luckycharmer / Published
Talk to people inside the SBA and they’ll say the agency is poised to emerge from several trying years of restructuring a stronger, business-friendlier organization.
Then there are SBA critics like Sen. John Kerry who, as chairman of the Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship, contends the agency, under President George W. Bush, has l
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Watch out for a new brand of consumer in 2008: the middle-aged Simplifier. She finds herself surrounded by too much stuff acquired. She is increasingly skeptical in the face of a financial meltdown that it was all worth the effort. Out will go luxury purchases, conspicuous consumption, and a trophy culture. Tomorrow's consumer will buy more ephem
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American business, typically a reliable Republican cheerleader, is decidedly lukewarm about Senator John McCain’s proposal to overhaul the health care system by revamping the tax treatment of health benefits, officials with leading trade groups say.
The officials, with organizations like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable and
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What are small businesses doing to cope with the economic situation? Here are a couple of peeks from Utah and California.
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Cause-related marketing can increase sales as much as 74% in certain consumer-goods categories, and consumers spend twice as long looking at cause-related ads than generic corporate ones, according to a study by Cone and Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business.
After participants were exposed to either a cause-related or a generic corporate
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Nearly three-quarters of American employees think their companies should help extremely poor people around the world if they have the resources, according to a survey conducted by Harris Interactive for Millennium Promise and CareerBuilder.com.
About half of workers cited social responsibility as the top reason their companies should help thos
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Most companies are struggling with how to adapt to serve a new wave of consumers from the Millennial Generation (or Gen Y) - those born between 1982 and 2001 - according to a global survey by the Economist Intelligence Unit and Alcatel-Lucent company Genesys.
The survey asked C-level and other senior executives from around the world how they a
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While we're not much for motivational posters or trite slogans, this ten-point manifesto by Swiss artists Peter Fischli and David Weiss on how to work better is worth a mention. Artist Ryan Gander has a photocopy hung on the wall of his studio, and writes:
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Some fringe benefits--such as paid parking, retirement accounts or paid vacation--are considered standard in today's work environment. And there are others, like the availability of the company jet, that seem like they only belong in the movies. When you want to offer extra incentives or benefits to your employees, consider the following:
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An overwhelming majority (81%) of US small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) say they will maintain or increase their ad spending in the next 12 months
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Bucking the perception that environmentalism is a youth movement, a new survey finds that male and female consumers over age 55 are the most prolific users of green products in the United States.
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Jodi Smith wasn't always so outgoing. In fact, she was so shy in high school that she knew "maybe three people out of a class of more than 1,000" when she graduated.
Heading to college, however, Smith made the conscious decision to reinvent herself, "just to see what would happen." Well, her experiment seems to have worked. After a decade
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In recent days, the debate between Democrat Barack Obama and Republican John McCain has increasingly focused on the economy. When it comes to such discussions, tax policy is where the rubber meets the road. And it is one of the key areas where the candidates are offering dramatically different approaches.
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Presumptive presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain have both put forth sweeping tax proposals that will shape the American economy for the next decade. It's only one of a number of areas where Republican McCain and Democrat Obama bring distinctively different philosophies to bear. But for small businesses, it may be one of the most
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Both Democrat Barack Obama and Republican John McCain have advanced a broad array of tax proposals that are complex, hard to understand, and on many points, difficult to compare. But the Tax Policy Center of the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution, two nonpartisan research organizations, recently published a study that provides the best
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