Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel H. Pink is one of those books that makes you wonder why we are having so much trouble getting over the command-and-control/face- time-and-billable-hours business models. In a nutshell–or should I say, in a “tweet”–which Pink so gamely prepares for us: “Carrots & sticks are so [...]

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Small business owners have had reasons to feel positive, including steadily rising retail sales since last fall. But now, that confidence is starting to evaporate. June retail sales were down, the National Retail Federation reported. And business owners appear to be getting nervous. 
The most recent Discover Small Business Watch study shows 75 percent of business owners [...]

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Social media is on the fast track to becoming the core
outlet for corporate communications, marketing, public relations and customer service. If your business
is not involved in social media via venues including Facebook, Twitter,
LinkedIn and YouTube, the good news is that it’s not too late to start. Even
better news is that conferences, including the ones listed [...]

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As a consultant, I often meet with inventors who’ve created–and sometimes even patented–an innovative product that has the potential to take the marketplace by storm.
The problem: It takes more than just ingenuity to get a product onto retailers’ shelves and into the homes of millions of American consumers. It takes money, marketing and distribution–and most [...]

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The Federal government has tried higher loan guarantees, pleas and threats, but small-business lending has remained anemic. Now, Congress is working on a more direct route to pumping cash into small-business lending — a new bill that would see the Feds invest up to $30 billion in small, community banks. The idea is that the banks [...]

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If you’re an entrepreneur, you’ve probably sacrificed a lot to be your own boss — security, maybe money, free time, fringe benefits. All to chase that dream of self-determination, of unleashing your creativity on the world, of letting your light shine.
Now, the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, which focuses on entrepreneurship, has created a way to [...]

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There’s a federal drive on to have more workers stay home from the office. Both houses of Congress recently passed new bills that would stiffen the requirements for federal agencies on telework. 
But remote workers aren’t just for big government departments. A new study from the Telework Research Network shows the substantial benefits to letting workers [...]

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Sometimes it seems like every celebrity and unemployed professional in America sees opening a restaurant as their natural second act. But a new study of single-location restaurants shows the brutal realities of this extremely competitive niche. 
To sum up: It isn’t easy being a mom-and-pop restaurant owner.
Single-location owners have just weathered three consecutive years of declining [...]

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After more than a year of Congressional drama, the biggest finance reform package since the Great Depression is expected to be law by Wednesday. What does it mean for your business? 

The bill is more than 2,000 pages long, and has the unwieldy name “Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.” To give a quick [...]

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