Without most people noticing, last week contrasted two events that, I believe, offer an alternate future for learning and higher education.

One happened in the bucolic shadows of the Shenandoah Mountains in rural Virginia. From the picture-postcard campus of century-old Sweet Briar College -- a respected, women's liberal arts college -- came a startling announcement:

"We are closing." Out of the blue.

You don’t need me to tell you that leadership and entrepreneurship are all the rage these days. It sort of makes sense since they go hand in hand: Entrepreneurs start businesses and leaders run them, right?

That’s what I used to think.   

A common complaint among managers is that the conversations they have with employees aren’t producing results: “We keep talking about the same issue over and over, but nothing seems to ever happen!” That’s because most managers are missing a vital skill: the ability to deliberately close a conversation. If you end a conversation well, it will improve each and every interaction you have, ultimately creating impact.

People don't just eat when they're hungry, and they don't stop when they're full. 

Psychologists have found a not-so-sweet suite of factors that contribute to over-eating. 

After dealing with a string of insufficiently answered questions from brothers Richard and Albert Amini regarding their company RoloDoc, "Shark Tank" investor Mark Cuban rose from his seat and shook each of their hands. "Worst presentation ever," he told them.

Image: "Shark Tank"/ABC Mark Cuban tells brother Richard and Albert Amini that they gave the worst pitch he had ever seen. 

Over 200 publicly listed American companies have R&D budgets that exceed $100 million annually. Which companies allocate the highest proportion of that budget to engineering in China and India, specifically? And what drives their success with these global engineering initiatives?

Last night in Cambridge, LSN joined Women In Bio for a Shark Tank-style pitch event. The audience heard pitches from five life science entrepreneurs. Across the table from them were four experienced early stage life science investors playing the role of “sharks”.

So what did we learn from these life science innovators and from the sharks’ cutting responses to their pitches?

Image: http://blog.lifesciencenation.com

The Web as we know it is about to fundamentally change, according to one its luminaries.

WordPress may power nearly a quarter of all websites, but Drupal is no slouch, either, running roughly 5% of all websites globally and 12% of the top 100,000 websites. So when Drupal founder Dries Buytaert declares the Web "will go through a massive re-architecture and re-platforming in the next decade," it's worth digging in to see what he means.

The annual conference of the National Business Incubation Association is the place where incubation and entrepreneurial support professionals from across the globe go to gather for idea sharing, learning and connecting with peers. This year, the 29th International Conference on Business Incubation will be held April 26-29 in Denver, Colo., a city with a flourishing entrepreneurial ecosystem. The Preconference Institute will feature workshops on a variety of topics, including three that qualify for the NBIA Incubator Management Certificate Program. The main conference will include receptions, keynote addresses, incubator tours and nearly 50 educational sessions that range from how to develop an incubator to more advanced and strategic topics. Keynote speakers include: Brad Feld, who is the co-founder of TechStars, and Donald F. Kuratko, who is the executive & academic director of the Johnson Center for Entrepreneurship & Innovation at the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University – Bloomington and is a prominent scholar and national leader in the field of entrepreneurship. Tony Stanco, Executive Director of NCET2, will be at NBIA facilitating a panel of Fortune 500 companies and their view of business incubation.

If federal agencies want to get ahead of the shutdown culture in Washington and attract recent college graduates to work for them, it won't be through a "business as usual" approach, a new study cautions.

Agencies more willing to take on innovative projects and ideas are more likely to get the attention of millennials looking for jobs, according to a follow-up study to the 2014 Best Places to Work report.

In the past few weeks, I’ve had about ten conversations with founders of tech-driven B2B/enterprise start ups that all seem to have the same dynamic. Let me give you an anonymized example:

Founder: “I have an angel investor who is willing to invest $250K at a $1M pre-money. Do you want to participate in that round?”

Health and Human Services chief technology officer Bryan Sivak announced that he will step down from the job this month.

In so doing, Sivak is not just leaving the CTO position but also the entrepreneur-in-residence post he held simultaneously. Healthcare IT News Executive Editor Tom Sullivan spoke with Sivak in 2013 about disrupting government culture with both technology and modern business practices.

Image: HHS CTO Bryan Sivak talks disruption, innovation and lean methodologies.

(KANSAS CITY, Mo.) March 16, 2015 – With the rise of entrepreneurial ecosystems – elements within a community that support firm formation and growth – how can local leaders measure success? That's the subject of a report released today by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation.

Most communities fall short in assessing the performance of their entrepreneurial ecosystems, according to the paper, "Measuring an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem."

Step inside the Raht Racer, a three-wheeled vehicle that looks a little like a simplified version of the Batmobile, and you'll start to pedal like you're riding a bicycle. But as you feed power to the electric motor inside, the bike also senses how hard you're pushing. Pedal hard—or flip on an automatic mode, if you don't want a workout—and the bike will travel up to 100 miles an hour on the highway.

Image: http://www.fastcoexist.com

Like plenty of science-oriented high school kids, Andrew Jin is interested in human evolution. But Jin, one of three $150,000 first-place winners in this year's Intel Science Talent Search, took that interest further than most. For his project, the high school senior came up with machine learning algorithms that detect mutations in the human genome—mutations that could one day be used to develop drugs to combat diseases like HIV and schizophrenia.

Image: http://www.fastcoexist.com

Having two breadwinners in the family can make it harder for young, married couples to break bread at home, but it doesn’t have to. If you’re willing to work as partners, adjust your priorities, and tweak your definition of "having it all," then you’ll likely be happier at home and at work.

It may sound like part marriage counseling, part career counseling, but the fact is that dual-career couples sometimes need both. Add children to the mix, and you really need both.

Leadership for a fractured world is a complex topic, and no single theory can do it justice.

Traditional leadership that relies on prominence ("look to me"), dominance ("listen to me"), and tribalizing ("follow me") to get things done isn’t working anymore. Instead the best leaders are global change agents; they’re men and women who can act with or without formal positional authority to mobilize diverse factions to face reality, participate in interdependent problem solving, and contribute to innovative solutions with focus and speed.

Ever feel like you’re in the middle of a game of Ping-Pong at work, except it’s not a little, white ball you’re volleying back and forth—it’s email?

If you do, you’re not alone. According to recent email surveys, the average employee receives more than 115 emails per day.

Over the last two decades, email has become the killer business app, and for good reason. It’s reliable, inexpensive, convenient, and ubiquitous. To be sure, email is invaluable for certain types of communication. Yet we have overdone it.

Consumers are incredibly poor predictors of the next big thing. Their knee-jerk reaction to new technology is almost always to say they don’t need it and will never use it. For many company leaders, this creates a significant business challenge: They know they must drive change to stay competitive, yet they have no way to determine with confidence which moves will be successful. They bring in experts to provide vision, they do market research until they’ve exhausted the deviations three sigmas from the mean, and they analyze and plan—only to find themselves no more certain about which direction to pursue than when they started.

Image: Illustration by Robert Neubecker

Every entrepreneur I know has their favorite excuse for a previous failure – an investor backed out, the economy took a downturn, or a supplier delivered bad quality. These things outside your control do happen, but based on my years of experience as a startup advisor and Angel investor, I still see too many common failure causes that are inside the entrepreneur decision realm.