A Doctor in Your Pocket

**Great article we found on WSJ.com.**

What does the future of medicine hold? Tiny health monitors, tailored therapies—and the end of illness

Take a moment to imagine what it would be like to live robustly to the ripe old age of 100 or more. You wouldn’t die of any particular illness, and you wouldn’t gradually waste away under the spell of some awful, enfeebling disease that began years or decades earlier.

It may sound far-fetched, but it is possible to live a long, disease-free life. Most of the conditions that kill us, including cancer and heart disease, could be prevented or delayed by a new way of looking at and treating health. The end of illness is near.

Today, we mostly wait for the body to break before we treat it. When I picture what it will be like for my two children to stay in good health as independent adults in 10 or 20 years, I see a big shift from our current model.

I see them being able to monitor and adjust their health in real time with the help of smartphones, wearable gadgets—perhaps like small, invisible stickers—to track the inner workings of their cells, and virtual replicas of their bodies that they will play much like videogames, allowing them to know exactly what they can do to optimize every aspect of their health.What happens when I take drug x at dosage y? How can I change the expression of my genes to stop cancer? Would eating more salmon and dark chocolate boost my metabolism and burn fat? Can red wine really lower my risk of heart attack?

From a drop of their blood, they will be able to upload information onto a personal biochip that can help to create an individualized plan of action, including both preventive measures and therapies for identified ailments or signs of “unhealthiness.” (Other body fluids—like tears and saliva—might be routinely tested, too.) They would be on the lookout for problems like imbalances in blood-sugar control, a risk factor for diabetes, and uncontrolled cell growth, which could signal cancer. Their doctors won’t just examine them once a year; they will continually monitor the next generation of patients, offering advice along the way.

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1 in 2 new graduates are jobless or underemployed

**Great article Alex found for us on Yahoo.com.  Thanks Alex!**

WASHINGTON (AP) — The college class of 2012 is in for a rude welcome to the world of work.

A weak labor market already has left half of young collegegraduates either jobless or underemployed in positions that don’t fully use their skills and knowledge.

Young adults with bachelor’s degrees are increasingly scraping by in lower-wage jobs — waiter or waitress, bartender, retail clerk or receptionist, for example — and that’s confounding their hopes a degree would pay off despite higher tuition and mounting student loans.

An analysis of government data conducted for The Associated Press lays bare the highly uneven prospects for holders of bachelor’s degrees.

Opportunities for college graduates vary widely.

While there’s strong demand in science, education and health fields, arts and humanities flounder. Median wages for those with bachelor’s degrees are down from 2000, hit by technological changes that are eliminating midlevel jobs such as bank tellers. Most future job openings are projected to be in lower-skilled positions such as home health aides, who can provide personalized attention as the U.S. population ages.

Taking underemployment into consideration, the job prospects for bachelor’s degree holders fell last year to the lowest level in more than a decade.

“I don’t even know what I’m looking for,” says Michael Bledsoe, who described months of fruitless job searches as he served customers at a Seattle coffeehouse. The 23-year-old graduated in 2010 with a creative writing degree.

Initially hopeful that his college education would create opportunities, Bledsoe languished for three months before finally taking a job as a barista, a position he has held for the last two years. In the beginning he sent three or four resumes day. But, Bledsoe said, employers questioned his lack of experience or the practical worth of his major. Now he sends a resume once every two weeks or so.

**To read the rest of the article from the original source, click here.**

6 Habits of True Strategic Thinkers

**Great article we found on Inc.com.**

You’re the boss, but you still spend too much time on the day-to-day. Here’s how to become the strategic leader your company needs.

In the beginning, there was just you and your partners. You did every job. You coded, you met with investors, you emptied the trash and phoned in the midnight pizza. Now you have others to do all that and it’s time for you to “be strategic.”

Whatever that means.

If you find yourself resisting “being strategic,” because it sounds like a fast track to irrelevance, or vaguely like an excuse to slack off, you’re not alone. Every leader’s temptation is to deal with what’s directly in front, because it always seems more urgent and concrete. Unfortunately, if you do that, you put your company at risk. While you concentrate on steering around potholes, you’ll miss windfall opportunities, not to mention any signals that the road you’re on is leading off a cliff.

This is a tough job, make no mistake. “We need strategic leaders!” is a pretty constant refrain at every company, large and small. One reason the job is so tough: no one really understands what it entails. It’s hard to be a strategic leader if you don’t know what strategic leaders are supposed to do.

After two decades of advising organizations large and small, my colleagues and I have formed a clear idea of what’s required of you in this role. Adaptive strategic leaders — the kind who thrive in today’s uncertain environment – do six things well:

Anticipate 

Most of the focus at most companies is on what’s directly ahead. The leaders lack “peripheral vision.” This can leave your company vulnerable to rivals who detect and act on ambiguous signals. To anticipate well, you must:

• Look for game-changing information at the periphery of your industry
• Search beyond the current boundaries of your business
• Build wide external networks to help you scan the horizon better

Think Critically

“Conventional wisdom” opens you to fewer raised eyebrows and second guessing. But if you swallow every management fad, herdlike belief, and safe opinion at face value, your company loses all competitive advantage. Critical thinkers question everything. To master this skill you must force yourself to:

• Reframe problems to get to the bottom of things, in terms of root causes
• Challenge current beliefs and mindsets, including your own
• Uncover hypocrisy, manipulation, and bias in organizational decisions

**To read the rest of the article from the original source, click here.**

Managing Millennials

**Great article we found on FINS.com.**

After the release of his first book in 1995, “Managing Generation X,” Bruce Tulgan received an unexpected call. “Hi, I’m calling from Jack Welch’s office at GE,” a woman told Tulgan, then 28. “He’s wondering if you would come brief some of his employees on your new book.”

That call — among many others — led Tulgan and his business partner, Jeff Coombs, to believe they were on to something. The book was written using the narratives of Gen-Xers reflecting on their experiences at work and offering advice on how to manage them.

Many of the companies that called said they had conducted surveys of younger staff in an effort to learn how to hold on to them. But the results only confused the companies. The attitudes of young workers in the surveys weren’t much different than those of older workers, but retention rates remained low.

“‘Managing Generation X’ struck a chord,” Tulgan said. “People were like, ‘You are exactly right!,’ but the only reason it was exactly right is because we interviewed a ton of people. I wasn’t just using a survey instrument, I was asking them open-ended questions.”

The interviews and consulting sessions inspired Tulgan to write a number of books focusing on issues surrounding management of young talent. Now, as the population of Generation Y workers continues to grow, he’s begun to hear the same questions and concerns about talent management and retention that he received back in the 90s.

The work force today is more intergenerational than ever, Tulgan says. For people of any age, crossing generational lines requires self-awareness and an understanding of others. FINS spoke with Tulgan about how managers and employees alike can bridge the generation gap.

**To read the rest of the article from the original source, click here.**

Facebook Posting Techniques that Really Work

**Great article we found on Entrepreneur.com.**

There’s a fine line between a scientific approach to marketing on Facebook and a haphazard shotgun approach. For those of you who prefer not to “point and shoot,” a new study from a San Francisco-based social media strategy firm offers an in-depth analysis of the top 20,000 Facebook Pages and up to a quarter million posts in an effort to determine the most useful posting techniques.

In the just-released report called Engagement and Interaction: A Scientific Approach to Facebook Marketing(link opens a PDF file), Momentus Media. provides answers to the seven most frequently asked questions by Facebook page administrators:

1. When’s the best time to post? While weekends and off-peak hours from 2pm to 5am are the times when page admins are least likely to add a new post, those are the posts that receive the highest interaction rates. Thursdays, on the other hand, shoulder the highest number of postings during the week and the lowest interaction rate. And since a high level of postings results in a lower interaction rate from users, it only stands to reason that posting in off-peak hours means you’ll gain more interaction from fans.
2. How many times should I post per day? You’d think too many posts would offend your followers but the report suggests frequent posting increases interaction. As you might suspect, fewer posts reduce the chances users will see them. And while unsubscribe rates go up after three posts per day, they level off at higher frequencies. The secret is to find that balance between optimizing interaction and managing unsubscribes, which is going to be different for every business.
3. What type of content elicits the most interaction? By far, photos generate the highest interaction rate for the six varieties of content, with status updates ranking No. 2. Others — in descending order — include video, music and links. The fact that links are at the bottom is interesting, considering they are posted the most often. Photos rank at the top because they’re visual, easy to digest and they elicit emotion.

**To read the rest of the article from the original source, click here.**

How Alcoa, Starbucks, Arista, And Febreze Kicked Normal Habits And Found Success

The Power of Habit, by New York Times reporter Charles Duhigg, examines habits good and bad. Duhigg talks us through four companies that found success by swapping business-as-usual routines with smarter habits.

STARBUCKS

As Starbucks planned its growth strategy in the ’90s, managers realized that employees regularly cracked under pressure. (Tears were common.) Starbucks implemented institutional habits for baristas, called the LATTE method: listen, acknowledge, take action, thank the customer, and explain why the problem occurred. Customer (and employee) satisfaction skyrocketed.

 

 

 

 

ALCOA

The sluggish aluminum company hired Paul O’Neill as CEO in 1987, hoping he’d boost revenue. To the chagrin of investors, he chose to focus his energies on decreasing employee accidents, the result of unsafe work habits. O’Neill streamlined the company’s production process to force cautiousness, and by the time he retired in 2000, Alcoa’s net income had increased fivefold.

 

 

 

FEBREZE

Launched in 1993 as an odor-killing product, Febreze was a flop. Why? “The people who needed it, who lived with nine cats, had adapted to the odor,” says Duhigg. While studying videos of folks making their beds, P&G marketers noticed one consistent habit: Subjects looked proud upon chore completion. Febreze was rebranded as a post-cleaning reward; it now makes $1 billion annually.

 

 

 

 

ARISTA RECORDS

When Arista introduced radio to Outkast’s “Hey Ya!” in 2003, listeners weren’t interested. “We like songs that are familiar,” Duhigg says, and “Hey Ya!” was too unusual. Arista got some help when stations sandwiched the tune between “sticky” artists such as Christina Aguilera and Celine Dion. In four months, the number of folks tuning out dropped significantly, and “Hey Ya!” is still stuck in our heads.

A version of this article appears in the March 2012 issue of Fast Company.

How Do Small-Business Owners Measure Success?

**Great article we found on Inc.com.**

Entrepreneurs rank their top goals for 2012, how they measure success, and how the business climate has affected their health in the past year. We crunched the numbers.

WORK-LIFE BALANCE

Share of small-business owners who say the poor business climate had a negative effect on their health in 2011: 44%

	Portion who excercised less in 2011:33%
	Portion who gained weight: 22%

MANTA

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RESOLUTIONS

Small-business owners’ top goals for 2012:

1. Grow the business.

2. Improve relationships with friends and family.

3. Eat healthier.

4. Work out more.

5. Work less.

MANTA

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SUCCESS

The most important measure of success, according to small-business owners:

THE HARTFORD SMALL BUSINESS SUCESS STUDY

**To read the rest of the article from the original source, click here.**