence for women. In it, a woman and a man are each putting on a pair of pants that is too small. The woman’s thought bubble says, “I must be gaining weight.” The man’s says, “There must be something wrong with these pants.”

As cities around the country rush to respond to Amazon’s RFP for its new HQ2, it’s worth remembering that urban economies aren’t built by winning a contest; they are grown methodically by building on a region’s strengths.

Indeed, the race for long-term prosperity isn’t defined by the month-long sprint to lure $5 billion of investment from Amazon; the real game is the marathon of figuring out which cities will lead in the research, development, and commercialization of breakthrough technologies such as autonomous systems and genomics, which by some estimates may constitute one-third of global GDP by 2025.  

Image: A cyclist on the Fort Duquense Bridge in downtown Pittsburgh. Gene J. Puskar/AP - https://www.citylab.com

There are endless truisms about the importance of company culture — so many that the idea of a strong culture has become a cliché. We often just nod our heads and move on. But it matters. So how can we put flesh and blood on the idea to make it more than just a nice saying? How can companies embody the connection between culture and the bottom line? Here are ten ways.

Women are rapidly changing the face of startup investing at the earliest stages, and soon could be changing its impact.

There is not yet parity among angel investors, but women are gaining: 22 percent were female in a survey this year of Angel Capital Association members. Women made up 30 percent of those investing for two years or less, compared with 18 percent of veteran investors.

Image: Marianne Hudson, executive director, Angel Capital Association - https://www.bizjournals.com

The Cedars-Sinai accelerator, managed by Techstars, kicked off its third class of healthcare startups this month. some of which are more mature than previous cohorts with a seed stage round behind them. Whittled down from roughly 600 applicants, the 10 companies are seeking to improve the patient experience, offer more personalized care plans for cancer treatment, triage faster and make blood sample collection less painful. Their technologies span artificial intelligence, voice recognition, microfluidics, and natural language processing.

Four of Topeka’s economic development nonprofits will restructure their operations and begin working together by Jan. 1 as the Greater Topeka Partnership.

  The Greater Topeka Chamber of Commerce, GO Topeka, Visit Topeka and Downtown Topeka Inc. will retain their individual names and boards of directors, but they will become one of the pillars of GTP in what is called a unified management structure.

Starting a business and leading it to success takes a lot of work, with long hours, seemingly insurmountable obstacles and great sacrifice. Hard work aside, accomplished business owners also share a series of special skills and behaviors that make them suitable for the challenges of an entrepreneurial lifestyle.

The market opportunity in health care is huge, and Apple sees health care and wellness as a core part of its app, services, and wearables strategies. Now the company is aiming to become your personal health record, jumping into research, medical devices, and more. As Apple CEO Tim Cook has said, the health care market makes the smartphone market look small. In fact, with over $7 trillion in health spending per year, it’s already almost 10% of global GDP.

In his recent keynote in August 2017 (when the company announced the new Apple Watch and new iPhone 8 and X), Tim Cook also stated that “health care is big for Apple’s future.”

Rakuten Ichiba is Japan’s single largest online retail marketplace. It also provides loyalty points and e-money usable at hundreds of thousands of stores, virtual and real. It issues credit cards to tens of millions of members. It offers financial products and services that range from mortgages to securities brokerage. And the company runs one of Japan’s largest online travel portals—plus an instant-messaging app, Viber, which has some 800 million users worldwide. Retailer? Financial company? Rakuten Ichiba is all that and more—just as Amazon and China’s Tencent are tough to categorize as the former engages in e-commerce, cloud-computing, logistics, and consumer electronics, while the latter provides services ranging from social media to gaming to finance and beyond.

The future of drone delivery is now, and it's pretty wild.

Lucky residents of Reykjavík are the first to benefit from a new service delivering online food orders like hamburgers, sushi, and even beer.

The system comes from a partnership between Israeli drone logistics company Flytrex and Icelandic eCommerce company AHA.

It's not the only one trying to make drone delivery work in an urban setting.  

Hyperloop One, a three-year-old, L.A.-based company working to create near-supersonic trains that can whisk both passengers and cargo in giant pneumatic tubes at speeds of many hundreds of miles per hour, has raised $85 million in fresh funding, as first reported in Recode.

The round, which comes from DP World, Caspian VC Partners, WTI and OurCrowd.com, brings the company’s total funding to $245 million.

It’s a lot of money for what still seems like a pipe dream, no pun intended. As the Verge noted in its own report on the new round, Hyperloop One still has “no commercial product, no revenue stream, no government approval, and no proof that its ultrafast transit system would even be safe for human passengers.”

Image: https://techcrunch.com

Business productivity is all about having the right people, even though I’m bombarded daily with online tools and mobile apps that promise to solve every problem with automation and data. In reality, business success and satisfaction is about doing the right things at the right time, which requires leadership and coaching. But coaching doesn’t always work the way you expect.

In fact, I’m a strong proponent of coaching and mentoring in the workplace, but I recognize that these efforts can only go so far in eliminating your human resources problems, and increasing team morale and performance. Some managers work too hard on fixing the weaknesses of the people they have through coaching, rather than enhancing the strengths of the right people.

From snooze cubes to rooftop pools to art museums, air travel doesn’t always have to be such a drag. That is, if you’re flying through the right airports.

With a golf course, movie theater and skating rink, it would be easy to lose track of time at Incheon Airport in South Korea. The rooftop pool at Singapore’s Changi Airport may just make you less likely to rush to your connecting flight.

Image: https://www.entrepreneur.com

If Southern California is ever to emerge as a mecca for technology start-ups that rivals Silicon Valley, it needs to attract more venture capital.

And one way to do that is to lure experienced entrepreneurs to Southern California who have track records of running successful, venture-backed companies.

That’s part of the emerging strategy for the Alliance for Southern California Innovation, a new nonprofit that has the ambitious goal of reaching parity with Silicon Valley by 2025 in terms of the amount of venture capital raised by start-ups.

In the two years since the United Nations introduced the Sustainable Development Goals, the global benchmarks–from ending hunger to promoting sustainability–have already begun to inspire shifts across the public and private sectors alike. In the last year or so, we’ve seen Costa Rica run for 113 consecutive days on renewable energy; we’ve seen the Indian city of Pune declare its goal to become the first “smart sanitation city” by using data to tackle its waste and water contamination issues; we’ve seen Volvo pledge to phase out diesel and gas-powered cars in 2019.

There’s a saying among pilots about certain types of human error: “There are those who have, and those who will.” Starting and building a business is much the same -- no matter how good you are, how hard you try or even how much you care, sooner or later you’re going to get it completely and horrifyingly wrong. The good news is that, at least some of the time, and more often than you might think, these catastrophes are not only salvageable but can lead to some of the most valuable client relationships you’ll have.