"Walls are in the mind"– this is one of the suggestions deployed along the "Path of meditation" in the Island of San Giulio on Lake Orta in northern Italy, west of Lake Maggiore. Playing the game of open innovation, we change our mind. As Virgil (The Aeneid, III, 72, quoted by Seneca, Epistulae morales to Lucilius, III, 28) says, “…terraeque urbesque recedunt” (“… leave the cities and the shores behind”). Passion combined with determination can produce outstanding results. According to “The First Word to Cross the Ocean”, one out of five “historical miniatures” by Stefan Zweig, leveraging the power of electricity, it was his passion together with the will to succeed in the bold enterprise that allowed Cyrus W. Field to bring about the laying of submarine cables for telegraphic transmissions between Europe and America.

Whether you are trying to motivate your team, close a deal with a customer, or get funding from an investor, a casual conversation is usually a waste of your valuable time. These result is a founder who is always “too busy,” but never seems to get the business done and the team moving. All real business is conversations focused on creating results.

Shawn Kent Hayashi, in her classic book “Conversations That Get Results and Inspire Collaboration” makes my point very well as she outlines the top twelve types of conversations that relate to working together in business, and provides tips on how to make each of them more effective for all concerned:

Image: http://blog.startupprofessionals.com 

First, the bad news: GDP is slowing all over the world because productivity has been in decline for two decades.  he result has been higher unemployment (especially among young people) and economists talking about 20 more years of slow growth. According to new numbers from Oxfam, just eight people are as rich as half the globe. In addition to this unprecedented inequality, we face climate change that’s taken us into the sixth extinction wave in the history of the planet, and the last time that happened was 65 million years ago.

Back, by popular demand, a reprise of my 8 Hottest Tech Trends of 1776. Enjoy!

A little more than 241 years ago, our forefathers used the best technology available to inspire colonial proto-Americans to revolt against King George. At that time, the “best” technology available was the printing press and the “best” social network required the use of “word of mouth” in Public Houses. Grog was the lubricant that facilitated this communication and the rest, as they say, is history.

Image: https://www.linkedin.com

Today is July 4th, Independence Day in the United States of America. A day to think about and celebrate the adoption of the Declaration of Independence. 241 years ago, in just two days, our Founding Fathers crafted, voted to approve, and signed this short document that has guided my country ever since then.

Soon after, the Constitution was in place. In all this time, there have only been twenty-seven additions to the Constitution, ten passed together within a few years and known as the Bill of Rights. Only seventeen more amendments have been added in all the years since.

As the most recent crop of college seniors have been awarded their diplomas, the next important decision many will make is where they should move now that they've graduated.

A ranking of the best major metropolitan areas from the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER) may help students having trouble making the call.

For our third annual roundup of the most influential people on the Internet, TIME sized up contenders by looking at their global impact on social media and their overall ability to drive news. Here's who made this year's unranked list:

One of our clients recently conducted their own internal interviews to get a sense of what their employees thought about their current situation, future opportunities, and persistent challenges as an input into the strategic planning process. During the interviews, a standard theme from the participants was to share their comments EXACTLY as they stated them. Our client made the commitment to do so.

The Fourth of July is a good time to ask the question: what exactly are we celebrating when we celebrate “America?” Is it a set of ideals and principles rooted in the Enlightenment? Is it a blood-and-soil nation on the American continent, with unique institutions and culture? Is it an idea that happens to have a nation, a nation that happens to have an idea, or something else entirely?

Accelerator programmes can offer startups the vital boost they need to take an idea, product or service, and turn it into a profitable business. Startups that join accelerators have a fantastic opportunity to pitch for investment, meet other entrepreneurs, learn from mentors and other experts, and build their brand.

But more than that, by finding the right accelerator, they have the opportunity to build a flourishing business. Joining an accelerator programme is a two-way process; the more you put in, the more you get out of it. We asked the startups in our accelerator what their advice would be for making the most of being in an accelerator. They came up with the following five things.

I love podcasts. Ask anyone. In fact, I've written about them for Inc, extensively, in the past. And yet, as an entrepreneur, I'm always looking for new podcasts that will spark my creative juices. As I'm getting ready for the first-ever Innovation Congress in New York City this July (which, disclaimer, I happen to be co-producing) I thought I'd speak to some of the innovators speaking at the conference, to find out which podcasts inspire them the most, and why.

This friendly dolphin just wanted a cuddle.

SEE ALSO: A severely sunburnt dolphin is recovering swimmingly because nature is resilient

In the video above, a dolphin floats next to a boat as a diver leans over and gives it a belly rub. The sea creature turns its big, beautiful body so that the diver can scratch the sweet spot. 

Image: http://mashable.com - From Video

Stanford Graduate School of Business offers the best MBA for entrepreneurship, according to new data from the Financial Times.

The Californian school has topped the FT 2017 ranking of the best 50 MBA programmes for entrepreneurship for the third year in a row. Other US schools scored highly. The Sloan School of Management at MIT achieved second place ahead of the Olin Graduate School of Business at Babson College in third.

Image: Stanford topped the entrepreneurship list, followed by MIT's Sloan School of Management and then the Olin Graduate School of Management at Babson College © FT illustration

In the early 1960s, an unnamed intelligence agency funded the first attempt at automation of facial recognition. Technology has improved, needs have changed and data collection has become significantly smarter since then, allowing f1acial recognition to have real-world everyday consequences, both positive and negative.

Packing your beach bags? Firing up a grill? Now’s the time for leaving work concerns at work and skipping off someplace where you can relax, regenerate, let loose, and just have fun. The idea of doing anything that even remotely reminds you of your job probably doesn’t seem too appealing—and that’s fine. But even so, your vacation doesn’t have to be dead time when it comes to self-improvement.

By definition, Vinod Khosla is an archetypal example of the American Dream. He found his passion in technology, spent years striving to actualize his vision of becoming the next Intel, succeeded, and is now perfectly positioned to tell the rest of us how it’s done.

He emigrated to the United States in the seventies to pursue his studies at Carnegie Mellon and Stanford University after a business venture selling soy milk in India never took off. He was determined that would be his last failed business, and so it was.

Elon Musk tweeted on Thursday that his tunnel boring machine has completed the first segment of tunnel in Los Angeles. 

On Friday, he followed up with images and video of a tunnel — supposedly the same tunnel segment — located at the SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California. 

Musk first tweeted an image of the SpaceX headquarters. He then tweeted a video of the tunnel entrance with the caption "across the road and below the ground." 

Image: ELON MUSK/INSTAGRAM  

Between Generation X and Millennials exists a tiny micro-generation of people who call themselves the Xennials. Maybe you've seen this group labeled Generation Catalano — a reference to '90s teen drama My So-Called Life — or perhaps as the Oregon Trail Generation, but neither have quite the ring that Xennial does.

Though the term's been written about before, a viral Facebook post from early June brought the term back into the news cycle. 

Paris will take a step closer to fulfilling its ambition of becoming Europe's technology capital when President Emmanuel Macron inaugurates Station F, the world's largest start-up incubator on the banks of the Seine.

The 34,000 square-metre (366,000 square-foot) facility which entirely fills an old railway depot is being bankrolled by billionaire Xavier Niel, who revolutionised the French internet and mobile market with his low-cost Free service and is now on a crusade to put French technology on the map.

Image: People walk through the construction site in the world's biggest start-up incubator Station F, formerly known as the Halle Freyssinet. Credit: JOEL SAGET / AFP    

In my role as an advisor to entrepreneurs and new businesses, I often get asked to critique an idea, but rarely get asked to comment on an implementation plan, or execution actions to date. For the record, my experience tells me that success in a new business has very little to do with the idea, and everything to do with execution. Execution trumps everything in a new business.