Senior executives often have a hard time letting go. When it comes time to decide whether to sell certain assets, particularly those that have become less relevant to the core business, many bosses hold on for too long, only to watch as value withers and the assets become costly distractions. Others are simply more focused on acquiring1 or turning things around and, as a result, fail to prune noncore assets or divest even those businesses that destroy value. The effect on shareholder returns is more than you might imagine: our analysis of the largest 1,000 global companies finds that those that are actively involved in both acquiring and divesting create as much as 1.5 to 4.7 percentage points higher shareholder returns than those focused primarily on acquisitions.

Between theory and practice can be a large chasm. Or, as Brian Park and Erik Vermeulen, two practicioners that have worked at Philips, a Fortune 500 corporation, note in their excellent academic paper, Debunking Myths in Corporate Venture Capital (CVC): What Works, What Doesn’t, and How To Make It Work: “On paper, large multinational corporations and startups seem like a perfect pairing, a match made in heaven. “Corporates can open doors for startups, provide them with necessary capital, and deliver tremendous resources in the form of knowledge sharing, distribution channels to seemingly endless rolodexes. The list goes on.

A new analysis of data from the 2012 National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) has found that most American adults have experienced some level of pain, from brief to more lasting pain, and from relatively minor to more severe pain. The analysis helps to unravel the complexities of a Nation in pain. It found that an estimated 25.3 million adults (11.2 percent) had pain every day for the preceding 3 months. Nearly 40 million adults (17.6 percent) experience severe levels of pain. Those with severe pain are also likely to have worse health status. The analysis was funded by the National Institutes of Health’s National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH) and was published in The Journal of Pain.

First it was The Social Network, the frenetic film about birth of Facebook. ThenThe Internship, a cinematic valentine to Google with Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson. Then a biopic of Steve Jobs starring Ashton Kutcher, then the sitcomBetas from Amazon. Lately, it’s HBO’s Silicon Valley, a very funnysend-up of the Bay Area start-up world from the creator of Beavis and Butt-head.

Meanwhile, in the real Silicon Valley, the unicorns are multiplying. (Unicorns are the breakout stars of the technology start-up world that investors have bid up to valuations of $1 billion or more.) The New York Times reports that over the past 15 months the number of unicorns has doubled to 102. Ten are valued at over $10 billion: Uber, at $40 billion, leads the pack. Other notables: Airbnb, $20 billion; Snapchat, $15 billion. No wonder Hollywood has taken notice.

Innovation is all about creating products and services that make your company more competitive in the marketplace. Those actions typically include generating ideas, creating prototypes, building the business case, and getting alignment to launch. Marketers must develop a strategy to know where to focus their resources. They must segment, target, and position the offering. Finally, they have to execute their plan by developing a coordinated set of marketing tactics including what products and services to offer, pricing, distribution approaches, and marketing communications.

Deloitte Australia has scrapped bi-annual performance reviews for 1500 employees starting from June 1 this year, and plans to extend its "nimbler, real-time" performance assessment criteria to its whole workforce of 6000 from December.

By June 2016, the dreaded ratings and distribution curves that so many companies are welded to, will no longer exist at Deloitte Australia.

Image: Deloitte Risk Services analyst Jennifer Hill prefers the new way of covering performance reviews. Michele Mossop

Every entrepreneur realizes that building a great team is critical to the success of his or her startup, but many don’t realize that it takes more than multiple qualified employees to make an effective team. It’s possible, or even likely, that a set of skilled individuals can result in a dysfunctional team, where contention, jealousy, lack of communication or work habits jeopardize results.

The unusual perspective of high-performing entrepreneurs allows them to turn good ideas into great businesses.

AJ Harbinger is a real-life Hitch. Except he looks nothing like Will Smith and cringes at the term "dating coach." Every Tuesday, three weeks a month, he sits on a tall chair in a posh house in West Hollywood in front of a new group of six to eight men and lectures them on how to talk to strangers.

Then, for the next five days, he makes them go out and do it.

Your legs wobble as you approach the podium. Your hands tremble as you adjust the microphone. Your head throbs. A wail builds deep inside you and threatens to escape.

It’s showtime—and the feelings are primal.

Evolutionary biologists tell us that in the presence of a presumed threat, we go into fight-or-flight mode, kicking off a millennia-old chain-reaction that starts in the brain’s fear centers and ends with our muscles pumped with blood and oxygen, prepared for battle or escape.

One of the big reasons you need a vacation this summer is to take a break from the chronic state of fight or flight that an overworked and overwhelmed lifestyle generates. By doing some quick math based on email statistics collected by the Radicati Group, I’m ball parking that the average business person gets 113 emails per day. When I ask the people in my leadership workshops how many they get in a day the responses are usually in the range of 200 to 300. Whatever the actual number is, for most professionals, it’s a lot.

Winning customers as an entrepreneur in a startup has many parallels to a young army trying to penetrate some formidable new and unfamiliar territory. You need a strategy as well as a goal, and you need to pick your battles well. Even in this age of purpose before profits, a business won’t survive by pretending there are no competitors out there to worry about.

Last month, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) released a thoughtful new working paper,  Cross-country evidence on start-up dynamics", that showed patterns across countries that are similar to those found for the United States. The report offers important insights for researchers and policy makers fine-tuning how to measure the dynamics of new firm formation.

Image: http://www.kauffman.org

Breaking up isn’t easy — especially if you are a leader “breaking up with” an innovation project that one of your teams still believes in passionately. It is a critical part of the innovation journey however, and done well can produce a positive outcome across the board.

India is at a very interesting stage in its history. It is emerging as a major global economy, a significant geopolitical power and a future military and economic superpower.

When nations reach such a stage in their history, they are expected to demonstrate leadership in a multitude of areas, both because their increased influence demands that they do so, and because of the expectation that other countries have from that nation taking on greater responsibilities on the world stage - and playing a proactive and positive role globally

Biology startups have been around for a long time. But the world has changed since that first wave of bio startups, and especially more recently, due to the “peace dividends of the smartphone wars”. So what happens when you combine those cheap sensors and compute power — and apply it to bio?

From 1999 to 2015, Jon Stewart frequently took on science policy issues as host of The Daily Show. Search the show's web site for “science” and 529 clips come up. In honor of Stewart's last show August 6, 2015 we picked our ten favorite Daily Show science moments. Some got a lot of social media love, like this one, where Stewart put his hands over his ears and teased climate change deniers by putting his hands over his ears and chanting, “La, la, la climate change”:

 

As the world of work continues to evolve at a rapid pace, innovation continues to become both a top priority and a top challenge. For most companies, innovation is handled behind closed doors in a secluded part of the company that only a few have access to. This type of innovation is no longer practical, scalable or effective when thinking about the future of work. In order to succeed and thrive in this rapidly changing world, organizations must adapt by implementing five innovation models, all five of these are crucial and are part of a broader innovation ecosystem. The five innovation models are:

KOLKATA: A former US bureaucrat and a leading expert on US-India relations says the Trinamool government needs to prioritize creation of opportunities for youths to stem Bengal's brain drain.

Raymond E Vickery had served as assistant secretary of commerce (trade development) in the Bill Clinton administration, and played a key role in promoting commercial relations between US and India and in the passage of the civil nuclear legislation. He feels Bengal needed to urgently address the flight of intellectual capital.

BMW is building a special sports wheelchair for use by the US Paralympics Track and Field Team in Rio next year. 

The American arm of the German carmaker has been working in partnership with Team USA and the wheelchair's development will be overseen by Designworks, its California-based creative consultancy. 

Image: Speedster: The BMW Racing Wheelchair will use carbon fiber construction. — BMW