Most people think that the Peter Principle (employee rises to his level of incompetence) only applies to large organizations. Let me assure you that it is also alive and well within startups. I see startup founders and managers who are stalled transplants from large organizations, as well as highly-capable technologists trying to start and run a business for the first time.

Forty years ago, in a satiric book named “The Peter Principle”, Dr. Laurence J. Peter first defined this phenomenon. The principle asserts that in a hierarchy, members are promoted so long as they work competently. Sooner or later they are promoted to a position at which they are no longer competent, and there they remain, unless they start or join a startup to get the next level.

San Francisco-based startup AppDirect, which provides software to power online app stores, competes as hard as any company to hire engineers—especially because it’s in the Bay Area, where technical talent is at a premium.

Now AppDirect is trying a new way to lure top software developers. Late last year it announced an incubator program for developers, offering them a chance to work on the AppDirect engineering team for 2 1/2 years while also getting exposure to different parts of the business–legal, human resources, marketing and so on.

Despite the massive changes we've seen in our personal lives from technology, the workplace has been remarkably static. Many of us still work in big offices, in cubicles, and at the same desk and computer every day.  Not for much longer. The workplace of the future is going to be less centralized, more mobile, and more flexible than anything most people outside the startup and freelance economy have experienced before.

There are many differences between the people inclined to take the relatively safe path of becoming a manager at someone else's business, and those who take the leap and become entrepreneurs. It turns out that extends to the way their brains work.  A recent study from MIT professor Maurizio Zollo scanned the brains of entrepreneurs and managers while they did two different types of activities, exploitative tasks, associated with optimizing a current or ongoing task, and explorative tasks, where you search for new ways to achieve broad goals.   

Most books use the same evidence to justify the benefits of goal setting. A famous study, performed at Yale in 1953, supposedly proved beyond doubt that goal setting is the secret to success. This study showed only 3 percent of surveyed graduates set goals. Twenty years later, it is said there was a follow-up survey. The results showed that the 3 percent had a higher net worth than the rest of the graduation class in total.

It is a compelling story, but it is fiction. No such data exist. In 2008, a Yale research associate reported that, after a flurry of articles citing the study in publications as diverse as Dental Economics and Success magazine, she was prompted to undertake an exhaustive search of Yale alumni archives. She concluded: We are quite confident that the study did not take place. We suspect it is a myth.

That’s what Josh Kopelman thought when he was contemplating turning his angel investment hobby into an actual firm. And, having built four successful companies prior, he approached it the way a founder would approach a startup, rather than a managing partners approach to building a firm.

“If you look at the venture business, for an industry that funds innovation – it really doesn’t have that much,” he said at PandoMonthly New York tonight. “There are many firms where I’d say their single greatest innovation over the last 20 years was raising carried interest from 20 percent to 30 percent.”

Stanford’s student startup accelerator, StartX, had its eighth demo day tonight in Palo Alto, showing off the latest class of 11 companies* to go through the program. The accelerator, which just raised another $400,000, has already had about 100 startups go through, raising $100 million along the way between them. This next batch is hoping to follow that lead.

Here’s the next class of Stanford StartX companies, in the order they were presented:

Pixlee. This startup wants to use user-generated photos to help brands market themselves. The idea is not just to collect and curate photos that will resonate with consumers, but also to present them in a personalized fashion. The idea is that everyone will get a different experience, not just see all the same photos. The company had been chosen by the 49ers for a fan-engagement campaign around the Super Bowl, which had more than 50,000 photos submitted. It’s also being used by brands like Yamaha, Major League Soccer, and the NBA.

Lets collaborate on building a vibrant biotech (or any other) community! Nice chestnut, but how does one design a community that functions across industries, geographies, support organizations, academic institutions and federal labs, each with very different missions and views of their (and others’) roles? How do you find a shared vision for these variant groups, one that drives growth for the greater region and doesn’t cause the players for fight over each opportunity as if it is the last scrap of possibility we’ll see? How do you prevent such a vision from becoming another dusty whitepaper, where behaviors weren’t aligned to make it happen?  I had a chance to discuss how such a collaboration should be designed with Rich Bendis, President & CEO of BioHealth Innovation (BHI), an organization which spans from Rockville to Baltimore.

Pampers were a massive success until 1976, but a marketing error made a mess so big that even a diaper titan couldn't contain it. Here's how P&G finally got both its diaper brands back on track.

Back in the late 1950s, a P&G chemist named Vic Mills had a profound dislike for cleaning his grandson’s cloth diapers; he was convinced there had to be a better way and began studying the nascent disposable-diaper product segment, which then represented less than 1 percent of the billions of diaper changes in the United States every year.

The U.S. is a pretty unhappy place compared to Europe, Australia, and South America. That’s according to a survey of 10,000 people in 29 countries from market research company GfK Custom Research. Conducted in 2009, the Anholt-GfK Roper City Brands Index, claims that San Francisco is the only U.S. city to crack the list of the 10 happiest cities in the world. Who else came out on top, and why?

When Eric Migicovsky took the stage at the Consumer Electronics Show this morning, he looked nervous in comparison with the slick executives who had preceded him from giants such as Samsung and Intel.

“It’s the first time that I’ve ever attended a press conference,” he confessed, as he launched the Pebble smart watch, a device that can display notifications from, and be used to control, a smartphone. The device has an e-paper screen and displays notifications such as text messages and incoming calls, and can also control some phone functions, such as music playback.

Venture capitalists invested $1.4 billion in digital health companies in 2012, according to a report from Rock Health, FierceHealthIT reports (Gold, FierceHealthIT, 1/8).

The figure represents a 45% increase from the $986 million invested in 2011. In addition, the total number of venture capital deals in the digital health sector increased by 56% between 2011 and 2012.

According the report, the investment growth suggests that investors increasingly are favoring the digital health sector over traditional health care fields, such as biotechnology and medical devices.

While most Americans were preparing to ring in the New Year at parties across the U.S. on New Year’s Eve, the President and Congress were still scrambling to avoid the “Fiscal Cliff” which would hike taxes on most of the New Year’s revelers while implementing wide-ranging deficit-reducing federal budget cuts. Despite plenty of time to work out an agreement before the November election and after, the New Year began with Congress still needing to send the final package to the President. Although the President did sign the agreement, which did increase income and capital gains taxes, the budget cuts, or Sequestration, were delayed until the end of February 2013. The fate of Sequestration cuts, the need to increase the National Debt Limit beyond $16 trillion, and the need to fund the federal government beyond March, combine to give the President and Congress another chance to go through another round of negotiations that could again result in a last-minute, late-night agreement.

To view a state's data page simply click on your desired state. Alabama Alaska Arizona Arkansas California Colorado Connecticut Delaware Florida Georgia Hawaii Idaho Illinois Indiana Iowa Kansas Kentucky Louisiana Maine Maryland Massachusetts Michigan Minnesota Mississippi Missouri Montana Nebraska Nevada New Hampshire New Jersey New Mexico New York North Carolina North Dakota Ohio Oklahoma Oregon Pennsylvania Rhode Island South Carolina South Dakota Tennessee Texas Utah Vermont Virginia Washington West Virginia Wisconsin Wyoming   he following pages highlight recent corporate facility projects, new laws and incentives policies, wages, employment, demographics and cost-of-doing-business facts in one easy-to-digest compendium.

Total state government revenue increased to $2.3 trillion in 2011, up 11.3 percent from $2.0 trillion in 2010, according to the latest report from the U.S. Census Bureau issued in early December. General revenues were $1.7 trillion in 2011, a 5.7-percent increase from 2010. General expenditures by state governments rose 3.7 percent in 2011 to $1.7 trillion.

The Angel Resource Institute studied investment trends over the course of 2012 from 541 deals and $804.4 million in total rounds. It pulled together a report on the state of angel investing. Here are the findings.

BI Intelligence has skimmed through many of the "Mobile In 2013" lists to create our own top 10.  These are the predictions that either came up again and again, or that echoed our own analysis and data.  We've tried to include predictions from across the mobile ecosystem. But many of the important trends— such as the slow-but-steady gains of HTML5, and mobile advertising's consolidation— will have impacts that cut across the industry. We've linked the sources so that you can view the original predictions. Here they are: 

Hospitals aren’t the only ones under pressure to become more efficient in how they deliver care.

Physician offices, too, are faced with the challenge of improving care outcomes and cost efficiency while keeping up with technological changes under meaningful use. And they’re employing some creative tactics to be able to make better use of their time and spend adequate time with patients — some doctors, for example, are offering shared appointments for people with similar conditions.

Others may be using some of these technologies that companies have developed (or are developing) specifically to make a physician’s work flow smoother and more efficient. In fact, a few of the examples below were actually developed by doctors themselves.

Much is being said on a daily basis about the “Series A crunch.” Supposedly, there aren’t enough venture investors to support all the startups winning seed funding these days. I will give you my thoughts on how to deal with the issue. Please note that this advice is entirely for entrepreneurs, not investors.

First and foremost, decide whether you are a real entrepreneur, or a pseudo entrepreneur.

Real entrepreneurs come to the game with vision, conviction, and an all-consuming desire to build something. They cannot help being entrepreneurs. So financing or not, these are the kinds of people who will figure out how to proceed.

I'm sitting under a scrubby pine tree in the dappled winter sunshine, watching traffic sail over the Williamsburg bridge. Near me, an adorable black dog with an enormous shovel-shaped head and seemingly no legs is sniffing a clump of grass. A red-and-yellow ferry glides across the East River, and I see cranes topping the Freedom Tower in the distance. When I close my eyes, I hear a bird chirping, the rumble of boat engines, and the gentle flapping of a flag in the breeze. Quite a stiff breeze, actually…

F*ck this. It’s freezing. My bare fingers are curling into useless, aching little commas. But I still think you should work from a park bench occasionally, and here's why:

1. Sunshine protects against mood disorders. Up to 5 percent of the population in temperate regions suffers seasonal affective disorder in winter. A study of Danish (naturally) civil servants found that those who spent more than two hours a day working outside were less likely to have mood problems.

Kansas and Missouri have long sought to woo employers with tax incentive packages, effectively locking the two states in a border war for jobs.

In 2011, the Missouri Department of Economic Development dished out more than $12 million in tax breaks for Applebee’s parent company DineEquity to move its headquarters across the state line. Last year, Kansas scored a victory of its own with a multimillion-dollar deal luring pharmaceutical firm Teva Neuroscience away from Kansas City, Mo. This back and forth competition isn’t unique to Kansas and Missouri. A new report by Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group Good Jobs First examines high-profile bidding wars in recent years, showing how far some governments will go to secure jobs.