In the comedy western Blazing Saddles, one seminal moment has the sheriff point a gun to his own head, threatening to blow his own brains out if everyone doesn’t do as he says.

There have been echoes of this persuasive technique recently in the U.K., whose populace voted to exit the EU. A cabal of leaders fell on their own swords like dominoes in the days after the referendum, the biggest casualty being the Prime Minister, David Cameron. Was such a bloodbath necessary? I would argue that in critical times, the case for reflective rather than reactive leadership, in society and organisations has never been stronger.

Red blood cells are flexible biconcave discs that spend their lives suspended in blood plasma. They are by far the largest component of ordinary blood and consequently play a hugely important role in the way it flows through the body.

In ordinary conditions, red blood cells stack together to form structures called rouleaux like cylindrical packs of coins. These constantly form and break up but they can also become tangled. When this happens, the blood becomes thicker and eventually clots.

With innovation being a buzzword for success in the world economy, India and the United States are launching an innovation forum in order to shape new partnerships. The Forum will be launched along the sidelines of the second annual Strategic and Commercial Dialogue between the two countries this month.

The Forum will serve as an additional avenue through which the two governments will seek private sector feedback and input for bilateral discussions, the State Department said in a fact sheet.

Image: http://www.enterpriseinnovation.net

(Trice Edney Wire) – The most recent data on minority-owned firms in the United States was collected in 2012 (and released at the end of 2015).  It showed that the number of minority-owned firms rose from 5.8 million in 2007 to 8 million in 2012.  Hispanic-owned firms grew the most rapidly – by 46 percent to 3.3 million.  African American-owned firms grew by 34.5 percent to 2.6 million.  Asian owned firms grew by 23.8 percent to 1.9 million.  Women-owned firms grew by 26.8 percent compared to firms owned by men growing by just 6.8 percent.   Since the total number of firms grew by just 2 percent, to 27.6 million, the growth in minority and women-owned firms is could define the way that business is being done in our country.

Image: Julianne Malveaux

In the mid-1980s, Andy Grove at Intel and Gary Kennedy at Oracle started playing with traditional models for setting goals at companies. What they developed became known as the Objectives and Key Results or OKRs system — since tweaked and made famous by Google (which still faithfully practices it today). For a long time it was the latest and greatest in company planning and alignment (if you’re not familiar, you can get an overview here). But now something new is emerging: Goal Science Thinking.

“Dynamic resource reallocation” is a mouthful, but its meaning is simple: shifting money, talent, and management attention to where they will deliver the most value to your company. It’s one of those things, like daily exercise, that helps us thrive but that gets pushed off our priority list by business that seems more urgent.

I just finished Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance. I can’t recommend this book strongly enough. I loved it in so many ways.

J.D. grew in a single-parent (often zero parent) lower-income home in Middletown, Ohio and spent much of his youth also in his family’s cultural home of Jackson, Kentucky. His youth was surrounded by family members who struggled with substance abuse, violence, teenage pregnancy and lack of social mobility.

Many of the most iconic photographs ever taken feature people as their subjects. But some photographs of empty spaces that are devoid of human life manage to freeze the echoes of human existence in a visually arresting way—and it can be difficult to understand why they capture our attention.

"My images are empty of people but they’re littered with the traces of human enterprise," says the graphic designer and photographer Rudy Vanderlans, whose work evokes the melancholy of vacant parking lots and other barren California landscapes. "To me, they're anything but empty."

The best job applicants have qualifications that are more than skills-deep, but it isn't always easy uncovering them. As hiring managers identify their top candidates, the challenge becomes finding out the less-obvious qualities that may put one ahead.

Summer is a good time to review investment activity for pharmaceutical and biotech companies in the year so far and a new report shows that there’s still life for life science IPOs.

More life science companies went public in the first half of the year than tech companies, and there are more of the former than the latter waiting in the pipeline. But a bigger-picture view of the numbers shows an overall slowing trend for both life science and tech IPOs, and depending on the sector. In fact there are different factors behind the decisions driving these companies to go public.

Corporate employees can be classified into two categories. The majority of employees must be classified as “the glass is half full” people, who when they look at an existing process or product, they assume that everything is fine. However, a handful of employees can be classified as “the glass is half empty and leaking” people. These individuals are much more valuable because they are constantly looking for hidden problems and they automatically assume that, in our fast-changing world, most existing approaches will soon become obsolete. This “half-empty” group is critical because their behaviors continually drive innovation, which is essential if you want to dominate your industry by becoming a serial innovation firm.

Image: http://www.eremedia.com

A hotter world could mean less wealth for millennials, according to a new report from environmental advocate NextGen Climate and research center Demos. They found inaction could cost Americans currently in their 20s and 30s $8.8 trillion in potential earnings over their lifetime.

Image: A cyclist and vehicles negotiate heavily flooded streets as rain falls in Miami. Flooding in coastal cities is on the rise due to climate change and rising sea levels. (AP Photo/Lynne Sladky)

MADISON – There are no shortage of explanations for why Wisconsin routinely shows up at the bottom of the Kauffman Foundation’s business startup rankings, the latest of which pegged the state 25th among the nation’s 25 largest states.

Those reasons include demographics (an aging workforce and low immigration rates); a capital-intense business core (manufacturing and agriculture) that is hard to crack for most entrepreneurs; a below-average share of adults with higher education degrees; and nagging social and economic problems in Milwaukee, the state’s largest city.

Some people can’t start the day without a piping hot cup of coffee (or two, or three). Now, scientists have identified a gene that may explain why some people drink more coffee than others.

By looking at populations of people in villages in Italy, researchers conducted a genome-wide association study in which they examined markers in DNA and identified a gene called PDSS2 that could play a role in caffeine metabolism. In the study, which was published Thursday in the journal Scientific Reports, the researchers asked more than 1,200 people in Italy how much coffee they drank and compared their consumption and genetic results to another population of 1,731 people in the Netherlands.

Historian and author of the international bestseller Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Yuval Noah Harari predicts the future of humanity. "We are probably one of the last generations of Homo sapiens," he tells BBC Radio 4's Today programme.

The University of California at Berkeley has produced plenty of successful startups, such as Nextdoor, TubeMogul and Cloudera, not to mention 486 startups last year alone, according to the venture and private equity database Pitchbook. Still, it tends to get lost in the shadows of the startup machine across the bay, Stanford University.

Image: Cameron Baradar, managing director of The House, in the background (Photo courtesy of The House)

What do Meg Whitman (former CEO of eBay), James McNerny (former CEO 3M and Boeing), Scott Cook (founder Intuit), Jeff Immelt (CEO of GE), Steve Case (cofounder of AOL), and Steve Ballmer (former CEO of Microsoft) all have in common? Besides transforming entrepreneurial enterprises into some of the world’s biggest companies, they all spent their formative careers at Procter and Gamble. Tell this to a business school student and they will likely be shocked. For many, the assumption is that to become a great entrepreneur, one must start at a small company; large blue-chip companies represent the opposite of fast, lean, innovative, and entrepreneurial. At face value, any company that has successfully survived for over 100 years must have the ability to adapt, but yet, the perception is that one can’t possibly learn entrepreneurship (just another word for successful business building) from a big company. As Steve Case says in his book, Third Wave: “The people I worked with (at P&G) were experts in understanding consumer preferences, doggedly pursuing R&D, and seeking breakthroughs that could give their products an edge against the competition.”

Image: (AP Photo/Matt Rourke, File)

A Crowdfund Insider reader reached out to us last week with an excellent question: can foreign nationals invest in US investment crowdfunding offers. We checked with several leading Fintech legal experts for their feedback on this question and we share some of this below.

In the US there are three different iterations of investment crowdfunding. There is Reg D, 506(c) which is for (US) accredited investors only. While individuals may invest online, and platforms may “Generally Solicit” (SEC-speak for advertising), you have to prove you are able to invest based off of economic metrics.

BANGKOK -- Thailand's leading mobile operator, True Corp., plans to set up an industrial park for major information technology and venture companies in the Thai capital in mid-2018.

The company hopes the IT hub, to be populated by an estimated 20,000 engineers and entrepreneurs, will nurture innovation, in which Thailand is lagging behind other countries in Southeast Asia.

Image: http://asia.nikkei.com

Victoria’s independent $60 million innovation fund has dished out $6.5 million in grants to 18 projects aiming to make the state the “destination of choice for startups worldwide”.

The recipients of the first round of LaunchVic grants were announced on Monday morning by Victorian minister for innovation Philip Dalidakis and the body’s chairman Ahmed Fahour.

The winning projects range from “small ideas” like a leadership program for the next generation of female entrepreneurs in the state to bigger ones like the establishment of a new “world-class tech and startup destination” at Abbotsford Convent.

Image: http://www.startupsmart.com.au