On your mark, get set, go!  For every project manager there are five goals in the race to the finish line.  As you round the bend and the trophy is in sight, take a short water break.  Jason Westland advises that you reassess your progress and ask yourself five questions.

1.Will I finish on time?

2. Will I finish under budget?

3.Am I meeting all the requirements?

4. Are the customers happy?

5. Is my team happy?

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Building the perfect team of workers is a little like baking a cake.  If you follow the right steps, you have a recipe for success.  In his article, Andrew Filev explains the recipe for a dream team of workers.  The first step is to grab all the right ingredients.  This means hiring all the right people.  However, just like when baking, don’t be afraid to tweak your original shopping list.  You never know when an unexpected addition might just be the icing on the cake. 

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Q:I am in the mid-stages of my career. I’ve been climbing the corporate ladder for a while with some success. Lately, I’ve been reading about how corporate entities want to hire those who think entrepreneurially. In fact, where I work, I’ve heard our top management talk about it. To be honest with you, I’m not really sure how to act on it or develop the thinking. Can you recommend some good reads or blogs?

Elana Fine: Eric Ries’ “The Lean Startup” talks about entrepreneurship within existing corporations, such as Intuit, and with start-up ventures that are more typically thought of as “entrepreneurial.” Similar skills apply in both cases — identifying a problem/solution, building a product on limited resources while testing hypotheses, establishing relationships with key partners and channels, etc.

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THE AUTHOR RECENTLY RETURNED FROM A WHIRLWIND SEVEN-CAMPUS, THREE-STATE COLLEGE TOUR WITH HIS OLDEST SON. BETWEEN THE QUADS AND THE DINING HALLS, HE LEARNED A LOT ABOUT HOW TO STAY IN THE MOMENT, MAKE CONNECTIONS, AND BE AUTHENTIC. 

Having recently visited seven college campuses in three states with my oldest son, I’ve spent hours on the receiving end of presentations by admissions office staff and student tour guides. If I ever doubted that the word awesome is being overused in today’s lexicon, I have put that doubt behind me.

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WHAT DO YOU WANT TO DO BEFORE YOU DIE? GO TO MARS? SKYDIVE? CLIMB EVEREST? BE AMBITIOUS: A GOOD BUCKET LIST SHOULD GROW OVER TIME, NOT SHRINK. JUST LIKE YOU.

A few years ago, Pat Palumbo, a Westchester, New York-based real estate agent, faced some major health problems. She recovered, but “having that experience did seriously give me all those reflections you have when you know you’re not invincible,” she says. “I felt such a sense of gratitude for all this opportunity in front of me.” She wanted to make the most of it.

IF YOU'RE EXPERIENCING AN ATTENTION DEFICIT, YOU'RE FAR FROM ALONE.

Try this: Count your exhalations--1, 2, 3--all the way to 10. See if you can get to 10 without thinking about lunch or laundry or deadlines or dates.

Unless you've trained your attention, it'll probably start to wander--which, new research into the brain suggests, begins at a physical level.

Thinking about wearing that red tie to a meeting with the managing director today? You might want to think again.

Body language and nonverbal communication can have a big impact on your professional life and can ultimately make or break a deal, business relationship or even your financial success, according to a legion of body language books.

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You may be wondering: What is crowdfunding?

Crowdfunding has become a new go-to resource for artists, entrepreneurs and businesses that are seeking funding. It is a means to raise funds and mitigate the financial risk of their creative projects or business ventures.

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If you’re a writer, you know how difficult it can be to navigate the publishing industry.

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This summer marked the inauguration of the DreamIt Health accelerator, a startup boot camp focused on healthcare IT run by DreamIt Ventures and powered by Penn Medicine and Independence Blue Cross.  In four short months, ten extraordinary teams of entrepreneurs, including four from Wharton, were brought together from around the country to achieve significant milestones going from concepts to prototypes, products, pilots and revenues.  As the program wound down, the investor, startup and healthcare community turned out in force for Demo Day to see a snapshot of each company’s progress and plans for the future.

As a young entrepreneur its essential to know how to promote yourself and your work if you want to be successful. If you want to be really successful then it’s crucial to understand how to grow your personal brand.

Wikipedia defines a brand as Brand is the “name, term, design, symbol, or any other feature that identifies one seller’s product distinct from those of other sellers”

What’s important to note here is that it says “distinct from other sellers” in such a crowded market, it’s so important to understand yourself and your work as a brand and how to stand out.

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Human beings naturally compare things. Our ability to make comparisons, in addition to our ability to make tools and fire, puts us at the top of the intellectual taxonomy. It is a neurologically wired part of our ability to make decisions. Creating comparisons allows us to choose the best path when moving forward in a process.

But comparing yourself to other CEOs is a waste of time and energy. Whether the founder of the company or a hired executive, a CEO is not paid to compare himself to others.

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Earlier this year, I had the displeasure of having to part ways with a client. While it cost me some money, the lessons I learned from letting the client go are priceless. This was the first and only client that I ever made the decision to stop working with, and I’m hoping that I never have to do it again. I won’t reveal the name of the client for obvious reasons. For the purposes of this article, I’ll just refer to them as Company X.

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Sometimes, ideas in healthcare have a way of starting small but quickly getting much bigger.

Take Care Team Connect, an Evanston, Ill.-based IT firm that provides software platforms for population healthcare management while also offering provider coaching services on how to manage population-based workflows effectively.

According to Carrie Kozlowski, Care Team’s senior vice president of client services and marketing, the company got its start five years ago after the founder, Benjamin Albert, became frustrated trying to manage care for his sick grandfather from a distance.

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Access to capital and investment is an integral part of translating innovative ideas into sustainable business lies that drive job creation and growth. For a significant number of entrepreneurs, however, traditional banking and venture capital mechanisms are unable and/or unwilling to provide them with the capital required to turn their ideas into reality. As a result, small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs) and the entrepreneurs that drive them are increasingly seeking out non-traditional sources of financing, such as innovative crowdfunding organizations like Kickstarter and IndieGoGo. Perhaps soon, equity crowdfunding platforms will become the primary means of growing ideas into businesses through a democratized model of finance. In doing so, crowdfunding builds on the evolving processes of web-enabled engagement and participation that have disintermediated numerous industries that were previously thought impenetrable.

Through its role as a conduit for donations, loans and investment, crowdfunding is poised to play a significant role in financing SMEs. Equity crowdfunding, in particular, offers significant potential to open up a new funding source for entrepreneurs, and a new avenue for investment for investors. In so doing, this nascent platform will help facilitate job creation and innovation by ensuring that good ideas don’t die on the kitchen tables of would-be entrepreneurs. As this report argues, however, jurisdictions seeking to capitalize on this new avenue must develop balanced regulatory frameworks that protect investors without stifling the elements of long-tail participation and engagement that make this medium a potential game-changer.

There is a very real knowledge gap in the early stage start-up game, on both sides of the table. First-time entrepreneurs lack the seasoning to captain a steady ship through turbulent waters. Inexperienced friends and family (and, increasingly, crowdsourced investors) lack the ability to gauge the viability of a business, or to mentor naïve entrepreneurs.

This knowledge gap, I have come to believe, is best filled by savvy incubators. However, there are over 7,500 business incubators around the world. Most of them fail.

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It isn't enough for a company to be open to innovation. If corporate leaders want to take full advantage of great developments in technology, they must learn to manage them effectively, according to guest columnist Irving Wladawsky-Berger. "There are many reasons why disruptive innovations fail in large companies. But often, despite having come up with a good strategy, they fail because proper attention was not paid to the organizational and cultural changes required, he writes. Companies need to make sure innovation is managed by people who understand strategy, as well as operations. And they must set clear but ambitious goals that instill a sense of mission.

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GrowFL, the state's economic gardening project, has released updated statistics on its impact in Florida, including the addition of 4,187 new jobs at participating companies since 2009.

According to an economic impact analysis conducted by Tucker Hall, GrowFL has helped companies add $581.4 million to the state's economy since the program began in 2009. GrowFL companies grow three times faster than their peers who do not participate in the program.

The famous social psychologist, Kurt Lewin, argued that behavior was a function of the individual and the environment (B=f (I,E).

The elements of innovative products and services already exist in most organizations. The challenge is to create an environment that permits those pieces to quickly align into a coherent whole.

All organizations face the challenge of combating the inherent reluctance of people in different roles to align around critical opportunities to work together.

Being human is hard. We’re squishy, lumbering, and sensitive. We don’t have claws or wings, and instead of arriving on this planet with houses on our backs like hermit crabs, we have to build them.

Australian architecture collective Sibling has designed a solution for this last problem. When Aussie clothing manufacturer Gorman asked 21 companies and artists to optimize a white canvas high-top sneaker for a line of “Choose Your Own Adventure Shoes,” Sibling, a collaboration among eight architect friends, made theirs with a built-in nylon and polyester shelter. The Walking-Shelter is perfect for a vision quest, walkabout, or epic bar crawl that demands collapsing of exhaustion at the end.

I got an email yesterday asking me to recommend some tools for startups to use when starting out, things like the best way to track marketing campaigns and the best task managers out there. Simple things that you wouldn’t think about and things that startups wouldn’t make a priority — because most of the time it’s about building a product and getting that product to market. So in response to that mail, I have put together a list of eight essential tools that every startup arsenal should have. Bear in mind you might not need all eight though. It all depends on the type of company you have and what you want to achieve as always.

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