Elevator pitches, and the reams of advice about perfecting them, have been business staples for decades. In his new book, "To Sell Is Human," bestselling author Daniel Pink argues that there are two major reasons its time has passed. First, organizations are more democratic. It used to be the only time a lowly worker would ever encounter the CEO was in the elevator. Now, open plans, all-hands meetings, and email means that's not the case.

Getting up early is a no brainer for most executives. It means being awake during a part of the day when there are few distractions. It means reacting to the biggest news of the day while others are dreaming. And in the evening you have the option to work late too —  or to get to sleep early while others are partying and watching TV.  From Jack Dorsey to Indra Nooyi, this is habit is common to tons of famous leaders.

There are hundreds of new startups that launch each year, but most will fail. At the end of the day, it's all about execution, not the idea. So far online dating site HowAboutWe is a success, raising $18.5 million to date and hitting nearly one million users since launching in April 2010. Co-Founder Aaron Schildkrout says it has everything to do with process: "Really talented people just don’t like to work inside broken processes. It feels dumb to them."

In the competitive world of business, you want to do everything possible to stay ahead. There are no second chances. Customers know what they want and they expect you to provide it. What can you do to ensure that your company maintains a solid reputation? Here are six ways to make that first impression in a business meeting a great one.

1. Wow clients with professional graphics and content

Nothing smacks of amateur efforts like poorly wrought designs that fail to communicate the company message. It literally pays to have graphic designs and copy made by a professional. Companies like Snap are committed to producing quality print design and business communications.

States are actively pursuing ways to use broadband to promote economic development, build strong communities, improve delivery of government services, and upgrade educational systems. The ingredients for meeting those goals are fast and ubiquitous broadband networks, a population of online users, and an economic structure that helps drive broadband innovation and investment in new broadband uses. Not all states have these ingredients in equal measure. In this report, the TechNet State Broadband Index rates the states on indicators of broadband adoption, network quality, and economic structure as a way of taking stock of where states stand. The ratings show that the top fifteen states are:

A terrific street redesign is assisting economic development in a southern California community that has suffered from changing economic conditions but is nevertheless seeing significant population growth. This is a story of municipal foresight, excellent recent planning, and green ambition.

Lancaster is a fast-growing city of a little over 150,000 in far northern Los Angeles County, about 70 miles from downtown Los Angeles. Its population has more than tripled since 1980; it increased by nearly a third from 2000 to 2010. It is racially mixed (38 percent Latino, 34 percent white, 20 percent African-American) and, like so many fast-growing western cities, decidedly sprawling.  The satellite view on Google Earth reveals a patchwork pattern of leapfrog development, carved out of the desert. It is a city with a very suburban character.

Kansas City, MO, January 9, 2013 – Legislation passed last week to address the “fiscal cliff”, the American Taxpayer Relief Act, included a provision that should improve opportunities for high‐growth innovative startup to attract capital. The extension of the 100 percent exemption on capital gains for Qualified Small Business Stock (QSBS) investments included in the act has been championed by the Angel Capital Association (ACA) over the past two years. The extension carries through calendar year 2013 and is also retroactive for 2012.

“There is little question that new and innovative startups drive economic growth,” said Dan Rosen, Chair of the ACA Public Policy Committee. “This extension demonstrates that Congress and the White House understand this linkage. We at ACA are pleased that we have helped our representatives understand the importance of high‐ growth startups to the US economy. We will now work to make this measure permanent.”

Sure, Windows 8 - Microsoft's new touchscreen operating system - will run just fine on PCs designed for Windows 7. But you won't be able to take advantage of the new touch capabilities the OS enables unless you scrap your existing PC and upgrade to a new computer.

Or maybe not.

At the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, a company out of China demonstrated a peripheral that combines a stylus and either a USB or wireless receiver to touch-enable a non-touchscreen LCD monitor or laptop screen.

You're smart, hard-working and good at what you do, but the truth is you also too often feel your life is just a relentless set of demands you have to meet, and too rarely a source of satisfaction. You long to feel more in control of your days, but the reality is you're frequently racing just to keep up.

This is the story I hear over and over at every level in organizations, from first line managers all the way up to CEOs in large companies. I'm convinced it doesn't have to be this way, and that the solution has to do with deeply embedding a series of simple practices into your life.

A generation ago, incumbents that struggled to respond to disruptive innovations had an excuse. The pattern that simple, convenient, low-priced solutions would grow from humble beginnings to create and transform industries had not yet been identified. Managers at companies like General Motors, Sears, and Eastman Kodak simply didn't have the tools to spot and respond to would-be disruptors.

Today's leaders have no excuse. Harvard Professor and Innosight cofounder Clayton Christensen alerted the world to the pattern of disruptive change almost two decades ago. Academics and practitioners have built on Christensen's work to develop robust frameworks that can help leaders to spot disruptive developments early and respond appropriately.

Any time you make the plunge to set up your own business, you’re going to be given advice – whether you ask for it or not. Everywhere you look, people who’ve never done anything remotely similar are going to be telling you what to do and where you’re going wrong.

It’s only now, a few years into running my own business, that I realise just how bad most of the advice I’ve received was. It’s got to the point where nowadays the only people I really listen to are those who’ve trod the same path, who’ve had the gumption to set out on their own.

If you have a unique creation or invention, and you are not selling it around the world on the Internet, now is the time to start. The cost of entry has never been lower. Anyone can be an entrepreneur today, without a huge investment, bank loans, venture capitalists, or Angels.

In the early days (20 years ago), most new e-commerce sites cost a million dollars to set up. Now the price is closer to $100, if you are willing to do the work yourself. Here are the key steps for a personal home-based business website selling a few products (as an alternative to Ebay):

At a dinner for Silicon Valley big shots in February 2011, President Obama asked Steve Jobs what it would take to manufacture the iPhone in the United States. Apple’s founder and CEO is said to have responded directly: “Those jobs aren’t coming back.”

In December, Apple reversed course, saying it planned to assemble a line of Mac computers in the U.S. With that, Apple joined a wave of companies that say manufacturing in this country makes sense again. Companies that say they’ve brought back jobs include General Electric, Michigan Ladder, and Wham-O, which in 2010 hired eight people to make Frisbees in Los Angeles instead of China. An MIT study in 2012 found that 14 percent of companies intend to move some manufacturing back home.

While most news from the Consumer Electronics Show is about new products, some early stage technology that could appear in future generations of products also gets unveiled. This year several companies demonstrated prototype technology that could make future touch screens flexible, curved, or even capable of sprouting physical buttons for certain tasks.

One of the most striking ideas on show was PaperTab, an early prototype of a tablet computer flexible enough to roll up like a newspaper. PaperTab was created by the Human Media Lab at Queen’s University, Canada, with the assistance of Plastic Logic, a U.K. company that makes flexible display technology. In Las Vegas, Aneesh Tarun and Roel Vertegaal from Queen’s showed off the prototypes, which still require tethering to a power source.

What is entrepreneurship? You probably think that the answer is obvious, and that only an academic would bother to ask this question. As a professor, I suppose I am guilty of mincing words. But like the terms "strategy" and "business model," the word "entrepreneurship" is elastic. For some, it refers to venture capital-backed startups and their kin; for others, to any small business. For some, "corporate entrepreneurship" is a rallying cry; for others, an oxymoron.

The history of the word "entrepreneurship" is fascinating and scholars have indeed parsed its meaning. I'll spare you the results, and focus instead on the definition we use at Harvard Business School. It was formulated by Professor Howard Stevenson, the godfather of entrepreneurship studies at HBS. According to Stevenson, entrepreneurship is the pursuit of opportunity beyond resources controlled.

Each year, Speakers Platform recognizes five speakers within ten popular topic areas. Excellence in speaking is based on: expertise, professionalism, innovation within the topic area, client testimonials & references, presentation skills, original contribution to the field and votes. The only substantive requirement is that the candidates' keynote presentation fee must be under $30,000USD. Please use the form below to vote for your favorite speakers in any number of the topic areas. You can also add "write-in" candidates.

Each winner will receive a distinctive crystal award, be highlighted at the Speaking.com Web site and can use the prestigious Top5 award designation and graphics in their marketing. Here are the 2012 honorees.

View the list and vote here by clicking here.

Voting ends on January 15, 2013.

IN our newly omnivorous nation, restaurant trends often have the same viral spread and short life span as boy bands — witness 2011’s crispy pig ears and sea buckthorn berries. Eating around the country on reporting trips in 2012, I saw food lovers everywhere embracing new interpretations of farm-to-table and nose-to-tail as fast as they came along.

But along with the flashes in the pan, I saw some new developments that seem to have both legs and merit.

In the big picture, Nordic naturalism (with its embrace of ancient, earthy and cold-weather foods) and Spanish modernism (which celebrates intense flavors and technical skills) are surging as American chefs return from internships abroad at places like Noma, Mugaritz and Arzak.

IF you spent a lot of time this year reading and writing about movies — as opposed to watching them, which is more fun — you might have detected recurrent notes of anxiety, trepidation, even dread. Television is better than movies; audience levels are in a state of permanent decline; the Hollywood studios have given up on grown-ups; and digital, a force so powerful that it is both adjective and noun, is destroying cinema as we know it. These are among the tenets of a pessimistic conventional wisdom. Multimedia

Slide Show A. O. Scott’s Top Film Picks Related

Against the Odds, Smart Films Thrive at the Box Office (December 16, 2012) The Year of the Body Vulnerable (December 16, 2012) They may well all be true, but the movies themselves answered this hand wringing with a defiant “So what?” Over the past decade series television has certainly (at last) begun to unlock its potential to deliver complex, long-form narrative, but there are still feats of scale, intimacy and visual ambition that cannot be doled out in episodic small-screen doses.

Greg Hofmann finally received an iPhone for Christmas, but it came with a long list of terms and conditions. His mother, a blogger named Janelle Hofmann, wrote up an 18-rule contract for the 13-year-old. If he doesn't obey each line item, his phone will be taken away.

"Merry Christmas! You are now the proud owner of an iPhone," her letter began. "Hot Damn! You are a good & responsible 13 year old boy and you deserve this gift. But with the acceptance of this present comes rules and regulations."

Saying you're going to change something in the New Year is easy. Doing it, of course, is the hard part, regardless of how committed you think you are. The lesson I always turn to about how people successfully break bad habits is one from NPR's Alix Spiegel. Last year around this time, she explored how disrupting your environment can help you turn the corner on a hangup. Research indicates that it's not so much the behavior that's hard to change, but the environment that gives us cues to perform that behavior. This insight started, strangely, with a study into why Vietnam veterans who were addicted to heroin during the war had such success overcoming their addictions after treatment and returning to the U.S. In large part, the fact that they weren't in Vietnam anymore helped their recovery tremendously.

"We think of ourselves as controlling our behavior, willing our actions into being, but it's not that simple," Spiegel writes. "It's as if over time, we leave parts of ourselves all around us, which in turn, come to shape who we are." And who we want to be.