If you were to see my calendar, you'd probably notice a host of time slots greyed out but with no indication of what's going on. There is no problem with my Outlook or printer. The grey sections reflect "buffers," or time periods I've purposely kept clear of meetings.

In aggregate, I schedule between 90 minutes and two hours of these buffers every day (broken down into 30- to 90-minute blocks). It's a system I developed over the last several years in response to a schedule that was becoming so jammed with back-to-back meetings that I had little time left to process what was going on around me or just think.

“Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome.”

Whether in business or life, there's a fine line between success and failure. Booker T. Washington’s quote highlights the inevitability of obstacles on the path to success. In fact, I firmly believe success and failure go hand-in-hand. Those looking to succeed must first fail or learn from those who failed.

One of the big advantages of being an entrepreneur and starting your company from scratch is that you get to set the culture, which is much easier than changing the culture of an existing business. The challenge is how to do it, and how to do it right. Why not learn what you can from companies like Apple, who are leading the way with great growth and a great culture?

Jim Stengel, in “Grow: How Ideals Power Growth and Profit” chronicles a ten-year study of the world’s fifty best businesses, including Apple, and concludes that those who centered their businesses on a culture of improving people’s lives had a growth rate triple that of competitors in their categories.

Choosing someone to start a business with is a lot like choosing who you want to marry. You're going to spend countless hours together and there will often be disagreements, but ultimately you know that you are both working toward a common goal — whether that is a successful business venture or a happy marriage.

Parking can be one of life’s frustrating experiences- trying to find a spot, hunting for change or an attendant to pay, or the ever infuriating experience of receiving a ticket. The “internet of things” (IoT), a combination of sensors, analytics, and communications infrastructure is transforming parking and many other everyday tasks.

Many activities in organizations that are considered innovative risk being missed if we solely use the standard toolkit to measure innovation. In this article we will look at three types of scales that measure intangible aspects of innovation that are easily added to the toolkit of any organization.

The fact that the Works Progress Administration (WPA) is today remembered as an exceptional moment in American economic policy is evidence of the serious blind spots Americans have developed in the way we think about government. Even Millennials, who have experienced perhaps the worst impacts of the current recession, have often celebrated entrepreneurship as a solution to their employment woes, rather than calling for the robust public action that has always been a part of effective responses to economic crisis.

But making the case that addressing the jobs crisis requires much stronger public investment will have to go beyond advocating for larger stimulus packages or revived public employment programs — we must also challenge myths of economic recovery, both past and present, that render activist government invisible.

Gov. Terry E. Branstad released today the Iowa Demonstration Fund Combined Economic and Fiscal Impact study. The report is a third-party review that quantifies the impact of the Demonstration Fund on the Iowa economy. The report was authored by Econosult Solutions Inc. and was commissioned by the Iowa Innovation Corporation in partnership with the Iowa Economic Development Authority and the Iowa Innovation Council.

An effort to help start-up businesses survive and thrive started under the Culver administration got rave reviews Monday from Gov. Terry Branstad and his economic development helpers.

Results of a study on the economic and fiscal impact of the state’s demonstration fund found the $8.7 million and technical assistance provided to 79 companies between 2007 and 2011 to encourage high technology prototype and concept development activities created 600 new jobs and generated $2.1 million in new tax revenue.

According to an NVCA and Thomson Reuters report issued this morning, U.S. venture capital firms raised $4.1 billion from 35 funds in the first quarter of 2013, an increase of 22 percent. But compared to Q4 2012, there is a 14 percent decrease by number of funds.

The actual number of funds raised during the first quarter of 2013 is a 34 percent decline from the number of funds raised last year and marks the slowest quarter for venture capital fundraising, by number of funds, since the third quarter of 2003. The top five venture capital funds (three from Massachusetts) accounted for 57 percent of total fundraising during the first quarter of 2013.

It’s no fluke that entrepreneurs are outgoing, gregarious and confident people with high levels of self-discipline.   People with such personality traits are often drawn to entrepreneurship, driven by the challenges that running your own business presents.   So, could an assessment of your personality traits pre-determine whether or not you’ve got what it takes to become a successful entrepreneur? Perhaps so, it seems.

Innovators get better with age. The stereotype of an innovator is a youngster bringing his dream alive like Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, Bill Gates of Microsoft, and Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak of Apple. But they are not the rule. They are the exception.

Tom Agan wrote an inspiring article in The New York Times on innovators and age. According to research by Benjamin Jones of Northwestern University, a 55-year-old and even a 65-year-old have significantly more innovation potential than a 25-year-old. He based his conclusions on data on Nobel Prize winners and great inventors.

Asking strangers for money has never seemed cooler. With stars like Kirsten Bell and Charlie Kaufman attaching their names to successful crowdfunding projects, the stigma of soliciting donations online has largely been eliminated. And now we have the numbers to prove it.

According to a new report from Massolution out today, individual donors pledged $2.7 billion to more than a million crowdfunding campaigns across the globe in 2012—an 81% increase from 2011. “There is an immense desire to want to support the aspirations of entrepreneurs and people who are pursuing causes,” says Carl Esposti, CEO of the research firm.

The Wisconsin Housing and Economic Development Authority is seeking proposals to form and manage a $3 million venture capital fund that would focus on making investments in Milwaukee.

The agency, known as WHEDA, wants the fund to have a special focus on the Transform Milwaukee area. Transform Milwaukee is a public/private partnership led by WHEDA that is trying to restore economic prosperity to the 30th Street industrial corridor, Menomonee Valley, Port of Milwaukee and an area called the Aerotropolis, which is located south of General Mitchell International Airport.

This week, Gov. John Kitzhaber signed a bill into law granting in-state college tuition to undocumented immigrants in Oregon. So far, 14 states have so-called tuition-equity laws, with Colorado soon to join the group. But in some places, universities are bypassing the political process and creating their own discounted tuition rates for undocumented immigrants.

The modern megacity may have been largely an invention of the West, but it’s increasingly to be found largely in the East. The seven largest megacities (defined as areas of continuous urban development of over 10 million people) are located in Asia, based on a roundup of the latest population data released last month by Wendell Cox’s Demographia. The largest megacity remains the Tokyo-Yokohama area, home to 37 million, followed by the Indonesian capital of Jakarta, Seoul-Incheon, Delhi, Shanghai and Manila.

It's almost too adorable to be true: the immortally comic Woody Allen reaches out to the comically mortal Louis C.K. Allen wants C.K. in his next movie. So as C.K. tells the New York Times, he goes into Allen's office to read for Blue Jasmine.

The character he read for was a total jerk--spousal abuser, the works--and he knew he wasn't right for the part. C.K. says it was "very emotional" for him; he'd been waiting for that email his whole life. Then, two weeks later, Allen's assistant brought over a package: pages from the script and a letter from him. This is what it said:

My company doesn’t hire rock stars, and neither should yours. Think about it: Rock stars are notorious for drinking, partying, and staying out all night. They’re not known for being responsible or particularly hard-working. Is that really the kind of employee you want to work with?

I’m sick of the job descriptions that state that the companies in question only hire rock stars. If you’re not a music producer or a distributor of black eyeliner for men, you don’t want rock stars. Here’s my shortlist of the other personalities that keep popping up in job descriptions that I would rather not bring on our team.

There's been a lot of research on how lack of sleep affects productivity, but the effects are much more detrimental than most realize. According to Health Central, sleep deprivation makes people more anxious, depressed, and at risk for a host of health problems, which it outlines in this great infographic:

"When you fail to remember someone’s name," Darlene Price tells Forbes, "it sends a clear message that you do not deem them important."

Why? The Well Said! author says that since we all take the time to remember important things--birthdays, anniversaries, where the good ice cream is--letting a name slip away suggests that you think theirs is "seemingly irrelevant."

But if you actually remember this new person's name, they'll leave the conversation all aglow.