Seven years ago, on the day I left Virginia, I had to run a last-minute errand at Walmart - where I was honked at and ridiculed one last time, thanks to my Hillary Clinton for President 2008 bumper sticker. I knew it was time to go. My homeland was no longer my homeland. Good riddance, state of very little progress and backwards ideals! I was moving to the land of equal opportunity. In California I had interviewed with a number of high-ranking women, and I was clutching an offer letter signed by Sheryl Sandberg. At last I was escaping the good ole boys network that had stifled me since middle school.

Recent research confirms that entrepreneurs inside large, established organizations (which we’ll abbreviate to EIs) largely follow the same act-learn-build logic as new venture entrepreneurs, but with some significant differences. One of the biggest difficulties reported by EIs is that they have few colleagues (and sometimes no one) to talk to, explore ideas with, or gain emotional support from.

There’s a fairly common maxim that “He who hesitates is lost.” It’s a curious proverb, not only because its origins are murky, but also because it might just be really bad advice for productivity. Recent research suggests that rushing to complete projects might actually harm our productivity, a phenomenon that’s been called “pre-crastination”—choosing a more difficult way to complete a task just to be able to mark the task complete.

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In the 15 years I’ve been teaching MBA students, their career plans have changed dramatically. Until the early 2000s they aspired to work in traditional corporate jobs for companies like Deloitte, JPMorgan, and GE. After that, the top destinations became tech giants such as Apple, Google, and Facebook.

In the past few years; however, a new favorite career choice has emerged, which eclipses any other form of traditional employment--working for themselves or launching their own business.

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Picture this. You’re on a beach in the middle of the Caribbean with no Internet access, no phone reception, and no text messages.

You return from your vacation well rested, and want to continue some of these healthy habits--like not sleeping with your smartphone on your pillow. But how does that work when you’ve been tethered to your phone, and your coworkers and boss expect you to answer 24/7 because that’s what you’ve always done?

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One of my Twitter people asked me to share my thoughts on yesterday’s Chronicle article, “Can Universities Use Data to Fix What Ails the Lecture?” At the time, I skimmed the article and replied that LectureTools, the technological tool developed by Perry Samson to gather real-time data from students during a lecture, reminded me of the contraption you see in the photo to your left. That’s an automated chalkboard eraser. As technology goes, it’s quite effective in what it does. Just look at how clean that board is! Which is great but… that’s a chalkboard for goodness’ sake. A piece of communications technology that is not significantly different than prehistoric cave drawing, and which has been improved upon countless times. (Purists who still cling to chalkboards: You guys are Luddites. Sorry.)  Strapping an awesome piece of technology to a chalkboard doesn’t make the chalkboard suddenly better.

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HUNTSVILLE, Alabama – The auditorium at the Chamber of Commerce of Huntsville/Madison County was packed this afternoon as startup companies, entrepreneurs and nonprofit organizations gathered to learn about Alabama's new crowdfunding law.

Republican Sen. Arthur Orr, who drafted the bill with help from the Alabama Securities Commission, emceed the event, which included a presentation from ASC Deputy Director Ed Reed.

I have worked with quite a few entrepreneurs that have gone through a group program of mine or even paid the premium rates to get the personalized attention through one on one coaching sessions. There are common traits that most successful entrepreneurs have and there are common traits of the people that I could tell after spending time with them that they didn’t have what it took to create the vision they desired.

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Tristan Walker, founder and CEO of Walker and Company Brands,  tresses the importance of understanding that your own brand isn't dictated by you, but is defined by what others say it is. In conversation with Stanford Prof. Tina Seelig, Walker also urges young people to manage their brand in the largely public online world.

DFJ Operating Partner Heidi Roizen talks about how preoccupied people are with the notion that others are always thinking about them, and how empowering it is to know that they actually aren't. Roizen underscores this fact with a concept she credits to actress Shirley MacLaine, called the "20-40-60 rule."

Natera Founder Matthew Rabinowitz explains the importance of identifying problems that are worthy of your time to try and solve. The course of human history is proof new problems will always arise, says Rabinowitz, so focus on finding solutions that will actually improve the quality of life.

If you want to be a successful entrepreneur, these are the skills you need to have. Running your own business means having to wear all different types of hats. Whether it's your marketing hat, your sales hat, or your general people skills hat, you're going to need to know how to court sales, and on the other side of operations, you are also going to need to know how to run a balanced account and continue to grow your wealth.

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No venture ever succeeds without confident, enthusiastic leadership around a mission that will attract employees, investors and customers. But this rosy outlook can become a liability – especially when dealing with financial projections.

Running out of cash is what ultimately kills eight of 10 businesses within 18 months of opening, according to Bloomberg. Here are lessons to keep your business from becoming a cash casualty.

Friends tell you what you want to hear. Advisors tell you what you need to hear. When the message is the same from both, you don’t need the advisor anymore. In that sense, you should think of an advisor more like your mentor who has done all he can. You always need the friend.

One of the benefits of making it big in the world of tech is that you get to buy a fancy car. All those hours you spent in front of a computer screen while everyone else was out partying suddenly don’t seem too bad when you find yourself cruising down a stretch of ocean-side black top in your set of dream wheels.

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Not every business partnership is meant to last forever. Some partnerships start off well, but as the company evolves, it outgrow its usefulness. Here are the typical bad signs of an impending breakup:

1. Respect And Trust Are Fading

The basis of any partnership is respect and trust. You may no longer respect the skills your partner brings to the company. You may no longer trust your partner to deliver the results that are needed to be successful. You may be hearing things from other employees about what your partner is saying behind your back.

Back in September 2009 the Obama Administration released A Strategy for American Innovation, a policy roadmap for establishing a long-term, well, strategy, for providing a foundation for innovation in the country that would serve it better than reliance on technology waves that can become bubbles and burst.  The three major themes of the Strategy are: Invest in the Building Blocks of American Innovation, Promote Market-Based Innovation, and Catalyze Breakthroughs for National Priorities.  In short, provide infrastructure, a research base, and other tools to facilitate innovation, and try not to get in the way.

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Irony lurks in the surge of interest in cognitive psychologists’ research on human reasoning: we seem to be desperately interested in reading about how poorly we think. If Descartes could behold the popularity of books by Daniel Kahneman and Leonard Mlodinow and the hundreds of articles and blog posts they and similar books have spawned, he might alter his pronouncement: I think about thinking, therefore I am. Metacognition rules.

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NEW DELHI: India's ranking in the Global Innovation Index has fallen to 76 position from 66 in 2013, the government today said quoting a report.

In a written response to a question in the Lok Sabha, Jitendra Singh, Minister of State for Science and Technology, said, "As a part of the Global Innovation Index (GII) Report 2014, co-published by Cornell University, INSEAD and WIPO, India has fallen to 76 position from 66 in 2013."

GII measures national innovation performance based on a set of variables to both innovation input and output.

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