Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own. Key Takeaways Pressure-test your values before a crisis by walking leadership through realistic scenarios and asking what you actually believe, not what you would say. Silence is a message too, so before staying quiet ask whether the issue affects your people, touches a value you’ve publicly claimed, or leaves someone else to define your position. The media requests started arriving before we had answers.Employees wanted to know where we stood. Reporters wanted a statement. Advocacy groups demanded clarity. Every hour that passed without a response seemed to create another headline waiting to…
Author: Staff Writer
Madrid thought it had crushed the Catalonia independence movement in 2017 when it sent police into polling stations, declared the referendum illegal, removed the regional government, prosecuted separatist leaders, and watched Carles Puigdemont flee Spain. Nine years later, the European Union’s highest court has upheld key aspects of Spain’s 2024 amnesty covering acts connected to the Catalan independence process. Roughly 1,600 people were estimated to potentially fall within the law’s scope. Spain has reached the point where the political establishment is pardoning people associated with a separatist movement it once tried to destroy because the underlying political problem never disappeared.…
The Federal Reserve raised interest rates by a quarter of a percentage point Wednesday, its first increase since July 2023. The move, approved unanimously by all 12 members of the Federal Open Market Committee, lifts the Fed’s benchmark rate to a range of 3.75 to 4 percent. Fed Chair Kevin Warsh said the bank had to act on inflation. “The plain fact is that inflation is too high and has been for too long,” Warsh said, according to the New York Times. So what does this actually mean for you? The effects will vary depending on what kind of debt…
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own. Key Takeaways Workarounds often outlive the problem they were created to solve. Once embedded in routines, teams keep using them even after the underlying process improves. Distributed costs are easy to tolerate. Small amounts of duplicate work, checking and waiting spread across many teams can add up to significant organizational drag without creating an obvious trigger for action. Keeping the workaround creates many small, ongoing costs, while removing it can expose the organization creates a concentrated, visible downside. The workaround started for a good reason. A launch team was struggling with unreliable…
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own. Key Takeaways Business fundamentals need to be continually reexamined as technology, customer expectations and the nature of work evolve rapidly. Every generation of entrepreneurs inherits rules from the generation before it. The smartest ones figure out which are still worth following. My parents’ generation largely grew up believing you found a good company, worked hard, moved up the ladder and, if everything went according to plan, stayed there. Today, people change jobs for better pay, flexibility, titles and that elusive thing every company claims to have — great culture. At the same…
Key Takeaways Vermont’s Mountain School charges students about $40,000 for a semester of academics, farm work and communal living. Students clean, cook, tend animals, harvest crops and maintain shared spaces across the school’s 418-acre campus. Some students view the school as a differentiator in the increasingly competitive college admissions process, alongside rigorous classes such as AP Calculus. At Vermont’s Mountain School, students pay $40,000 to trade conventional classrooms for farm work and communal chores for a semester. According to a recent report from The Wall Street Journal, students are eager to explore a life with less technology — and get into…
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own. Key Takeaways As companies grow, payroll is often one of the first processes to reveal how much more complex the business has become. Reviewing exceptions and ensuring accuracy consumes time that could be spent on value-added tasks. AI makes payroll more proactive. Instead of catching errors at the end of a pay cycle, continuous processing can flag overtime, pay-rate and compliance issues earlier — reducing last-minute corrections. The strongest payroll applications act as an intelligent second reviewer, identifying and explaining potential problems while leaving final decisions to human administrators. For most growing…
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own. Key Takeaways Running a business while traveling is about finding the right balance. You need systems, a reliable team and technology that keep things moving, but you also need the discipline to know when to unplug. 11 key strategies help me stay productive without turning every vacation into another week at the office. The real freedom isn’t being able to work from anywhere — it’s building a business that doesn’t need your attention everywhere. Running a business while traveling sounds great in theory, but I’ve learned that it only works when you…
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own. Key Takeaways Systemization thinking, or systems thinking, is the habit of seeing things as systems instead of isolated events. A normal thinker looks at slow customer support, for example, and says, “Let’s reply faster.” A systems thinker asks why support is slow in the first place, then builds templates, routing rules and automations so that speed becomes automatic and doesn’t depend on anyone trying harder. Let me tell you a quick story. There was a new town in Norway back in the 1990s, built by a rich oligarch who decided to create…
ASIA: The major Asian stock markets had a green day today: • NIKKEI 225 increased 438.90 points or 0.69% to 63,923.00 • Shanghai increased 27.321 points or 0.71% to 3,891.601 • Hang Seng increased 46.54 points or 0.19% to 24,713.78 • ASX 200 increased 24.00 points or 0.28% to 8,696.50 • SENSEX increased 332.63 points or 0.45% to 74,336.45 • Nifty50 increased 99.00 points or 0.43% to 23,217.60 The major Asian currency markets had a mixed day today: • AUDUSD decreased 0.0003 or -0.04% to 0.71287 • NZDUSD decreased 0.0001 or -0.02% to 0.57560 • USDJPY increased 0.058 or…