Good bosses look good on paper. Great bosses look great in person; their actions show their value. Yet some bosses go even farther. They're remarkable—not because of what you see them do but what you don't see them do. Where remarkable bosses are concerned, what you see is far from all you get:

Being likeable will help you in your job, business, relationships, and life. I interviewed dozens of successful business leaders for my last book, to determine what made them so likeable and their companies so successful. All of the concepts are simple, and yet, perhaps in the name of revenues or the bottom line, we often lose sight of the simple things - things that not only make us human, but can actually help us become more successful. Below are the eleven most important principles to integrate to become a better leader: 1. Listening

"When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen." - Ernest Hemingway

Listening is the foundation of any good relationship. Great leaders listen to what their customers and prospects want and need, and they listen to the challenges those customers face. They listen to colleagues and are open to new ideas. They listen to shareholders, investors, and competitors. Here's why the best CEO's listen more.

No authoritarian authority exists that determines whether a given word is valid or bogus. In any language, there's a complex and imperfect vetting procedure; at least in English, most serious writers agree on the correct or preferred form of a word that is one of two or more variants or on whether a word is acceptable at all. Here's a list of words that have been under scrutiny in this approval process:

1. Administrate: A back-formation of administration and an unnecessary extension of administer

2. Commentate: A back-formation of commentator and an unnecessary extension of comment

3. Dimunition: Erroneous; the correct form is diminution (think of diminutive)

4. Exploitive: A younger, acceptable variant of exploitative

5. Firstly: As with secondly and thirdly, erroneous when enumerating points; use first and so on

Entrepreneurship is more about building a business than inventing a product. It’s more about the quality of the execution, rather than the quality of the idea. Most importantly, it’s more about being a proactive leader who connects to customers and the team deeply, rather than a bright light that struggles to be seen amidst the glare of a million other bright lights.

Achim Nowak, noted business coach and author, in his new book “Infectious: How to Connect Deeply and Unleash the Energetic Leader Within,” talks about how technology today allows entrepreneurs to communicate at a furious pace. They exchange more emails, texts, and tweets every day. Yet many know less and less about how to really connect, and get people to commit to their business or product.

Where do you go to find the rich and famous — or perhaps the not-so-famous— innovators in the area?

Well, the short answer is Kendall Square. Scott Kirsner recently wrote about the popular hangouts for “the movers and shakers of the innovation economy.” His list is compiled by dozens of entrepreneurs and investors technology, life sciences, and cleantech who work in areas all around Greater Boston. Here is a list of 15 and what makes them special.

While your company likely can't afford to advertise during the Super Bowl -- a 30 second commercial cost nearly $4 million, small-business owners can learn some valuable marketing lessons from the game's most successful ads.

"Super Bowl commercials teach entrepreneurs two things: the art of getting your message down to 30 seconds and the art of creating an enticing narrative," says Matt Eventoff, founder of Princeton Public Speaking, a New Jersey-based firm that specializes in message development strategy. "Small-business owners should watch the ads again and take notes; the ideas might prompt new ways to think about their own marketing."  

The United States hasn’t seen this much patenting activity since the Industrial Revolution, according to a new report from the Brookings Institution Metropolitan Policy Program.

The report analyzed patenting trends on a regional level from 1980 to 2012 and found three decades of growth, although 92 percent of the innovation is concentrated in only 100 of the nation’s 360 metropolitan areas, home to 59 percent of U.S. residents, the report found.

While the United States remains a global leader in research and development, it has fallen behind in some areas, the report found.

Nearly two years ago, I championed the idea of making it legal for entrepreneurs to raise money by selling equity stakes in their companies online. This kind of crowdfunding came much closer to becoming a reality when President Obama signed the Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) Act into law in April. It was one of the few bipartisan efforts to support small business that emerged from Washington in recent years.

The businesses that stand to gain the most from the crowdfunding provision in the law are those seeking small sums—less than $100,000. The goal is for the undercapitalized owners of the local car repair shop or restaurant to be able to inexpensively raise money from individuals without getting engulfed in red tape.

It’s better for a CEO to describe success than to prescribe the exact methods employees must use to achieve it. This is done, says Chegg CEO Dan Rosensweig, by establishing a company vision and sharing it often with employees. He advises to not think in terms of business models, but rather to reframe the questions to ensure your company is thinking big enough. Then, hire people willing to be part of a team that will be integral to this vision.

Call it the miracle on Francis Street. Last year Ryan and Jenny Carpenter got a deal seemingly too good to be true in their Kansas City, Missouri, neighborhood: an installer from Google Fiber wired their bungalow to give them at least 50 times their previous Internet access speed and a substantially better TV service, all for only $125 a month, tax included—just a few dollars more than they’d been paying Time Warner Cable.

Ryan Carpenter still speaks in amazed tones of the December night when he simultaneously streamed four high-definition TV shows (two Christmas specials, an episode of The Office, and a Kansas University basketball game), recording three of them on the included two-terabyte DVR. That’s two more shows than he could previously watch at once, with plenty of capacity to spare. “It just blows my mind—we can be running video via Wi-Fi on two smartphones and on two laptops, and also be watching and recording TV shows all at the same time,” he says. “It’s a vastly superior service.” And that’s even without touching high-bandwidth Web apps that work seamlessly at superfast speeds, such as 3-D maps of cities that have imperceptible load times.

SPECIAL REPORT / Europe seeks to capitalise on clusters of internet-driven businesses – such as those in Dublin and Helsinki – whose success relies on a mixture of policy initiatives ranging from education through to taxation, but also word-of-mouth. One of the key drivers leading companies to gather in Silicon-Valley-style hubs, however, is the simple fact that others have done so.

“When you gather a lot of talented people in one location there is obviously a natural exchange of ideas and cooperation between the companies in that cluster,” said Kenneth Fredriksen, vice president of Huawei’s Central European and Nordic region.

Fredriksen said the Chinese tech giant was lured to invest in a new research and development centre in Finland because of the “structured and unstructured ways that hubs help companies to create and share ideas”.

This week we can expect President Obama to speak to immigration reform and a new immigration proposal to be unveiled in the Senate. I have discussed in this blog the importance of creating a U.S. Startup Visa for high skilled immigrants—but only in the context of America’s loss. We take a look today on what America's loss in terms of brainpower and innovation skills means for one nation—India.

In recent years, there has been a growing trend in the U.S. of Indian and Chinese highly skilled immigrants leaving to return to their home countries. These returnees are relatively young (35 and 37) and most of them hold Master's and PhD degrees in management, technology or science. In an often cited Kauffman Foundation study, 56.6 percent of Indian respondents indicated that they would be likely to start a business in the next five years, and 53.5 percent of them believed their best opportunities for entrepreneurship were in their home country. Is the Indian startup ecosystem leveraging the growth engine leaving the U.S.?

This infographic from DrugPatentWatch shows that Sanofi Aventis, Merck, and GlaxoSmithKline face the most patent expirations this year. Perhaps not surprisingly, GlaxoSmithKline and Sanofi Aventis are also among the firms with the most drug patents.

We’ve all been subjected to presentations that bombard us with an endless stream of PowerPoint slides or other forms of visual “aids.” We read a screen covered with wordy bullet points and dense text, only to forget most of it by the time we leave the room.

Visual aids such as PowerPoint, Keynote, and Prezi can add flavor to your presentation – or they can suck the life out of it. We use visuals to foster a professional image and reinforce our brand, while helping the audience make sense of our message. But the audience will only reap the benefits if the speaker steers clear of a few common pitfalls. When constructing visual media, it is best to consider the following:

Running a business is time consuming and to make sure that a business is successful it is essential to manage your time effectively. It is important to spend time on the core tasks. Too much effort spent in the wrong areas will not only affect productivity but will also lead to stress and anxiety – a recipe for failure.

Prioritize

Prioritize the tasks for the day and then for the week. Make sure that the plan optimizes the times of the day when people are most productive – that will depend on the individual. Set out a plan which will help to achieve all the key areas of work and identify what could be given to someone else to do.

After the recorder, the violin is the instrument most commonly offered to children by state schools in the UK.

The violin is a challenging instrument. Rapid, independent motion of the digital joints in the left hand is desirable. This study was conceived after an 11-year-old patient volunteered that she had given up playing the violin because of difficulty and discomfort manoeuvring the left small and ring fingers independently. On exami¬nation, she was found to have absent FDS (flexor digitorum superficialis) function in the small finger. The research investigated whether lack of inde-pendent movement of the small finger PIPJ affected the musical ability of string players. Because an ana¬tomical variation is fixed, training and strengthening exercises will be unlikely to correct any issues of technique that arise as a result.

Organizational social-media literacy is fast becoming a source of competitive advantage. Learn, through the lens of executives at General Electric, how you and your leaders can keep up.

Few domains in business and society have been untouched by the emerging social-media revolution—one that is not even a decade old. Many organizations have been responding to that new reality, realizing the power and the potential of this technology for corporate life: wikis enable more efficient virtual collaboration in cross-functional projects; internal blogs, discussion boards, and YouTube channels encourage global conversations and knowledge sharing; sophisticated viral media campaigns engage customers and create brand loyalty; next-generation products are codeveloped in open-innovation processes; and corporate leaders work on shaping their enterprise 2.0 strategy.

Drug-resistant bacteria are a growing problem at hospitals across the country. The bacteria, such as Staphylococcus and Clostridium difficile, are difficult to prevent and impossible to treat.

"The problem is expanding, and it's going up and up and up," explains Dr. Trish Perl of Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. "We're running out of antibiotics to treat, and so the challenge is can we prevent?"

At Johns Hopkins, doctors have turned to a new technology to prevent the so-called superbugs: robots. The machines spray toxic doses of hydrogen peroxide into sealed hospital rooms, killing any bacteria.

Despite their best efforts to stabilize abdominal wounds sustained on the battlefield, military first-responders have few options when it comes to stanching internal bleeding caused by, for example, gunshots or explosive fragments. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) says it is studying a new type of injectable foam that molds to organs and slows hemorrhaging. This could provide field medics with a way to buy more time for soldiers en route to medical treatment facilities.

The polyurethane foam begins as two liquids stored separately and injected together into the abdominal cavity. One liquid is a polyol, a type of alcohol. The other is made of isocyanates, a family of highly reactive chemicals widely used in the manufacture of flexible and rigid foams. Within about one minute after a medic inserts the liquids at the midline—near the belly button—the mixture expands to nearly 30 times its original volume and then turns solid. It slows or halts hemorrhaging by sealing wounded tissues. Once the patient can get to intensive care, doctors would remove the solid mass and then perform surgery to permanently stop any bleeding.

ACCORDING to the calendar, it is 2013, but anyone who watched the commercials during Super Bowl XLVII on Sunday night might be excused for believing it was a year when “Modern Family” meant the Cleavers, the Bradys, the Huxtables or the Conners.

The commercials that CBS broadcast nationally during the game were, by and large, disappointing. They represented a missed opportunity for marketers and agencies to demonstrate that they had at least some understanding of how contemporary consumers think and behave.

Alas, the so-called creative minds of Madison Avenue chose once again to fall back on familiar strategies and themes that would have appealed more to viewers during the Eisenhower, Nixon, Reagan or Clinton administrations.