I talk a lot about costs. I believe good engineering is about finding the most cost-effective solution to a problem, whether that cost is measured in dollars, hours, morale or lost opportunities. Some costs are paid immediately and some are assumed as debt. Everyone in business knows this intuitively, but some costs are less obvious than others, so it's important to point them out to your team.

Among the most dangerously unconsidered costs is what I've been calling complexity cost. Complexity cost is the debt you accrue by complicating features or technology in order to solve problems. An application that does twenty things is more difficult to refactor than an application that does one thing, so changes to its code will take longer. Sometimes complexity is a necessary cost, but only organizations that fully internalize the concept can hope to prevent runaway spending in this area.

A newly created map of Kansas City's entrepreneurial community points to nearly a dozen firms and institutions that have spawned a majority of the metro region's information technology and life sciences companies. Based upon research funded by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation and conducted by Professor Heike Mayer of the University of Bern in Switzerland, the new data visualization depicts Kansas City's entrepreneurial development over the past 50-plus years.

"Kansas City appears to have followed a markedly different path of economic development than more prominent tech regions like Silicon Valley and Boston," said Mayer, who has studied Kansas City's entrepreneurial culture since 2005. "In contrast to those regions where growth has long been attributed to the presence of large research universities, regions like Kansas City, which are not typically known for high-tech industry, have leveraged large home-grown firms to develop the region's knowledge, labor and entrepreneurship."

Imagine this totally made up and totally arbitrary situation:

You’ve just gotten the biggest, most challenging assignment of your career.  You’ve been handed an under-performing division in your organization and your job is to turn it around. Fast.  The pressure for immediate, tangible results is intense.  You do not want to fail at this assignment.

Sometimes choices appear black and white; this is an illusion.

You’ve been meeting with the management team you inherited.  You find them to be committed to the challenge and experienced; they also know where all the bodies are buried.  You’ve been preaching the need to produce results quickly, but your team tells you they need your strong support to experiment with new, untested approaches to producing the asked-for results. Many of these will certainly fail in the near term, but continuing to do what has always been done is just not going to work.  Your boss says “now!” Your management team says “a little time and space, please.”

Last week my bonus son was married to the love of his life. I took the week off for wedding festivities and returned eight days later to an inbox full of out-of-office replies from others. If you have followed me for any length of time, you know how much I despise out-of-office emails. An out-of-office email is off-putting and consumes my precious time.

Either check your email while you are away or have someone do it for you. You should be able to check your email anywhere in the world on your mobile phone or, at the least, on an iPad, laptop or other tablet device. If you can’t, then I’m not sure you are sufficiently up with technology or up to the task of taking care of my business in a timely and professional manner. When the NASA astronauts became able to check their email on the International Space Station, you ran out of excuses.

The Curmudgeon knows it is unusual for him to overstate and oversimplify (burp), but maybe just once–to make a point. He is not sure that the profession, as a whole, has much of an idea of what it is trying to accomplish. Every other article or report he reads claims that this city, or that region has been, or is being revitalized–and this very special economic development program-strategy-official is responsible. Is there anyplace left in the USA that has not already been revitalized? What a great profession we are. We never fail and every strategy (except tax abatement, of course) succeeds. Innovation works the best, of course!

The only exception to the reports cited in the first paragraph is the other 50% of reports that scream nothing an economic developer does actually works. The only way an economic developer creates any job at all is if he hires himself. There isn’t a cost-benefit study that actually, indisputably, proves economic development actually can create jobs. Nothing, no where has been revitalized and economic developers are just a bunch of nondescript drones who feed zombie firms and capitalist fat cats. Economic development programs, positive business climates, incentive-deals cited in these reports are nothing but a race to the bottom–a perversion of everything decent in humanity.

Back in 2011, when we began work on a McKinsey Quarterly article called “A CEO’s guide to innovation in China,”1 much of the debate was about whether the country was more likely to become innovative or to remain a fast follower of foreign leaders. Even then, that seemed like yesterday's question. Companies in China were innovating; we were seeing that every day in areas such as renewable energy, consumer electronics, instant messaging, and mobile gaming, both at domestic players and at multinationals with significant research and product-development presences.

Nothing that has happened since has changed our view. Indeed, our sense today is that the pace of innovation is quickening and that a new spirit of innovation is spreading across sectors into universities and even into key departments of the Chinese government. In a recent series of interviews with executives at Chinese companies, we detected evidence of real innovation leadership and the potential for more to come. John Oyler, CEO of the three-year-old Chinese biotech company BeiGene, for instance, underscored the attitude—“anything is possible, we can make it happen, there is no challenge we cannot conquer, we will surprise the world”—that he’s now seeing among Chinese scientists at his company.

China’s emergence as a manufacturing powerhouse has been astonishing. In seventh place, trailing Italy, as recently as 1980, China not only overtook the United States in 2011 to become the world’s largest producer of manufactured goods but also used its huge manufacturing engine to boost living standards by doubling the country’s GDP per capita over the last decade. That achievement took the industrializing United Kingdom 150 years.

Today, however, China faces new challenges as economic growth slows, wages and other factor costs rise, value chains become more complex, and consumers grow more sophisticated and demanding. Moreover, these pressures are rising against the backdrop of a more fundamental macroeconomic reality: the almost inevitable decline in the relative role of manufacturing in China as it gets richer.1 Manufacturing growth is slowing more quickly than aggregate economic growth, for example, and evidence suggests that the country is already losing some new factory investments to lower-cost locations, such as Vietnam, sparking concern about China’s manufacturing competitiveness.2

I was born in 1990, on the cusp of the digital age.

For the better part of my childhood, I grew up in a house with no cable television, Internet, or cell phones. On the weekends, my family might rent a movie (VHS, mind you), or I’d read a book, or listen to the Red Sox game on the radio.

By the time I arrived at high school in 2004, the world as I knew it was turned on its head. My classmates were running around with iPods (soon to be iPhones), and if you didn’t have your own computer and AIM account, you were as good as dead. In college some of us would have Facebook profiles, but that wouldn’t last, we thought--the cool kids were already on Myspace.

It is very easy to start a business these days. Many times, it does not even require any form of real investment. A person is able to hop online and start selling the things that they already own. But, if you are looking to start your own business whilst still studying, you should really ensure that you grow your personality to suit the work. Here are a few personality traits that you are going to have to work on if you want start a business and enjoy any sort of success.

A student has to be highly organized

This is absolutely imperative. Even people with the best idea on the planet are going to struggle if they are not organized. It not just a case of being organized enough to make deliveries on time. You need to be organized in the way you market your business, how you grow your brand, how you manage your PR, how you deal with complaints, and how you manage your money. Many large organizations are managed by accountants for the simple reason that money can be organized easier. That is why big companies set budgets first, prior to building marketing campaigns or beginning a new year’s worth of product production.

Who needs a little motivation to get the week going? Check out these 25 awesome picture quotes to get you pumped to tackle the week. Let us know your favorite in the comments.

BECTON, Dickinson and Co.’s announcement that it was about to roll out a new, easy-to-use, disposable pen injector called Vystra hardly caused a stir in October.

Although an executive for the Franklin Lakes, New Jersey-based medical technology maker said the injector, unveiled at a Las Vegas convention, would introduce “a new level of flexibility for drug manufacturers,” the announcement made few ripples outside the industry.

Now, that’s changed, though not for reasons BD wanted. The new device has become the center of a criminal case in which an engineer, Ketankumar Maniar, 36, who helped create Vystra, is accused of stealing thousands of computer files relating to the pen injector shortly before he quit his job, saying he planned to move back to his native India.

HERE'S HOW THE BUSIEST CONNECTORS--MIGHTYBELL FOUNDER GINA BIANCHINI, HOOTSUITE CEO RYAN HOLMES, REDDIT COFOUNDER ALEXIS OHANIAN, IVANKA TRUMP, AND MORE--GIVE THEMSELVES A BREAK.

1. RESPECT THE WEEKEND.

"I'm a natural introvert, as many entrepreneurs (and especially social software entrepreneurs) are. Keeping the weekends quiet is critical. I disconnect and read, watch a movie, or just remember that I am a person outside of my mission." --Gina Bianchini, founder, Mightybell

Given the forecasts of uncertain global economic growth, we might expect companies to hold off from hiring new employees and to limit whatever international hiring they do to emerging markets. But our 2012 global survey of more than 1,000 corporate directors, conducted in partnership with WomenCorporateDirectors and Heidrick & Struggles, said otherwise. The vast majority of board members told us their companies are hiring in double-digits and across the globe.

So the war for talent is on. Are you and your company ready? Do you know what world regions and industries are generating the greatest demand for talent? Is your company prepared to defend your talent from aggressive raids by competitors?

According to industry estimates, there are currently over 500 active crowdfunding platforms – some sources have quoted 9,000 registered domain names related to crowdfunding. While these platforms vary along stated dimensions like form of security to investor—equity, debt, rewards, donation, industry and geography—there is another more important, often not stated, dimension that differentiates emerging platforms: quality. While the term “quality” can mean many different things, in the context of crowdfunding platforms it should come down to this: the more transparently that a platform brings together investors and entrepreneurs with the tools needed to make informed decisions which allow for mutual benefit, whether financial or psychological, the higher the quality of that crowdfunding site. The platforms that achieve this goal responsibly will share five characteristics:

Sixteen of Utah’s most promising and innovative technologies have recently been awarded a $40,000 Technology Commercialization and Innovation Program (TCIP) grant through the Governor's Office of Economic Development (GOED). 

The TCIP grant aims to help entrepreneurs commercialize and build their new companies by accelerating the process of taking university-developed technologies to market.

"Money makes the world go around, of that we can be sure," sang Alan Cummings in the popular stage play "Cabaret." Certainly, the half-million Americans starting new businesses in 2012 have reason to suspect the truth of those lyrics since raising capital, whether to fund a new technological marvel or open a franchised restaurant, is one of the most challenging aspects of starting a new business.

Unfortunately, the need for capital never ends. This means that understanding how to find and shake the "money tree" is critical. And before you begin your search, there are a number of crucial questions you must ask yourself - and answer.

Every enterprise will be affected by the Internet of Things (IoT), the growing phenomenon by which not only people, but also "things" — vehicles, commercial and industrial equipment, medical devices, remote sensors in natural environments — are linked to networks that are connected to the internet. Expect the impact on your business to be profound.

In particular, expect it to challenge your conception of cybersecurity and your ability to deliver it in IoT-enabled digital networks, your commercial operations, and your partner ecosystems. Paradoxically, the very principle that makes the IoT so powerful — the potential to share data instantly with everyone and everything (every authorized entity, that is) — creates a huge cybersecurity threat.

Here is how the venture capital game used to be played around here:

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Steve Dykes for The New York Times Thomas Thurston is the chief executive of Growth Science which uses data science to make business predictions for companies. A friend calls a friend who knows a guy. A meeting is taken. Wine is drunk (at, say, Madera lounge in Menlo Park). A business plan? Sure, whatever. But how does it feel?

This is decidedly not how Google, that apotheosis of our data-driven economy, wants to approach the high-stakes business of investing in the next, well, Google. Unlike venture capitalists of old, the company’s rising V.C. arm focuses not on the art of the deal, but on the science of the deal. First, data is collected, collated, analyzed. Only then does the money start to flow

Wealthier and more educated, first-generation immigrants start and run new businesses at twice the rate of the second-generation.

As Congress engages in overhauling the country’s immigration system, new research finds that wealthier and more educated, first-generation immigrants drive U.S. immigrant entrepreneurship, starting and running new businesses at twice the rate of the second-generation. The 2012 Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) U.S. Report surveying immigrant entrepreneurs was recently issued by Babson College and Baruch College.

GEM researchers also found that first-generation immigrants outshone non-immigrants in recognizing good opportunities (48 percent vs. 43 percent); are more affluent (63 percent vs. 50 percent in top 1/3 income category); and are highly educated (57 percent vs. 45 percent holding bachelor degrees or higher). More than 16 percent of first-generation immigrants started and ran new businesses compared to 13 percent of non-immigrants.

Johns Hopkins University is seeing strong interest for the university’s first business accelerator — a faster than expected response than what director John Fini had projected. “It’s like we’re tapping into something,” said Fini, who also leads the Office of Intellectual Property and Technology Commercialization on the university’s Homewood campus. “The palate was there. They just didn’t have an outlet.” The accelerator, called FastForward, opened in January to Hopkins faculty members and students interested in pursuing business ideas with their research. The university is holding an official grand opening for the accelerator June 27.