The roles that create the most value in your organization may not be at the top. Getting the right people in these critical seats can turbocharge performance.

The entrepreneur’s challenge is to effectively communicate their value proposition, not only to customers, but also to vendors, partners, investors, and their own team. Especially for technical founders, this is normally all about presenting impressive facts. But in reality facts only go so far. Stories often work better, because humans don’t always make rational decisions.

Rents across major US cities continue to soar.

The national median price for a one-bedroom apartment was $1,216 as of June 2019 — a 1.5% increase year to date.

Business Insider's Hillary Hoffower previously reported that rents are so high in major cities that some residents are resorting to living in the exurbs — the area beyond the suburbs — and living in vehicles to work around the cost of housing.

There's no way around it: The average American millennial is financially behind.

Faced with a high cost of living, staggering student-loan debt, and the fallout of the Great Recession, American millennials are trying to make ends meet in the midst of The Great American Affordability Crisis.

The financial crisis split the generation into two distinct groups. Older millennials, who bore the brunt of the financial crisis, dealt with a tough job market and wage stagnation, making it more difficult for them to save. Younger millennials, who experienced the recovery period, entered a better job market and became risk-averse by watching the recession unfold.

In the popular press, it’s easy to find articles that will convince you that companies with a good culture, such as Google, do it by lavishing perks and benefits, including some combination of free meals, trips and parties, financial bonuses, gyms, and a dog-friendly environment. These things are clearly good for morale, but its not so clear that they translate into a competitive advantage.

Decision makers fed up with slow or subpar results take heart. Three practices can help improve decision making and convince skeptical business leaders that there is life after death by committee.

Two years ago, we wrote about how it was simultaneously the best and worst of times for decision makers in senior management. Best because of more data, better analytics, and clearer understanding of how to mitigate the cognitive biases that often undermine corporate decision processes. Worst because organizational dynamics and digital decision-making dysfunctions were causing growing levels of frustration among senior leaders we knew.

A know-it-all attitude. Giving up at the first sign of trouble and criticizing the ideas of others. These are some ways entrepreneurs sabotage their success with bad habits. A successful entrepreneur achieves by avoiding a few bad habits. If you’re an entrepreneur with a lust for life and the heart of a business-building hustler, consider breaking the following five practices and watch your career flourish.

Leading the new LaunchKC Health Accelerator is Don Peterson’s way of giving back to a community that opened its arms to his family nearly 30 years ago, he said. 

“I’m proof that we can accomplish the entrepreneurial dream right here in KC and feel like it’s my duty to pay that forward,” said Peterson, a health care industry veteran and big data expert who retired as founder and CEO of Infusion Express in June 2018.

Image: https://www.startlandnews.com

A new study finds that drinking a cup of coffee could have a direct effect on the body’s brown fat functions Scientists from the University of Nottingham have discovered that drinking a cup of coffee can stimulate ‘brown fat’, the body’s own fat-fighting defenses, which could be the key to tackling obesity and diabetes.

The pioneering study, published today in the journal Scientific Reports, is one of the first to be carried out in humans to find components which could have a direct effect on ‘brown fat’ functions, an important part of the human body which plays a key role in how quickly we can burn calories as energy.

Stereotypes are often reinforced by the words we choose to use. For example, when researchers recently analyzed massive text datasets, they found that in the 1910s, Asians in the U.S. were often characterized by words like “barbaric” or “monstrous” while descriptors like “passive” and “sensitive” are more common today.

We see stereotypical word choices play out in the workplace. Job ads for professional roles are often peppered with stereotypically masculine words. Research from the Women’s Leadership Lab reveals that stereotypes also affect how managers write performance reviews and talk about people in talent reviews.

A large auto manufacturer asked a consulting firm to evaluate its competitive position in relation to ride-sharing startups building autonomous vehicles. Instead of viewing this as a classic strategy project, with a business case, PowerPoint decks, and five-year projections, the firm created a “game” that the automaker could “play” against its competitors. An artificial intelligence (AI) system modeled the voluminous individual choices available to customers, companies, and other entities as digital twins (a digital twin is a computerized replica of a physical asset, process, consumer, actor, or other decision-making entity). The hundreds of thousands of simulations suggested many strategic bets, option-value bets, and “no-regret strategies,” or moves that made strategic and financial sense in a multitude of situations.

Image: Illustration by Neil Webb

Being a renter these days isn't fun.

Business Insider previously reported that rent is soaring across the US. A study by GoBankingRates found that most renters across the country show signs of spending too much on living costs.

But just how much should you plan to shell out for rent? The answer depends on where you live.

GoBankingRates revealed how big your annual salary needs to be to afford rent in every US state, including Washington, DC. To determine the list, they used the budgeting rule of thumb that one should spend no more than 30% of their annual income on housing.

GoBankingRates then found the median rent for a single-family residence in each state using the Zillow Rent Index, and calculated how much annual income one needs in order for rent costs to equal less than 30%.

Not everyone who starts college finishes on time.

We took the top 50 schools on U.S. News & World Report's 2019 Best National Universities and Best National Liberal Arts Colleges lists and found the share of first-time, full-time, degree-seeking undergraduate students who completed a four-year degree within six years for each school using data from the US Department of Education.

The group of students used in this analysis started college during the 2011-2012 school year, six years before the 2017-2018 year, the most recent year for which data was available.

MassChallenge, a Boston-based network of startup accelerators, awarded more than $200,000 in cash prizes on June 25 to a group of early-stage digital health companies in the 2019 HealthTech accelerator.

Healthcare industry experts chose the five winners from a cohort of 31 startups. Throughout the six-month program, the companies partnered with established leaders in the industry to develop digital solutions to some of the biggest challenges in healthcare. In total, according to Nick Dougherty, managing director of MassChallenge HealthTech, the cohort raised over $26 million in funding and earned $5 million in revenue.

When Dropbox had its first ever IPO last year, it was valued at $12 billion . However, just 11 years earlier, its founder was pitching the startup's business idea to well-known business incubator Y Combinator.  Did the incubation program contribute to Dropbox's success? Notably, as reported by FiveThirtyEight, only 11% of Y Combinator startups have died, and other program participants have included Airbnb and Reddit.

On May 29, the California Assembly voted 55-11 to pass Assembly Bill 5, codifying a simple three-part test to prevent companies from misclassifying workers as “independent contractors.” Misclassifying workers has long enabled companies to deprive them of a wide range of labor rights (from minimum wage and overtime protections to unemployment insurance, workers’ compensation, employer contributions to Social Security, and the right to organize and bargain collectively), while depriving the government of money to fund such programs.

Image: https://www.randomlengthsnews.com - Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez, D-San Diego, is the author of Assembly Bill 5, a measure that codifies a test to prevent companies from misclassifying workers as “independent contractors.” File photo

Education policy in Norway has been shaped by data more than by doctrine. As a result, education reforms in the country have been supported by various governments across a broad political spectrum for more than a decade.

Norway is one of the few countries that has managed to sustain its program of education reform over multiple years, despite changes in political leadership. Since 2000, when Norway performed well below expectations on the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA)—an event now known as the “PISA shock”—leaders across the political spectrum have collaborated and focused on data-driven policies to improve education outcomes.

We have come a long way in pediatric medicine, but not far enough.

For nearly a decade, the chief executives of the nation's children's hospitals and health systems have discussed challenges we face in caring for America's very sickest children, whose life-threatening diseases and congenital conditions put overwhelming burdens on their families.

Image: Dr. Kurt Newman is CEO of Children’s National Health System in Washington, D.C., which participated in the CARE project, and is board chairman at the Children’s Hospital Association. - https://www.modernhealthcare.com

Is there a "secret sauce" for succeeding as an entrepreneur? Judging from what venture capitalists look for in a startup -- typically, the team, the product, the market -- there’s nothing specific that creates success. So probably not. After all, most if not all entrepreneurs try to get the best team, the best product, and find the better (larger) market. And most of them fail.

With nearly 50% of millennials looking to start their own business in the next three years, it is not a surprise that the new generation of entrepreneurs aren’t based – or even particularly interested – in Silicon Valley. With students and recent graduates all over the country experiencing startup fever, college towns may just be the next big thing for entrepreneurship.