Your Dog Is a Secret Weapon in the Fight Against Cancer

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Your Dog Is a Secret Weapon in the Fight Against Cancer   Jellybean continues to defy expectations. The 5-year-old Labrador retriever mix jumps up and down from her favorite spot on the couch and walks around the living room with such ease, it’s as if she hadn’t ever had metastatic cancer. Her owners, Patricia and Zach Mendonca, still can’t quite believe the miracle. “She’s got a little bit more of a tug to her step,” Patricia says.Jellybean was diagnosed with bone cancer in her hind leg almost three years ago. Despite amputation and chemotherapy, the cancerous cells quickly spread through her blood to her lungs, as they do in 90 percent of cases in dogs. Survival time at this stage averages two months. “We didn’t have any hopes of curing her,” says Patricia. “We were pretty devastated.” Continued here

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How to Write a Winning Business Plan   You’ve got a great idea for a new product or service—how can you persuade investors to support it? Flashy PowerPoint slides aren’t enough; you need a winning business plan. A compelling plan accurately reflects the viewpoints of your three key constituencies: the market, potential investors, and the producer (the entrepreneur or inventor of the new offering). Continued here

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Why the Lean Start-Up Changes Everything   In the past few years, a new methodology for launching companies, called “the lean start-up,” has begun to replace the old regimen. Traditionally, a venture’s founders would write a business plan, complete with a five-year forecast, use it to raise money, and then go into “stealth mode” to develop their offerings, all without getting much feedback from the people they intended to sell to. Lean start-ups, in contrast, begin by searching for a business model. They test, revise, and discard hypotheses, continually gathering customer feedback and rapidly iterating on and reengineering their products. This strategy greatly reduces the chances that start-ups will spend a lot of time and money launching products that no one actually will pay for. Continued here

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Why Design Thinking Works   While we know a lot about practices that stimulate new ideas, innovation teams often struggle to apply them. Why? Because people’s biases and entrenched behaviors get in the way. In this article a Darden professor explains how design thinking helps people overcome this problem and unleash their creativity. Continued here

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How Apple Is Organized for Innovation   When Steve Jobs returned to Apple, in 1997, it had a conventional structure for a company of its size and scope. It was divided into business units, each with its own P&L responsibilities. Believing that conventional management had stifled innovation, Jobs laid off the general managers of all the business units (in a single day), put the entire company under one P&L, and combined the disparate functional departments of the business units into one functional organization. Although such a structure is common for small entrepreneurial firms, Apple—remarkably—retains it today, even though the company is nearly 40 times as large in terms of revenue and far more complex than it was in 1997. In this article the authors discuss the innovation benefits and leadership challenges of Apple’s distinctive and ever-evolving organizational model in the belief that it may be useful for other companies competing in rapidly changing environments. Continued here

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The Discipline of Innovation   In the hypercompetition for breakthrough solutions, managers worry too much about characteristics and personality—“Am I smart enough? Do I have the right temperament?”—and not enough about process. A commitment to the systematic search for imaginative and useful ideas is what successful entrepreneurs share—not some special genius or trait. What’s more, entrepreneurship can occur in a business of any size or age because, at heart, it has to do with a certain kind of activity: innovation, the disciplined effort to improve a business’s potential. Continued here

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You Need an Innovation Strategy   Without such a strategy, companies will have a hard time weighing the trade-offs of various practices—such as crowdsourcing and customer co-creation—and so may end up with a grab bag of approaches. They will have trouble designing a coherent innovation system that fits their competitive needs over time and may be tempted to ape someone else’s system. And they will find it difficult to align different parts of the organization with shared priorities. Continued here

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The Right Time to Get Yourself a Career Coach   Senior executives often hire career coaches to help them figure out where they want to grow and come up with a strategic plan around how to fulfill their potential. But having a coach earlier in your career can accelerate your path to that leadership role by helping you develop skills that are critical to your career progression. Here is how to find yourself the right coach. Continued here

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Career Crush: I Want to Play Video Games for a Living   Steve Sarumi: The majority of the time, I stream Pokémon. There’s a category on Twitch called “Just Chatting,” which is literally what it sounds like. You just hang out with your audience. And I think Pokémon really is mostly “just chatting,” but with Pokémon in the background. I do anything from shiny hunting (searching for rare Pokémon), to battling, to playing through games, to doing weird challenges, and collecting. Continued here

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Warren Buffett Says There's 1 Smart Choice That Separates Successful People From Everyone Else   According to Buffett, pick your long-term business connections wisely. Continued here

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Why This Entrepreneur Took Over His Mom's Business   Dr. Laura Jacobs built Normatec with one goal in mind, to help as many people as she could. Now her son carries on her mission. Continued here

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8 Common Challenges Facing Every New Product or Service Offering   Business owners are often sadly disappointed when a new product fails to provide growth. Continued here

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Boost Employee Engagement and Productivity With a Surprising Addition: Office Pets   Your next employee of the month might be of the four-legged variety. Learn why pets deserve a spot on your roster and how to make it happen. Continued here

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Buzz Aldrin's Big Tip for Ambitious Leaders in Just 6 Words   And it's not rocket science. Continued here

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Warren Buffett Just Revealed 7 Principles Every Founder Should Know   Powerful lessons for living a happy life and growing a successful business. Continued here

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To Retain Customers, Retail Brands Are Rolling Out Paid Memberships   For some companies, fee-based membership programs are proving to be compelling incentives for shoppers looking to get a better bang for their buck. Continued here

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A Strong Leadership Message From Metallica Frontman James Hetfield   For building a thriving team, cultural fit is more important than functional fit. Continued here

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A.I. For Leaders: Why an Online Course Could Be a Good Investment   Platforms such as Udemy and edX have launched courses for business leaders, not just tech professionals. Continued here