Here’s the ultimate leadership litmus test: Would your employees still work for you if you didn’t pay them?  

To answer this question, I traveled to Saddleback Church, a so-called mega church that wouldn’t be able to fulfill its mission without volunteers. On a typical Sunday at its main campus in Lake Forest, Calif. (where I visited), more than 1,000 volunteers are needed to make sure that the 20,000 attendees are welcomed, parked, fed, inspired, and connected.

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As Microsoft charts a new course under Satya Nadella, the company’s former head and now Microsoft board member, Steve Ballmer, has been candid about his experiences at the Redmond software giant. The ex-CEO’s latest public words came via a fireside chat hosted by Professor Peter Tufano, a long-time friend of Ballmer’s and Dean of the Saïd Business School, part of England’s Oxford University.

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A few years ago, a landmark Stanford study came out showing that people tasked with remembering one digit made much better decisions than people charged with remembering seven digits. The two groups were each presented with a choice to eat calorie-laden cake or healthy fruit. The seven-digit crowd ate 50% more cake. The culprit: Cognitive load. 

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Last week was Global Innovation Week 2014 and one of the highlights was the Global Innovation Summit (GIS) in Silicon Valley.

The focus of the GIS conference was on the great topic of ecosystem development - a topic of great import to conference leaders Victor Hwang and Greg Horowitt, venture partners at T2 Ventures and authors of The Rainforest: The Secret to Building The Next Silicon Valley.

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Companies have developed mission statements for years. It helps guide them by defining who they are and why they do what they do. Coca-Cola’s mission statement, for example, is “To refresh the world. To inspire moments of optimism and happiness. To create value and make a difference.” For Google it’s “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

Image: http://www.fastcompany.com  - Denise Morrison, CEO of Campbell Soup Company

When designing the Tesla Model S, Elon Musk wanted an electric motor that had the same horsepower as the most powerful internal combustion engine but with nearly-instantaneous torque. And he wanted it to be the size of a watermelon. Engine manufacturers told him this couldn’t be done. So the Tesla CEO decided to build his own motor. The earlier versions of this had a hand-wound stator which increased winding density to help eliminate resistance and increase peak torque. Later versions of the stators were built by robots.

Image: Credit: Tesla Motors 

In his $3.9 trillion fiscal year 2015 budget proposal released Tuesday, President Obama asked for $1.8 billion to support health information technology incentive payments — the same amount he requested last year. Actual spending for this category came to $1.07 billion in 2013.

The budget also included $77.1 billion in discretionary funding to support HHS’s mission, $800 million below the 2014-enacted level.

Image: President Barack Obama signs copies of the FY 2015 Budget 

Cisco Systems Inc. has tapped Toronto as one of four cities around the world to house an "Internet of Everything" lab, an investment that the company says will amount to as much as $100 million for the city over 10 years. Toronto joins Songdo, South Korea, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and a yet-unnamed German city as sites of the company’s “IoE” innovation hubs.

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The following statement is attributable to American Geophysical Union (AGU) executive director/CEO Christine McEntee:

"When President Obama delivered his State of the Union address just a few short weeks ago, he spoke about it being time for the United States to 'unleash the next generation of American discovery.' In many ways, his budget proposal is a testament to that goal. In many other ways, it misses the mark.

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It's not your imagination. Wine really has gotten boozier.

In the past two decades the maximum alcohol content of wine has crept up from about 13 percent to, in some cases, northward of 17 percent, a side effect of the growing popularity of wines with richer fruit flavor. The intoxication inflation has gotten so bad that wine scientists have begun to bioprospect for wild yeasts that turn a smaller quantity of the sugar in grape juice into alcohol during fermentation than does the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae—humanity’s partner in inebriation for thousands of years—but which can still produce a fine, finished wine.

Image: Australian Shiraz-viognier wine. Credit: Tristan Kenney/Wikimedia Commons 

Tim had been on the fast track. An Ivy League graduate, he had joined one of the premier consulting firms as an associate. He went on to take an MBA at INSEAD, graduating at the top of his class. Recruited by a pharmaceutical firm he rose quickly through the ranks, joining the executive team in record time. Within just eight years after joining the company he was appointed its CEO.

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The way a company sets price is an integral component of its brand. Think about your favorite merchants – what associations of price do you have? Do you think of them as premium, middle-of-the-road, or a value player? Just as prices drive brand perceptions, pricing surprises can damage a company’s brand. Remember the uproar when Apple discounted its iPhone from $599 to $399 just 68 days after introduction?

J. Craig Venter, the human genome pioneer, today unveiled a new San Diego-based venture with an ambitious goal of providing whole genome sequencing and cell-therapy-based diagnostic services for patients.

Venter said he co-founded the company, Human Longevity Inc., or HLI, with Robert Hariri, who oversaw Celgene Cellular Therapeutics and Peter Diamandis of the X Prize Foundation.

Image: http://www.xconomy.com 

"This is clearly a new frontier for science and we're excited and honored to share this first chapter with the world." —HUVr Team

What began as a summer project in 2010 at the MIT Physics Graduate Program has evolved into one of the most exciting independent products to be developed out of MIT since the high-powered lithium-ion batteries developed by Yet-Ming Chiang in 2001. Our team consists of materials science, electricity & magnetism experts who've solved an important part of one of science's mysteries: the key to antigravity.

Image: http://huvrtech.com 

David Jarman of Daily Kos Elections provides an excellent analysis of the absolute change in the Democratic and Republican vote for president from the 1988 through the 2012 elections, together with valuable tables and maps. The maps, tables, and narrative clearly demonstrate that, while the map looks mostly red as if Republicans were the big winners, the reality is that the Democrats were the beneficiaries of vastly more added votes, because of Democrats’ stupendous domination of the denser, bigger, metropolitan territory. For example, Los Angeles County by itself provided a Democratic gain of 1.2 MILLION, while the largest Republican gain was Utah county, Utah (Provo) with a paltry 90,000 gain. Republicans dominate the vast non-metropolitan expanses, Democrats the urban cores.

Image: http://www.newgeography.com 

Lithium-ion batteries have become the power backbone for our always-on gadgets, laptops and cell phones. Now, thanks to Tesla Motors, they’re moving into our cars and potentially onto the power grid and into buildings, too. With the potential for so many batteries becoming embedded in everything — providing both short bursts of power and long drawn-out energy trickles — the need for smart software, predictive algorithms and temperature management systems for batteries will only continue to rise.

Image: http://gigaom.com/ 

The popularity of crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter and Indiegogo have helped thousands of people, including myself, get access to capital to bring products and services to market. Raising money via crowdfunding to launch products, or even sell equity in your company is entirely possible. The main problem with these platforms is the majority of people only hear about the extreme successes which raised millions of dollars. As a full time marketing consultant, I should warn you that those extreme successes are the exception to the rule. Crowdfunding projects that raise millions of dollars usually include a recipe of a huge PR team, tireless hours sprinkled with a lot of luck and a dash of perfect timing.

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Information always changes situations. The right insights, advice, and encouragement has the power to propel you into a different place. LinkedIn, as the world’s largest professional network, has found a way to harness some of that inspiration, and give it away for free. There is no other place in the world where entrepreneurs, CEOs, world leaders, and celebrities come together to share their expertise. They write so you can learn.

Here are 30 people who will inspire you to new heights in your career, business and life.Some you may know, some you may not. Regardless, they can and will help you get better.

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Google Glass shares much of its electronics and software with the smartphone, but it’s a very different machine.

You hold a smartphone in your hand. And we do—at restaurants, at the movies, walking across the street, and even in bed. We use smartphones to check our mail, update Facebook, get driving directions, search the Internet to settle bets, and, sometimes, even to make calls. But Glass you wear on your face, and that fundamentally transforms all these human-computer interactions, making them more intimate. Because you don’t use your hands, and because it projects an image onto a transparent screen suspended in front of your eye and uses a vibration to stimulate your inner ear, using Glass is like being naked with the machine: synapses and wires united.

While there’s always new and improved technologies every year that are said to make driving all the better, how many of them are actually new or actually want to make you drive more?

Image: http://motorburn.com