When temperatures start to fall, more and more people find themselves sick with colds or the flu. For small businesses, that means you’ll likely have some employees try to come into work even while they’re battling these illnesses.

Olivia Curtis is a workplace wellness expert at HR company G&A Partners. Curtis runs the company’s award-winning corporate wellness program, EVOLVE, and develops wellness initiatives for workplaces. Curtis recently shared some insights in an email interview with Small Business Trends about the risks and pitfalls of employees coming to work with the flu or similar illnesses.

Is the latest golden age of Silicon Valley success over? Nearly 10 years after the start of the Great Recession — a spark that helped ignite a surge of disruptive business activity, propelling the region to its dominant economic position — that question is being asked more and more.

Much has been said in recent months about Uber and its travails as a company, with big leadership changes, and then an outright ban in London. Even so, Ubers (and Lyfts) are rolling down city streets, and the 40 million monthly active riders indicate that this is an incredibly popular transportation option.

Launching a business is challenging enough, let alone keeping it afloat and even thriving. While many people try to prepare for challenges and address them in a level-headed manner, they may not realize how difficult moments alter their thinking. New research has found that when dealing with challenging situations, it can be tough to understand what is going on around you.

In our hectic daily lives, there’s not much room for innovation. Through trial and error as well as using some good old-fashioned common sense, I have found three simple habits to guarantee innovation every day. As a professional development coach, it’s important that I find space for innovation so I can share transformational techniques with my clients. We are only gifted with so much time in the day. How we use it matters!

The 2017 SDPS conference in Birmingham has offered many global scientific minds into Birmingham to weigh in on the future prospects of the city

How old is venture capital? Probably as old as the first hunter/gatherer. Yet, until the mid-20th century, it was mostly practiced by wealthy individuals and families. Chris Columbus himself pitched various rulers for seven years until the Spanish monarchs eventually financed his first travel to “disrupt the spice trade.” Even the fee structure of “carried interest” — typically 20 percent of profits — is said to originate in the share that the captains of merchant ships would collect for goods carried during their perilous voyages to Asia and the Americas.

Inspired by her own struggles, Harvard Business School historian Nancy Koehn turned to figures from the past who overcame adversity to leave a lasting mark on civilization. She learned that true leaders are those who can forge through impossible odds with intelligence, compassion and resilience. Koehn has captured the stories of five inspiring historical figures in her book, Forged In Crisis: The Power of Courageous Leadership in Turbulent Times. They include Abraham Lincoln, who presided over the United States at a pivotal time in its young history; Frederick Douglass, an abolitionist who escaped slavery to become a writer and a statesman; Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German clergyman who became a double agent against the Nazis; Ernest Shackleton, a polar explorer who survived a shipwreck on an ice floe; and Rachel Carson, a scientist whose work sparked the modern environmental movement. Koehn recently joined the Knowledge@Wharton show on SiriusXM channel 111 to discuss her book and why true leaders are made, not born.

Many strategy execution processes fail because the firm does not have something worth executing.

The strategy consultants come in, do their work, and document the new strategy in a PowerPoint presentation and a weighty report. Town hall meetings are organized, employees are told to change their behavior, balanced scorecards are reformulated, and budgets are set aside to support initiatives that fit the new strategy. And then nothing happens.

While typical entry-level jobs today pay around $40,000 to $50,000 annually, if you choose the right career route, you could be starting your career off making around six figures right off the bat. Of course, that depends on your job. Unsurprisingly, if you’re in technology, you’re in luck.

A recent study by Comparably that analyzed nearly 20,000 anonymous employee salary records from companies big and small, public and private, uncovered the top six entry-level jobs that have average annual salaries of $90,000 or more.

In the 17th edition of our Best Business Books section, our crack team of reviewers has ferreted out the most inspiring, illuminating, and entertaining volumes of the past year. 

Read it and reap.

In this increasingly digital age, there’s still nothing like feeling the weight of a book in your hand.

Image: Illustration by Karolin Schnoor

The financial establishment doesn’t know quite what to make of bitcoin, the digital cryptocurrency (pdf) whose value has soared by 600 percent this year alone.

Bitcoin is an encrypted global electronics payment system in which prices are stored in an electronic, publicly available ledger called blockchain. Blockchain and associated cryptotechnologies hold out the promise of — and in some ways already are — revolutionizing the ecosystem of trading and settlement, as John Plansky, Tim O’Donnell, and Kimberly Richards laid out comprehensively in strategy+business in early 2016.

“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” the saying goes. Venture capitalists may think it ain’t broke, but they’re missing a source of innovation that can drive greater returns. They’re wrong; it is broken.

Carlos Pagan Sara T Brand, Founding General Partner and Kerry Rupp, General Partner of TrueWealth Ventures Women deliver higher returns, according to a study by First Round Capital, a seed-stage venture firm focused on tech companies. Companies with a female founder performed 63% better than those with all-male founding teams.

Image: Carlos Pagan - Sara T Brand, Founding Genera

If you’re rich, there’s a good chance you’re up before dawn. Tom Corley, who researched 233 wealthy individuals, found that nearly 50 percent of them say they wake up at least three hours before their workday starts. Rising before they have to hustle allows them to utilize that precious time more effectively, from working out to clearing their minds, which gets the rest of the day rolling. Here are five hacks that can help you get the most out of the beginning of your day.

Image: http://time.com

New entrepreneurs who want to survive, and optimize the growth of their startups, need to think globally, and act locally, from day one. This approach, popularly known as “glocalization,” means you have to design and deliver global solutions that have total relevance to every local market in which you operate.

Recognizing this is as much about culture as about language, ensures an understanding of regional motivators, cultural taboos and local customs – so that your solutions are ideally designed and marketed to deliver value that has genuine local relevance.

Hungry to launch his medical technology firm, Jake Orville first needed a city with the research brainpower he'd require and the workers and workspace he could afford.

Cleveland was not the sexy answer a decade ago, but it turned out to be the right one.

At Cleveland Clinic, the city's world-class health and medical facility, Orville found the diagnostic technology he wanted to commercialize and sell. In 2009, it grew into Cleveland HeartLab, a 200-person company developing biomarkers to help doctors predict cardiovascular risk.

In an interview, Harvard Innovation Labs managing director Jodi Goldstein said the 15,000 square-foot space is also nearing full occupancy.

Crowdfunding has become the fuel for many a startup, and now women entrepreneurs in New York City have their own crowdfunding program to help them build their businesses.

Mayor Bill de Blasio announced on Wednesday that the city has partnered with Kiva.org to launch “WE Fund: Crowd,” described as “a first-of-its-kind city-led crowdfunding program to help women entrepreneurs access affordable capital and start businesses in New York City.”

Chief innovation officers (CInOs) are poised to become one of the more important executives in the C-suite in pharma just as they are in other industries. As the scope and pace of changes facing the life sciences industry accelerate, innovation must occur faster — not just in R&D but throughout the organization. Achieving fast, focused innovation, however, often requires thinking outside the usual silos and chains of command to foster — and manage — innovation in unusual ways.

The Texas Medical Center, the largest medical complex in the world, today announced the TMC Venture Fund, a $25 million initiative designed to support technologies and early-stage companies to flourish in Houston’s health care ecosystem and further the TMC’s mission to advance health, education and research.

The Texas Medical Center unveiled plans for the TMC Venture Fund to an audience of more than 600 investors, hospital stakeholders, advisors and members of Houston’s innovation ecosystem who are gathered for TMCx Demo Day.