After 40 years as a professional woman who by many standards has “made it,” I am struck by the extent to which young and highly educated—even Ivy-league educated—employees are challenged by the ambiguities and realities of the contemporary competitive workplace.

Having always been exceptional, and having done what was expected of them, usually by their parents and teachers, they expect the workplace to be like a classroom wherein good performance based on reasonably clear expectations gets you an A+.

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I call that traditional view, "Big Work," and millennials intuitively understand that's not where the future is. They are, in a sense, the first generation of freelance natives. They’re embracing freelancing in a way no other generation has. And now, they’re the majority of the workforce.

They are generation with markedly diverse interests––they’re into design, tech, activism, the arts, everything.

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Providence regularly lands on the lists of top hipster cities and top hipster colleges for its cool factor, having earned plaudits from Travel and Leisure to Buzzfeed for live music, coffee shops, and hip culture.  

But can hipsters save Providence?

In 2013, when Providence took the number four slot on Travel and Leisure's list of America's Top Cities for Hipsters, the publication stated of Rhode Island's capital city, "On the west side, you can order vegan cuisine at The Grange, hear concerts at the Columbus Theatre (with a clever 1492 seats), or browse the vintage fashions, ceramic poodles, and kitschy kitchenware at Rocket to Mars."

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New lessons are emerging for executives striving to harness the power of social media in the cause of wider employee participation. Clearly, there’s more to success than just investing heavily in the latest Enterprise 2.0 technology platforms. Large-scale engagement of the workforce requires, first and foremost, a firm grasp of organizational culture and its social dynamics, a psychological understanding of what triggers new behavior, a determination by management to loosen if not relinquish its traditional top-down approach, and an ability to demonstrate how digital activities complement offline or other real-world events.

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Before you get married, everyone tells you that marriage takes work. I never really believed it until my husband and I landed in therapy after four years, two kids and one seismically stressful cross-country move. Turns out you really can't just flip the switch to autopilot and trust love to take care of itself; you have to devote actual time and effort to understanding and appreciating your spouse. Anyone who is married knows that's not always a simple feat. Here's what relationship research (and a touch of game theory) tells us about how to become a better spouse.

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Patents can be both boring and exciting at the same time, depending on how you look at them. On the one hand, they are the life-breath of American innovation and the protector of the individual inventor. You know the guy – the type who everyone thinks is a bit loony as he works for days, months, or even years in his basement or garage on the next hot new gadget that he’s convinced will revolutionize the world as we know it.

Entrepreneur is a broadly defined term. Kids selling lemonade are entrepreneurs. Someone selling widgets at Etsy and supporting themselves at $40,000 a year are entrepreneurs. Co-founders taking a small seed to build a new app to huge traction and selling to Facebook FB -0.91% down the road for $10 million are entrepreneurs. Someone building a SaaS business to $10 million a year in recurrent revenue, profitably, and without funding, is an entrepreneur.

It’s not often that we witness a pivotal juncture in an entire industry sector. A juncture that – if wisely managed – holds potential to transform a huge chunk of the US economy, or even reskill major segments of the workforce. In the eyes of AOL founder and venture capitalist Steve Case, such is the power of advanced manufacturing at the dawn of the third wave of the Internet. Steve Case believes advanced manufacturing represents a juggernaut linking the power of productivity gains with innovation, workforce competitiveness, and big data as the Industrial Internet unfolds.

One of the world’s preëminent biomedical researchers is calling for a concerted effort by scientists to develop pills that would stay in the stomach or gut for weeks or months once swallowed, delivering one or more drugs continuously or over set intervals.

Such “super pills” would greatly simplify the treatment of diseases such as malaria. They could address a major concern in medicine, says MIT professor Robert Langer: the fact that many people don’t take all their drugs, especially when undergoing long-term treatment.

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The new Facebook headquarters looks like a cross between high-art, 21st century corporate thinking and a child's candy-fueled daydream.

Facebook officially moved to a vast 430,000 square foot campus this week, expanding on its old digs nearby in Menlo Park, California. The office complex was designed by famed architect Frank Gehry and includes modern artwork and furniture, stairwells that look like something out of the Guggenheim museum, a 9-acre rooftop park (hate where you work yet?) and at least one meeting room that looks like the multicolored Chuck E. Cheese ball pit.

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Though the classic brick has not changed since it was patented in 1958, the Lego brand has evolved greatly in the past half-century.

The simple building toy has grown into an empire boasting enormous playsets, board games, video games and even an awesome movie (with a sequel on the way).

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Start-up accelerators have become a prominent feature of the entrepreneurship landscape in recent years. New programs appear nearly every month, and in many ways, accelerator participation has become a rite of passage for budding entrepreneurs. Yet, with the proliferation of programs, the newness of the phenomena, and little to no publicly available data on outcomes for the programs and affiliated start-ups, it is hard for entrepreneurs to determine which programs are most effective and, more importantly, which specific program would be the best fit for their particular start-up’s goals. With this challenge in mind, we set out over the last few years to both foster conversation about the accelerator model, and help entrepreneurs gain visibility into the strengths of individual programs.

Silicon Valley Bank has published the results of the 2015 Innovation Economy Outlook — the bank’s sixth annual study of executives’ perceptions in the innovation sector. Each year, SVB asks questions of innovation economy executives to determine how their companies are performing and what challenges and opportunities they see emerging.

The European venture capitalist has one play in his/her playbook: to find the best European tech entrepreneur from Helsinki to Madrid, and to sell his/her business to a US technology platform company. Twenty-five of these buy up most of the European venture backed startups.

Why should you care? Why does this matter?

It doesn’t if you are only concerned with creating supernovas. If you take a short-term view, then as soon as you cash out, everyone is happy. Why think too hard about the whoosh of value going to Palo Alto.

As the man who built his empire up from a modest mail-order record service, Sir Richard Branson is not known for walking away from challenging situations.

The 64-year-old billionaire entrepreneur struggled with dyslexia as a child and eventually left school at 16 to launch a magazine for young people.

Once you've landed a job interview, you have one shot to wow the hiring manager. To do this, there are a few things you should avoid at all costs.

In a recent LinkedIn post, recruiting manager John Kirschner shared the 10 "nevers" of interviews. Here are four of our favorites: 

1. Never show up without good questions. "Interviewing is like a sales call; you uncover a need and try to fill it," writes Kirschner. "Find the real need by asking good questions. You are interviewing them as well, so this is your chance to learn more about the job, the company, the manager, the culture, etc."

Anybody who has kids — or hopes to — wants them to stay out of trouble, do well in school, and go on to do awesome things in the professional world. 

While there isn't a set recipe for raising successful children, psychology research has pointed to a handful of factors that predict success.

Now that I’ve got your attention, let’s talk about homosexuality and whether it has any impact on innovation. There probably are two no more polarizing topics in the United States than homosexuality and abortion. But the truth is that if both sides of the political and religious spectrum focused on the golden rule, there would be less corruption, we’d all be a lot happier, probably have more innovation, and our politics would be more productive.

For start-up companies, there may be such a thing as an embarrassment of riches. In these heady times of high valuations, some have started to suggest that fledgling firms need to be more wary about how they raise capital.

Among those sounding the alarm is prominent venture capitalist Marc Andreessen. In a series of recent tweets, Andreessen warned that “high cash-burn startups almost never survive down rounds. VAPORIZE. Further, to get into this position, you probably had to raise too much (money) at too high valuation before.”

 

Do you remember the first time self development became important to you?

I do. I was 7 years old and I was in love with basketball. My mother had bought me a book called Rare Air, the autobiography of Michael Jordan. 

Through this book, Michael Jordan brought me into his world. He shared stories of what inspired him, the emotions he felt, how he handled the failures and rejections and how he discovered his passion.