It’s all too easy for entrepreneurs to keep their noses down, focusing on the day-to-day grind. Heck, Michael Gerber made his millions speaking to this fact of working in a business rather than on it. But coming up for air once in a while can net major benefits, especially when it comes to expanding your knowledge and skills.

Here are 21 places you should be looking to learn new things about your industry, as well as different facets of running a business.

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What does the term a “new way to work” signify? My company, Unify, posed that question to 961 professionals scattered across the globe and found in the results (published in June) that for 47 percent it meant “working where I want to work” and for 43 percent it meant “working when I want to work.”

For 39 percent it meant “working in a flatter more collaborative organization,” while 32 percent said the new way to work means “working on virtual teams that form and disband as needed.”

Whether you’re job hunting, seeking a promotion, or just want to be taken seriously at work, how you present yourself is an oft-overlooked, but integral part of the process — and you can boost your chances at impressing with one very simple rule:

Slightly overdress for your position. Just a notch. Remember the old adage: dress for the job you want, not the job you have? It’s absolutely true, because it shows you are excited and eager to be at your workplace, and that you put thought into the details, not to mention the fact that you will simply come across as more professional and competent.

Raise your hand if you don't know what "business casual" actually means. That's what we thought.

As fashion changes and younger generations rise up the ranks at companies, the official office dress code is a threatened species. While some sectors, such as law, finance and construction, have clear rules about what to wear to work, other industries lack a universal uniform.

On average, faculty salaries rose faster than inflation for the first time in five years. Still, at some institutions, associate professors have seen their salaries stagnate over the past decade relative to those in higher and lower faculty ranks. Read more.

View trends, gender breakdowns, and comparisons of faculty salaries at 1,156 institutions from the AAUP’s Faculty Salary Survey.

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I can't recall how the topic came up, but the other day someone asked me if it bothered me to lose clients.

My answer: "it depends."

If the loss is due to poor service quality or slow response, I hate it.  Fortunately, this has been rare, mainly because my staff works hard to make sure that any problems that arise get fixed ASAP.  We also do root cause analysis to figure out ways to prevent it happening again.

All 35 of these people are doing exciting work that could shape their fields for decades. But they’re solving problems in remarkably different ways. We consider some of them to be primarily Inventors; they’re immersed in building new technologies. Others we call Visionaries, because they’re showing how technologies could be put to new or better uses. Humanitarians are using technology to expand opportunities or inform public policy. Pioneers are doing fundamental work that will spawn future innovations; such ­breakthroughs will be taken up by tomorrow’s Entrepreneurs, ­people who are building new tech businesses.

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No one could have predicted that Oscar-winning comedian Robin Williams would kill himself.

Or could they?

When someone commits suicide, the reaction is often the same. It’s disbelief, mixed with a recognition that the signs were all there. Depression. Maybe talk of ending one’s life.

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We’ve managed to do some pretty amazing things with 3D printers in the last few years, printing out everything from living replicas of Van Gogh’s ear to revolutionary casts that make your bones heal faster. There are even relatively affordable 3D printers for kids. Despite that, they’re still very much in the domain of the early adopter. I mean think about it, is your mom mulling over getting one any time soon? If technology research house Gartner is to be believed though, that’s likely to change within the next five years with business and medicine more likely to adopt the technology in the short term.

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Unless you are an accountant specializing in small business, you may not be aware of a new trend in the world of sole proprietorships: registering with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) as a limited liability company (LLC). While LLCs have been around since 1977, their popularity among sole proprietors has accelerated in the past decade, data from the IRS reveals.

The figure above shows the fraction of sole proprietorships organized as LLCs along with their share of the revenues of all Schedule C filers from 2001, when the IRS first began to provide these data, and 2011, the most recent year for which these numbers are available.

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Pitching your idea to investors can be nerve-racking. Even with lots of practice, it’s easy to find yourself clamoring for the right words. That being said, certain mistakes can mean the end for you and your business. With that in mind, we asked seven members from Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) the following question:

“What’s one word or phrase that you should never use when pitching an investor?”

Here’s what YEC community members had to say:

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No phenomenon more reflects the sheer power and appeal of urbanism than the rise of megacities, which we define as an urban area with more than 10 million residents (defined as areas of continuous urban development). Until recent decades there were only three — Tokyo and New York, joined by a third, Mexico City, only in 1975. Now the megacity has become a global phenomenon that has dispersed around the planet. There were 29 such cities in 2014 and now account for roughly 13% of the world’s urban population and 7% of the world’s total population (Figure 1).

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When Arielle Jackson started to develop the marketing and communications plan around Cover (the Android app quickly snapped up by Twitter), she brought a lot of firepower to the job. During her nearly nine years at Google, she managed product marketing for Gmail, Docs, Calendar and Voice. She then moved on to Square, where she led go-to-market plans for new hardware products like the Square Stand. At Cover, she put everything she learned to work to help make the product uniquely valuable. Today, she does the same as an advisor to multiple startups.

One of the most exciting initiatives we have been working on in 2014 is creating a series of articles on sourcing, recruiting and managing talent. We partnered with TechEdge, industry-leading HR experts, to develop new resources for founders and managers who are ready to grow their startup team. Of course, the success of any business relies on its team members.

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Marketing classrooms have long discussed the four P’s of marketing: product, promotion, position, and price.

I realized it was high time that entrepreneurship got the same love in the form of P’s, through a simple, formulaic way of discussing what it takes to be an entrepreneur.

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Gannett Corporation, like Time Warner and News Corp, has recently announced that it will split its print news businesses (USA Today and 80 other newspapers) from its media businesses (TV channels, Cars.com, and other internet businesses).

A split-up like this is hardly news. Companies have been splitting off and de-merging businesses for more than twenty years, and the logic is usually pretty obvious to the lay observer. Spinoffs and splits can be justified by financial modeling around the relative profitability and growth prospects of the units involved, by giving a company greater focus or by allowing it to unload units that have been a drag on growth.

Holacracy: So hot right now.

Some of the best, biggest influencers in corporate culture are doing it, including Zappos, Github, and Medium. The alternative structuring theory isn't your parents' corporate ladder. No more reporting to a direct boss, who in turn reports to a series of middle- to upper-management.

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Imagine being able to take your career and personal life, set each down on the ends of a scale and tinker with both sides until some equilibrium was reached. Voila! Work-life balance. Sorry to say, but it's unlikely to happen. Simply put: There's no such thing.

The term "work-life balance" is a lovely little lie that's infiltrated our vernacular. Long touted by companies as a perk, these days it seems to do more harm than good, suggesting that if you work at it hard enough, you'll be able to find that sweet spot where each part of your life gets just the right amount of attention.

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It’s classic productivity advice: Match your most important work to your most productive hours. If you do that, you’ll get a lot more done.

But this advice assumes you know when your most productive hours are. Many people don’t, says Daniel Gold, a productivity specialist and author of Evernote: The Unofficial Guide to Capturing Everything and Getting Things Done, among other life management books. “We’re too often stuck without thinking about the bigger picture,” he says. If you’re constantly in reactive mode, or your life features irregular hours or travel, you may not be familiar with your own internal rhythms. Getting there is “really just about taking that uncomfortable step inwards,” he says. Here are strategies for paying attention.

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Last week I challenged readers, and myself, to wake up what they considered to be “insanely early”--a time earlier than when they would normally wake up, whether it be 6:30 a.m. or 4:30 a.m.

The idea is that having a time in the day where there is no pressure and no expectations from other people would result in better focus and more creative thinking.