“The very rich,” according to a character in an F. Scott Fitzgerald story, “are not like you and me.” To that, a character in an Ernest Hemingway story famously responded, “Yes, they have more money.”

If only someone could replicate Papa’s trick to define what makes entrepreneurs not like you and me. Despite efforts of generations of researchers into how people who found businesses differ from the rest of us, a similarly simple and straightforward explanation has not been forthcoming. The latest attempt, based on analyzing responses to 12,000 surveys administered to both entrepreneurs and the rest of us, does little to resolve the issue.

Psychological assessment purveyor Psychtests in conjunction with Bill Wagner, author of “The Entrepreneur Next Door,” put together a quiz that promises to explain to the rest of us “what it takes to succeed.” But the result is not itself all that successful. Psychtests examined respondents for seven traits: conscientiousness, drive, optimism, networking ability, risk-taking, self-sufficiency and social skills. Does it really take all that to start and run a business?

Let’s say you are trying to sell cookies for a school fundraiser at the local mall, and you want to pick the ideal spot to set up your table. You’d probably look for an area with a lot of traffic. And once you’d picked your spot, you would no doubt give some thought to your pitch. A friendly hello and nice smile would set the stage nicely. Perhaps it would be a good idea to offer samples or to have friends hanging around saying nice things about the cookies or the school.

A recent Journal of Experimental Social Psychology article by Larry Sanna and his associates at the University of North Carolina suggests a more surprising factor that you might want to consider – proximity to an escalator.

The Obama administration swept into Washington in 2008 with promises of both increased transparency and increased use of modern technologies, two things our political system desperatley needed. And while both promises somewhat fell victim to standard Washington infighting and inertia, some of the results were impressive, especially the high-profile Data.gov, which aggregates all government data sets, and USASpending.gov, where you can see how much money government contracts are worth.

But the budget process--currently in danger of shutting down the government entirely--is not being kind to the Government Electronic Fund (GEF), the umbrella government organization that funds these programs and more. Budgets proposed by the Republicans in the House and some Democrats in the Senate both cut the program's funding from $32 million to a mere $2 million, potentially destroying all the progress that the administration has made in transparency and technology.

With all the hoopla over bad bosses and dysfunctional managers, I never thought to look at the flip-side until I read a post by Jill Geisler of the Poynter Institute. Sure enough, there’s a huge downside to managers being wimpy or too nice.

No, not just nice. Too nice. What’s the difference? Good question.

* Nice is treating employees with the respect they deserve. Too nice is being a doormat and letting people walk all over you.
* Nice is giving employees the flexibility to work from home periodically. Too nice is a staff meeting in an empty conference room because everyone’s out screwing around.
* Nice is being honest about your employee’s strengths and weaknesses come review time. Too nice is when your people get crappy raises because you didn’t fight for them.

Five o'clock used to mean happy hour, soccer practice, or a few hours in front of the tube. But for an increasing number of professionals, powering down the computer at the office now means powering up the laptop at home.

With new technologies that make it cheaper to start your own business and a widespread need to earn additional income during the recession, more professionals are taking on paying projects in addition to their day jobs. Whether you're selling a service or promoting a product or driving traffic to a website, juggling a business on the side is the new nine-to-five.

"There is this brand new phenomenon," says Paul Kedrosky, a senior fellow at the Kauffman Foundation, a nonprofit organization that focuses on entrepreneurship. "People are being entrepreneurs almost in their spare time, which you could never do before, at least never do in a way that was profitable."

Yes, we know you want your organization to be more innovative. And yes, we know you want to improve your organization's culture of innovation. The best place to start? With YOU.

1. Give up needing to be the smartest person in the room.

2. Seek out people who think differently than you do.

3. Reward new thinking.

4. When you delegate, delegate.

5. Listen more, tell less.

6. Create an environment where no idea is considered dumb.

At the risk of sounding like a Grumpy Old Man, and with near certainty that this post will be roasted by many who read it, I am about to make the case that there is such a thing as too much entrepreneurship — or at least too much excitement about becoming an entrepreneur too early in life.

I know, I know. This blog, and all of my work over the last 15 years, has celebrated the spirit of innovation, disruption, and changing the game. But last week, when the New York Times published one of those bound-for-the-time-capsule reports on the culture of Silicon Valley, I for one had had enough. Anything in excess is a poison, after all, and in America we've made the phenomenon of taking every good idea to excess our new national pastime. That's what we may be doing with entrepreneurship today. The startup bug has become a startup fever, and that fever may be driving many people to hysteria.

That hungry whirring noise heard around offices across the U.S. is the sound of March Madness brackets being fed to paper shredders everywhere. Bracket busting is reaching historic levels in this year’s NCAA Division 1 Men’s Basketball National Championship Tournament. Since the tournament was created in 1939 this is the first time there are no number 1 or 2 seeds in the Final Four. All of the country’s top eight teams, as annointed by the experts, will watch the Final Four from home.

That’s amazing. It’s the first time in March Madness history that two teams, Butler (8) and VCU (11), seeded 8 or worse in their bracket will play each other in the Final Four. So if you shredded your bracket, you’re not alone. According to ESPN Research only two people out of the 5.9 million who filled out and submitted brackets in the ESPN Tournament Challenge have the Final Four correct. Only two. That’s .000034%.

Savannah Ocean Exchange is pleased to announce a competition with a $100,000 prize. We have just extended the deadline to May 31. Please review the attached documents, view the video, and visit the website.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DC3qcaF7JhI

http://www.savannahoceanexchange.org   "Submit a Solution" button

We would be grateful if you could spread the news far and wide and forward to any organizations  you and your colleagues are associated with. There is really no limit to the type of business eligible to apply!

BALTIMORE, March 29, 2011 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- CEOs and companies from Maryland's biotech community were honored today by the Greater Baltimore Committee as winners of the sixth annual Maryland Bioscience Awards. The awards were presented during a breakfast ceremony at the University of Maryland, Baltimore BioPark.

Winners of the 2011 Bioscience Awards are:

* Best New Product or Progress: Steven J. Kubisen, Ph.D., President and CEO Seguro Surgical, Inc., Columbia. The core technology for Seguro Surgical's first product was licensed from Johns Hopkins University in September, 2009. In less than one year, Seguro completed the commercial product development, established manufacturing capability, established sales coverage and launched the Lap Pak. The product is a one-piece, silicone "bowel packing" device for use in abdominal surgery, saving operating room time and reducing the risk of complications from the surgery.

I’m very pleased to say that the UK is becoming an incredibly entrepreneur friendly place, largely courtesy of a number of government initiatives. The statistic being bandied around Whitehall is that 1.3m of the last 2.4m jobs created in the UK were created by startups, and something like 80% of those were created by top 6% of startups (more exact stats would be welcome). Ergo the UK needs more high quality startups and government should be doing everything it can to create the best environment for that to happen.

There is nothing new about this argument (except maybe the statistic) but for the first time government seems to really believe in it.

TIME picks the 140 Twitter feeds that are shaping the conversation. Take a look and vote on whether you think these top tweeters should be on our list

It seems that everybody wants an easy solution. They want best practices and case studies they can copy. They don’t want to do the hard work of learning for themselves. They want a cookie-cutter solution.

Well there aren’t any.

Case studies abound in business and many sell for a significant amount. Other than for general education, they’re rather useless. Each organization’s situation is not only different, it’s changing. Case studies and best practices in business are like the arbitrary subjects in our schools. They’re easy to package but don’t transfer well into real life.

Half of all Israeli venture capital funds did not invest in Israel in 2010, a 42% increase over the number of non-investing VC funds in 2009, a report by the Israel Venture Capital Association released this week reveals.

Of the 75 new investments in Israel over the course of 2010, 69% were by Israeli VC funds, led by Evergreen Venture Partners, which made six new investments, and Battery Ventures and Pontifax Fund, which each made five new investments. Gemini Israel Funds, Genesis Partners, Cedar Fund, and Carmel Ventures made four new investments each, while Pitango Venture Capital made three new investments in 2010.

Steve Chiotakis: We've been hearing a lot lately about drug violence in Mexico. But that's not stopping a lot of wealthy people from investing there.

Marketplace's Jeff Tyler now and why venture capital is taking off south of the border.

Jeff Tyler: Historically, entrepreneurs in Mexico have had a hard time raising venture capital for start-ups. American Paul Ahlstrom saw $1 trillion economy and a big opportunity.

Video DownloadHelper, a Firefox plugin that lets you download Flash videos to your hard drive from sites like YouTube, has had success most startups dream of: 85 million downloads so far, and yet they've stayed under the radar.

Video DownloadHelper is made by 4 year old company ACLAP, and it's a one-man band. French software developer Michel Gutierrez made DownloadHelper. He thinks it's the most downloaded French software in the world.

The app has been one of the top 2 most downloaded for the past 3 years, and gets one download per second.

How to make a billion in biotech: It’s much more difficult than the software industry, but the key to biotech billions for entrepreneurs and investors seems to be taking one or only a very few highly concentrated positions in companies that they developed over years of effort. So reports Forbes Magazine, noting that only three of its 400 wealthiest Americans made most of their money by spearheading the development and marketing of a new drug.

Going hostile: Valeant Pharmaceuticals, Canada’s largest drugmaker, has made a $5.7 billion hostile takeover bid of Cephalon, a Pennsylvania-based maker of pain and sleep drugs.

What’s next for cleantech? Sunil Paul, founding director of Spring Ventures, thinks it will be the “CleanWeb,” or technologies that leverage the capabilities of the Internet, social media and mobile technologies to address resource constraints. He’ll explain this idea in a morning talk at Green:Net 2011.

Paul, who made his first cleantech investment back in 2002 and was an early investor in Nanosolar and Solazyme (which just filed its S1), will discuss the next-generation of opportunities that he thinks the CleanWeb will unveil.

When you're running a growing business, it’s tempting to overlook the matter of keeping receipts and other financial documents. But staying on top of your record keeping is essential for filing tax returns and being able to prove they’re accurate in the event of a tax audit.

What’s more, well-organized records can help you track the progress of your business and prepare accurate financial statements.

What constitutes a record? The short answer is, if you think it’s one, it probably is. Cash register tapes, bank deposit slips, receipt books and credit card slips all record important information. A 1099 miscellaneous-income form is the kind of document you’ll want to keep, as are your invoices.