February 2016 Newsletter
Business Truisms You Shouldn’t Believe
A lot of what it takes to be a successful entrepreneur is the same today as it was 30 years ago—grit, vision, initiative, willingness to take risks. But how we start and run a business is very different. “We used to do market research, write a business plan, seek money and resources, build the product—and then execute the plan and hope we were right,” says Mark Coopersmith, senior fellow of entrepreneurship at UC Berkeley’s Hass School of Business and coauthor with John Danner of The Other “F” Word: How Smart Leaders, Teams, and Entrepreneurs Put Failure to Work. “Now we start lean and iterate quickly, learning as we go and building on the fly. It’s no longer a linear and segregated process.” Read More
Six Steps to More Effective Decision-Making
By Alison Young, Executive Director, Drexel University’s Institute for Strategic Leadership at LeBow College of Business
In our complex, fast-paced, data-deluged world, making effective decisions in a timely manner can be a real challenge. It’s an important leadership skill though, and decision science majors are on the rise at Drexel University’s LeBow College of Business. “Data—in the form of numbers, text, audio, video and social media—helps us make better decisions,” says Murugan Anandarajan, professor of management and decision sciences at Lebow. “We use this data to model the problem, then based on this model, we collect the relevant information, apply it to the model and make the best decision for you. This is the focus of the decision sciences.” Read More
Trade Secrets of a Tech-Savvy Entrepreneur
A word to the wise: If you ever take a meeting with Tiffanie Stanard, make sure you’re fully caffeinated. The marketing and branding strategist and CEO of Prestige Concepts in Philadelphia talks fast, thinks faster—and does what most people consider a full morning’s slate (i.e., sends emails to current, past and prospective clients, updates her to-do list, prepares for meetings and exercises) before she has even arrived at her office. Read More
Three Things Every Career Woman Needs to Know
If you ever feel like an imposter at work—or felt like one in school—you stand in good company. “It’s common to feel this way, and women tend to feel the imposter syndrome more intensely than do men,” says Marianne Cooper, a sociologist at Stanford’s Clayman Institute for Gender Research and author of Cut Adrift: Families in Insecure Times. Read More