5 Money Myths That Make Success Harder

What you believe in your gut about money predetermines whether you'll ever have more than enough of it
Your ability to accumulate wealth depends on how you think about money.

If you belief negative things about money, you may be creating an undertow of self-sabotage that's keeping you from being successful. Here's are the beliefs to avoid:

Dealing With Disruption by Adapting Your Business Model

The bromide is that disruption can be the stimulus companies need to innovate, but disruption doesn't feel that way when it happens to you. Here's how Joie de Vivre Hospitality responded.

“Show of hands: How many of your business models have been disrupted?”

Roughly half of the large crowd raised their hands when Chip Conley, founder of Joie de Vivre Hospitality (JDV), posed this question at a Build/Live event.

Conley never expected his industry to fall prey. “When you get into the hotel business, you don’t expect to be disruptively innovated,” he admitted. “This is a business that’s been around forever.”

A Closer Look: 5 Crucial Phases of Startup Growth

Mohan Sawhney, professor at Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management, recently published a research-based list of five transitions companies need to make in order to scale.

As difficult as it can be to go from startup to viable company, the next transitions in business growth--from small business to midsized one, or from midsized to large--can be even more difficult.

"The organic nature of early-stage growth can often leave companies relying on a handful of talented leaders to handle everything from acquiring new clients to managing functions in an informal, reactive way," writes Mohan Sawhney, professor at Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management, in an article on the Kellogg site. "Once a company achieves a certain size, the needs of the business typically overwhelm these ad hoc approaches."

Here's Sawhney's list of five transitions companies need to make in order to achieve scale:

3 Innovative Methods to Battle Leadership Blind Spots

The concept of not knowing what you don't know has gotten its fair share of attention. Here are three practices that can lead to crucial discoveries.

"The important and difficult job is never to find the right answers, it is to find the right question." Peter Drucker, The Practice of Management (1954)

3 Things a CEO Should Never Delegate

If you think you can just hand off financing and investor relations to a specialist, think again.

Entrepreneur Dan Shapiro is a three-time CEO who has raised more than $30 million in venture capital. In 2011, Google bought one of his startups, Sparkbuy. Since then, he's worked at Google. He's writing about these experiences in a forthcoming book called Startup CEO Secrets.

8 Steps to Launch an Idea, in Just a Few Hours

Thanks to the spread of "lean" startup techniques, today's innovators are smarter than ever. But in the race to launch that first prototype, some of them might be moving too fast.

Now that "lean" methodology has taken hold of startup culture, many founders and internal innovation teams grasp the virtue of creating a "minimum viable product" or MVP: An initial prototype they can show to potential customers and investors, in the interest of collecting feedback and making subsequent improvements.

The Secret To Winning An Argument Is Ridiculously Simple

The only way to get someone to agree with you is get them to rethink their own position.

If you want to change someone's opinion, ask them how they would do something instead of why.

The insight comes from University of Colorado psychologist Philip M. Fernbach in a paper with the telling title "Political Extremism Is Supported by an Illusion of Understanding."

5 Traits of a Micromanager (and How to Fix Them)

Micromanagement is the plague of the technology-driven workplace. Here's how to spot it and what to do instead.

Everyone agrees that micromanagement is a bad thing, but not everyone knows how to identify and correct it.

In my experience, micromanagement manifests itself in the following five avoidable behaviors:

4 Money Mistakes That Entrepreneurs Must Avoid

When it comes to personal investing, business owners should resist conventional wisdom (not to mention certain temptations)

You've heard the advice before: Diversify, make time work for you, and embrace stocks. For most folks, those are the core pillars of any investment strategy. For business owners, that's true only up to a point. You are different and need to invest accordingly.

Benefits of Blogging for Your Business

With the expansion of online businesses, you may be researching how an online presence can benefit your company or how you can make money blogging. In fact, there are numerous benefits of blogging that you may never have considered.

Getting Results from the Flexible Workforce

Today's flexible workforce can offer a tremendous upside, but reaping its potential rewards requires a combination of shifts in technology and culture. Here's how to implement those changes and get the payoff the anywhere worker offers.

The concept of the “anywhere office” fits into the growing trend of the flexible workforce and the idea of work being a thing you do, not a place you go. “For small and medium-sized business owners, the flexible workforce can offer a tremendous upside, including access to a larger talent pool, ability to attract those requiring flexibility, increased efficiency by removing commutes, reduction in overhead costs of bricks-and-mortar, and an overall increase in productivity,” says Nancy Martini, president and CEO of PI Worldwide, a provider of human resources solutions.

Are You Wasting Your Most Valuable Asset?

Your most valuable asset is probably the one you use the least effectively.

As an entrepreneur or small business owner you are undoubtedly very busy. You have so much to do every day: customers to find, employees to hire (or fire), potential partners to meet. But is all that stuff moving your business forward? As they say, activity doesn't always equal forward momentum.

5 Must-Have Spaces for Your Office

When it comes to great office design, there's no one-size-fits-all solution. The best workspaces have a variety of areas suited to different needs.

Everyone has heard of the workplace of the future--touted as a utopian, wide-open space with few divisions and natural light throughout--but there are always the whispers, “How can I focus? What about quiet space?” For decades, seas of uninspired cubicles hindered collaboration, but today’s open-plan offices can leave workers exposed, with little opportunity to concentrate. Regardless of which type, monotonous office design can fail you. Whichever direction the pendulum swings, too much of one thing can certainly be a bad thing.

Why You Don't Need Rich Customers to Sell Luxury Goods

Sure, household wealth has diminished, but that doesn't mean you should cater to the super-wealthy.

Being a luxury brand isn't what it's cracked up to be, at least according to the The Wall Street Journal's Justin Lahart. The success that companies selling goods to affluent Americans have enjoyed, he argues, has its limits.