If you’re suffering under a bad boss, vacation time this summer is a great opportunity to figure out your strategy for what you’re going to do about it. Your best strategy may be to get out ASAP, but that may not work for you for a variety of reasons.

If you’re stuck for now, here are five things you should learn until you or your boss move on:

Learn what a boss shouldn’t do – This sort of goes without saying, but figure out all the things you shouldn’t do if you want to be a strong leader. I’ve only had one really bad boss, and the “what not to dos” I learned have been invaluable in my career.

Silicon Valley’s top 150 public companies saw their most profitable year in history as they put the big recession behind them in 2010, according to the San Jose Mercury News’ annual SV150 report published Sunday.

The Merc’s list showed that the combined stock value of those 150 companies climbed to its highest level since the height of the internet boom in 2000. As noted, a kind of perfect storm has enabled a broad recovery among tech companies: the rise of new handheld gadgets such as the iPad, iPhone and Android devices; social networking’s growth; increased use of video online; more e-commerce; and corporations going back into technology-purchasing mode.

The Midwest Technology Exchange (mtechx) is a collaborative conference focusing on the development and commercialization of Midwestern technologies which have been developed in collaboration with the U.S. Army Medical Research and Materiel Command (USAMRMC) and the Telemedicine and Advanced Technology Research Center (TATRC). This conference will be an inclusive two-day meeting that will bring together Army funded principal investigators in the Midwest region, technology transfer experts, company representatives, venture capitals, economic developers, military and civilian experts to collaborate on advanced methods to achieve tangible commercial success and develop an infrastructure to help advance technology development and commercialization of Army fund- ed projects in the Midwest. For more information and registration visit www.mtechx.org.

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During a recent interview, a young founder admitted that one of the hardest things about being an entrepreneur was figuring out how to fill up his day. For him, balancing the multiple roles he plays and the long-term goals of the venture with the need to make the most of his day was a major challenge. “I’ve got all these balls in the air and these long-term benchmarks to work towards, but what does that mean for me today?”

And this got us to thinking: we’re getting great insights into the broader trajectory of launching businesses and starting new ventures, but we need to better understand the nitty-gritty, day-to-day processes and challenges facing entrepreneurs and small business owners. We’re having great conversations about how you begin to act on an idea, what it’s like to navigate the funding process, how to build a network and make your first hires, and what happens when you’re ready to move on. However, like the young founder, we’re curious to learn more about what these broader questions mean from one day to the next.

To my pleasure, there is now a United States Bicycle Route System that goes more places than Amtrak and Greyhound do. Have a look at the proposed map of the national corridor plan.

The goal is to create clearly marked north-south and east-west routes, as romantic as the Oregon Trail or as functional as the Erie Canal. The trail of Lewis and Clark is on one of the routes.

I can only hope that the plan serves as an inspiration to would-be cyclists and every-day bike commuters. To be fair, it takes years to master the dark and often wet arts of cycling. My riding-to-work garb includes reflective gear from London, Alaskan socks, a headlight from San Diego, a lock from Amsterdam, and a rain jacket from Ohio. On my first commute, after a year of wondering of “whether I could do it,” I searched so hard to find a safe route that I got lost.

Creativity is a sought-after commodity among employers and those seeking personal or professional fulfillment. It comes in handy not only while concocting works of art and literature but also in planning a corporate event or devising a new business strategy. Some people seem more naturally open to new ideas and able to put them to innovative uses. Many of these individuals also tend to be a little…well…different, as Harvard psychologist Shelley Carson wrote in the May/June 2011 Scientific American MIND. But you don't have to be eccentric to be creative. You don't even have to be born with a knack for innovation.

Not surprisingly, the 2010 census data concerning Detroit’s shrinking population set off what has become a familiar call-response routine between doomsayers lamenting lost glory and civic boosters touting a renaissance.

For the record, I agree with the boosters, but we shouldn’t let this dialogue drown out the promising buzz building between other economic centers across the state.

While the Motor City has struggled to shift gears over the past decade, cities like Ann Arbor, Grand Rapids and Kalamazoo have quietly developed local innovation ecosystems that resemble those of early Silicon Valley and Boston’s Route 128 Corridor.

Fear. It’s a shape-shifter, a gut-wrenching combatant and top-notch motivator all rolled into one. Call it an entrepreneurial bogeyman. How you respond to it makes all the difference to your success. Will you freeze and pull the covers over your head or will you be ready for anything?

Sure, an uncertain economy leaves entrepreneurs with plenty to be fearful of these days. Still, more than half a million entrepreneurs started small businesses in 2009, and despite economic fears, 70 percent of them will survive at least two years, according to Small Business Administration statistics.

That’s not to say it’s easy to build a successful business. But with all the obstacles, don’t let fear be the one that takes you down.

For Harvard Business Review's April issue on failure, I penned a piece on the experience of going through a failed IPO. In one context or another, you've likely failed, too. You may have chosen to frame it some other way ("experience," "lessons learned," etc.), but it was failure.

First, welcome to the club. We've all been there. Second, for a book we're writing on the DNA of entrepreneurship, my co-authors Richard Harrington, Tsun-yan Hsieh, and I have developed a checklist on how to reflect on failure. So I thought I'd share:

Checkbox 1: Was This Really My True North?
Sometimes things fail. Why? Because you may not have cared enough. The fact is, highly capable people are often driven to success standards that are extrinsically measured -- e.g. they provide external credentialization -- but have little in common with what they truly wanted to accomplish. If you are working without meaning in a role, task, or job, your missing drive will make it harder for you to succeed. If you are conducting a post-mortem of a failure, ask yourself, Was I truly self-motivated to succeed, or was someone (or something) else driving me to succeed?

Last night on Friday, April 15th students, faculty and members of the business community gathered at the Boston University School of Management. The event: The 9th annual Technology Entrepreneurship Night (TEN) to discuss the intricate connections between business and engineering. BU’s Student Association of Graduate Engineers (SAGE) and Institute for Technology Entrepreneurship and Commercialization (ITEC), in addition to outside venture capitalist firms, sponsored TEN. The event was organized by Alket Mertiri, a Ph.D. student in BU’s Materials Science and Engineering Program, and Luis Jugo, an MBA student at Boston University.

Technology Entrepreneurship Night was comprised of three panel discussions led by Boston business professionals, including CEOs, lawyers and venture capitalists. Each panel was geared towards a technical aspect of the industry. For engineers, the panels featured two technology sectors: Energy Technology, which focused on green start-ups, and BioTechnology, which examined the state of biomedical businesses.For budding entrepreneurs, the third panel New Reality in Entrepreneurship discussed tips for navigating the new start-up environment. Networking sessions for the attendees followed these fantastic panel presentations.

Looming worker shortage. That’s not a phrase one expects to hear at a time of high unemployment. But when experts look at the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ list of the fastest-growing occupations, that’s what they see: more than a million new jobs on the horizon by 2018, and a worker pool that may not be trained to fill them.

Such a list was first compiled in 1946, just after the end of World War II, to help veterans on the G.I. Bill make smart educational choices. One need only pay attention to news reports to guess where the current shortages may be: eight of the fields in the top 10 categories are health care or wellness related; one is in financial services; and the other is in the information technology field.

But, points out Michael Wolf, an economist with the bureau, “The mere fact that a category is fast growing does not mean you can get a job in it.” For most of these occupations, training (sometimes years of it) is necessary.

On May 26, 2009, Robert Lustig gave a lecture called “Sugar: The Bitter Truth,” which was posted on YouTube the following July. Since then, it has been viewed well over 800,000 times, gaining new viewers at a rate of about 50,000 per month, fairly remarkable numbers for a 90-minute discussion of the nuances of fructose biochemistry and human physiology.

We all know that we don’t get enough sleep. But how much sleep do we really need? Until about 15 years ago, one common theory was that if you slept at least four or five hours a night, your cognitive performance remained intact; your body simply adapted to less sleep. But that idea was based on studies in which researchers sent sleepy subjects home during the day — where they may have sneaked in naps and downed coffee.

Enter David Dinges, the head of the Sleep and Chronobiology Laboratory at the Hospital at University of Pennsylvania, who has the distinction of depriving more people of sleep than perhaps anyone in the world.

DR. LEVINE’S MAGIC UNDERWEAR resembled bicycle shorts, black and skintight, but with sensors mounted on the thighs and wires running to a fanny pack. The look was part Euro tourist, part cyborg. Twice a second, 24 hours a day, the magic underwear’s accelerometers and inclinometers would assess every movement I made, however small, and whether I was lying, walking, standing or sitting.

James Levine, a researcher at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., has an intense interest in how much people move — and how much they don’t. He is a leader of an emerging field that some call inactivity studies, which has challenged long-held beliefs about human health and obesity. To help me understand some of the key findings, he suggested that I become a mock research trial participant. First my body fat was measured inside a white, futuristic capsule called a Bod Pod. Next, one of Dr. Levine’s colleagues, Shelly McCrady-Spitzer, placed a hooded mask over my head to measure the content of my exhalations and gauge my body’s calorie-burning rate. After that, I donned the magic underwear, then went down the hall to the laboratory’s research kitchen for a breakfast whose calories were measured precisely.

A while back I emphasized how important is to have a company website these days (Publish Your Website Or Customers Won’t Find You). I should have added that a website not optimized for search engines is lost in the heap of a billion dead websites. Unless someone searches for your company by name, it won’t show up in the first few pages of any search results.

Search engines are programmed to rank websites based on their popularity and relevancy. These are subjective elements, but there are specifics that even a computer program can evaluate to set your ranking, and thus determine whether your site is alive and a good match to a specific search request. Yet recent research indicates that almost half of small business websites are still missing these basics, and thus are essentially dead to the search world.

Kansas’ Pipeline Entrepreneurial Fellowship program, imperiled by state budget cuts, has gotten a new and improved lifeline from Kansas City’s Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation.

The foundation, which promotes entrepreneurship, said Thursday that it was providing Pipeline with a three-year challenge grant worth as much as $800,000 to expand regionally the grooming program for high-potential entrepreneurs. Now, 5-year-old Pipeline, a 501(c)(3) organization, must match that in donations from other sources.

CEO Joni Cobb said Pipeline has been in conversations with other organizations and geographic areas in recent years, looking at the potential for expansion as part of Pipeline’s natural evolution. But the announcement that Pipeline could lose Kansas dollars “put a little bit more sense of urgency to determining the right path forward,” she said.

Sarah Endline asked Golden Seeds, a group of mostly women angel investors, to help contribute $1.5 million to expand her candy company. She sweetened her pitch with samples of dark cacao pieces, about 1 calorie each.

Endline, who got her MBA from Harvard Business School and worked at Yahoo! Inc. in marketing before launching sweetriot in 2005, already received about $1.5 million from the group, and other investors, in 2007. Turning to Golden Seeds again yesterday was a natural choice, said Endline, 39, because “we’re a women-powered, women-certified company whose core consumer is women.”

A report from the Association of American Publishers reveals that e-books sales experienced “powerful continuing growth” as they colorfully put it, and paper books of all types dipped, compared to the same period (January-February) from last year. This isn’t surprising news, mainly because it isn’t news — and even if it were, it’s just history repeating itself; we’ve seen the same thing happen to music.

The parallels are clear, though the situations and reactions of the RIAA and AAP are somewhat different. Mostly in that the AAP and other booksellers aren’t being dragged kicking, screaming, and suing into the future, but are embracing it despite its implications.

Over the past decade urbanists, journalists and politicians have hotly debated where Americans were settling and what places were growing the fastest. With the final results in from the 2010 Census, we can now answer those questions, with at least some clarity.

Not only does the Census tell us where people are moving, it also gives us clues as to why. It also helps explain where they might continue to go in the years ahead. This information is invaluable to companies that are considering where to expand, or contract, their operations.

The financial crisis caused a great deal of damage to the capacity of entrepreneurs to access traditional sources of funding, such as bank credit, credit card debt and home equity loans. And "friends and family," another common source of startup capital, are as financially stressed as the founders themselves.

To help fill the gap in funding, online platforms have emerged in recent years to connect entrepreneurs with investors. These Internet-age "yentas" extend entrepreneurs' reach and enable them to access resources well beyond their geography. As a result, startups in more rural communities or in places with a dearth of venture investors will benefit from the geographic neutrality of the Internet.