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One of the most enjoyable and important parts of starting a new business is creating a “corporate culture”; in other words, an environment in which your employees are able to perform at a peak level with the least supervision while developing new products and services that meet the needs and wants of customers while growing your business. That being said, it’s not always easy to make this happen.   Many if not most businesses are so driven by the day by demands that little thought is given to where the company is going and how it’s going to get there and by what route. For example, innovation is always a hot topic in the business press.   How does a company foster innovation?   The short answer is by creating a corporate culture in which innovation is encouraged and rewarded.   Research shows that people innovation when they are given the freedom to explore those things that interest them based on their internal motivation.   Telling people that they must innova...

Funding a start-up is always a hot topic, unfortunately, all too many prospective business owners believe more than a few myths about financing a start.  Below is a small excerpt from a longer article, Six Myths About Venture Capitalists  by Diane Mulcahy, in the current online issue of The Harvard Business Review. Myth 1: Venture Capital Is the Primary Source of Start-Up Funding Venture capital financing is the exception, not the norm, among start-ups. Historically, only a tiny percentage (fewer than 1%) of U.S. companies have raised capital from VCs. And the industry is contracting: After peaking in the late 1990s, the number of active VC firms fell from 744 to 526 in the decade 2001–2011, and the amount of venture capital raised was just under $19 billion in 2011, down from $39 billion in 2001, according to the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA). But less venture capital doesn’t mean less start-up capital. Non-VC sources of financing a...

Source:  www.fremont.gov We are all creatures of habit, which is good news to owners of any small business.  This may seem instinctive to any business owner, but now this assumption can be considered scientific fact. A comprehensive study of consumers world-wide conducted by the mathmatics department at the Universidad Carlos III of Madrid (UC3M) not only documents this, but has developed a method for predicting people's shopping patterns.  Also participating in this research are scientists at the University of California in San Diego (U.S.A), M.I.T (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and NICTA (Australia).  A pretty impressive group of researchers, indeed. The conclusion of this study is that consumers are more predictable than you might assume and because of this predictability it is possible to know where consumers will shop. As explained by one of its authors, Esteban Moro of the Department of Mathematics at UC3M, " the main conclusion we have ...

I was approached by a father and his teen-aged son while hosting a small business exposition some years ago.  The father asked me who to talk to at the exposition to get the $100,000 his son needed to start a business based on his son's "sure-fire idea."  Far too many prospective entrepreneurs assume this is how you fund a business: Go ask someone for a wad of cash and within a short period of time, we'll be rich. Here is a breakdown on the 22 Known Ways to Finance a start-up . 1.       Take a very sharp pencil to your personal budget and your business start-up and operating budgets. Your primary personal source of financing for your business is yourself.   If you try to get a bank or investment company, or even private investors to underwrite your business, and you haven’t put your own money in, how do you think these people will react?   Working with other people’s money is an accepted business practice -- as long as you are ...

Source: www.newzimbabwe.com UPDATE: April 23, 2013 Women Handle Sleep Loss Better Than Men Women handle workweek sleep loss better than do men, though job performance of either men or women is impacted by a pattern of less that seven to eight hours per night of sleep. For both men and women, performance deteriorates when sleep is restricted to six hours per night for a week. Worse yet, performance does not improve after two nights of recovery sleep - you'll feel better, but your job performance will still suffer. A study published in 2011 was led by Dr. Alexandros N. Vgontzas, professor of psychiatry and endowed chair in sleep disorders medicine at the Penn State College of Medicine and director of the Sleep Research and Treatment Center at the Penn State Milton S. Hershey Medical Center in Hershey, PA. "After one workweek of mild sleep deprivation, two recovery nights were adequate in improving sleepiness but not performance," said Dr. Vgontzas. "The usual practi...