Open up your mind and say, ahh...

It’s been more than 100 years since
15,000 women marched through the streets of New York City demanding shorter hours, better
pay, and voting rights, but how much progress have women really made in the workforce?

First, the tough news: Although women
make up 49% of the total workforce, they represent 59%
of low-wage workers. That number is down from 63% a decade ago, but research from
the Institute for Women’s Policy Research (IWPR) shows that it will
take until 2056 for women and men’s earnings to reach pay parity–if
the wage gap continues to close at the same pace it has for the last
50 years.

Another sobering statistic is from a study by Grant Thornton International on the status of women in
leadership roles at top private companies worldwide. In 2011, only 20% of those at the helm were women–down from 24% the
year before. The world’s largest economies–the G7 nations, which
include the United States–lag further, with an average of 16%
women leaders. In the U.S., only 3.6 percent of of Fortune 500 CEOs are women. And the recession may have brought the
glass ceiling
down a bit further as companies attempting to reverse the
“mancession” hired more men.

Instead of bemoaning the numbers, though, Kathy
Cloninger, former CEO of Girl Scouts of the U.S., is calling on all
women to raise awareness and push back. As such, Girl Scouts is
spearheading a nonprofit-sector celebration of 2012 as the Year of
the Girl. “But what we really need is a Decade of the Girl, because
we need to take a giant step, and we need more than a year to do it,”
declared Cloninger in her book Tough Cookies: Leadership Lessons from
100 Years of the Girl Scouts.

To do this, Girl Scout’s current CEO
Ana Maria Chavez advocates leading by example. “Girl Scouts was
founded 100 years ago. We need to update the organization and our
model, or else we’re going to lose people.” From using mobile
payment technology to boost sales of those cookies (which totaled
$700 million last year) to holding virtual troop meetings via
web-conferencing, the organization is furthering its mission to train
young girls to be entrepreneurs, managers, and
leaders.

Here’s a look at what other female leaders had to say about breaking down barriers and achieving success, whether you’re clicking into a conference room in Louboutins or pounding the pavement in your Danskos.

Don’t Take Your Foot Off The Gas

Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer of Facebook, gave a now-famous TED talk on why we have too few women leaders. As a mother of two, she is sympathetic to women feeling like they have to choose between career and family, so she offers this: “Don’t leave before you leave. Stay in. Keep your foot on the gas pedal, until the very day you need to leave to take a break for a child–and then make your decisions. Don’t make decisions too far in advance, particularly ones you’re not even conscious you’re making.”

Know Yourself

Ellen Kumata of Cambria Consulting says, “Women tend to
think more broadly about business issues on both the business and the
people sides, including the long term. But they are not thinking
broadly about themselves. They do not see their own potential; they
do not fully comprehend the politics.”

Women who get into and are successful in the C-suite realize that it is perfectly okay to work the
high-end corporate politics in order to pull the top team together in
ways that advance them to the benefit of the organization.

Go Where the Opportunities Are

Alice Korngold, founder of Korngold Consulting, points out that on
nonprofit boards, the person who raises her hand and offers to
spearhead an initiative often gets to do it. “There are an
abundance of boards with no glass ceilings,” she says. “Consequently, nonprofit
boards provide extraordinary opportunities for women to engage at the
highest levels of leadership–including as board chairs, vice chairs,
secretaries of the board, treasurers, and committee chairs.”

Channel Emotion

Cofounder and president of
thatgamecompany Kellee Santiago has proven that her David-sized business
is more than worthy of taking on the lumbering corporate gaming
Goliaths. Her games Flower and flOw both achieved commercial success and
critical acclaim with nary a weapon or zombie corpse warlord in
sight. Flower is all about flow–the concept, not the game–which is based on a psychological theory of engagement that’s gaining
traction in design circles. “When I was at the USC School of
Cinematic Arts media program, we were taught a process that focuses
on starting with the emotion, as opposed to the mechanics,” says Santiago.

Don’t Be Afraid To Scrap

Linda Chavez-Thompson, former executive vice president of the AFL-CIO, was called many names in her 30-year tenure
in the labor movement–and “pushy broad” was one of the nicer ones. “I wear it like a badge of honor. Back in Texas I’d be in meetings where I’d cuss like a
sailor. I didn’t have a choice: How much you could take and dish out
was the measure of others’ respect for you. Remember, I was dealing
with six-foot-tall, 250-pound Texans who smoked big cigars. I
couldn’t let them push me around. While a few of my union brothers
didn’t like me, they sure did respect me.”

Take Charge of Office Politics

Kimberly Davis, president of JPMorgan
Chase Foundation, finds that niche cultures within the overall
corporate culture can be pockets of innovation, if you play your cards
right, in this 30 Second MBA video.

Nellie Akalp is CEO of CorpNet.com. Since forming more than 100,000 corporations and LLCs across the U.S, she has built a strong passion to assist small business owners and entrepreneurs in starting and protecting their business the right way. To learn more about Nellie and see how she can help your business get off the ground quickly, visit here or “Like” CorpNet.com on Facebook.

The U.S. economy has been on shaky ground for several years. Whether it’s news from Greece or Capitol Hill, it doesn’t take much to send serious shock waves throughout Wall Street, and ultimately down to Main Street. People are nervous, and for the American worker, that means staying with a stable job until the economy turns around.

According to the Bureau of National Affairs, only 0.5% of the American workforce voluntarily left their jobs in 2009. In 2010 and Q1 2011 it rose to 0.7% (for context, the reported voluntary turnover rate was 1.1% each year from 2005 to 2007). When approximately 14 million Americans are looking for work, many consider themselves lucky to be bringing home a paycheck at all. In a world full of uncertainty and delicate economies, it’s easy to see why people want to play it safe.

But just how many brilliant entrepreneurs are waiting on the sidelines for the market to come around? After all, how logical is it to jump ship when the economic picture remains precarious? According to a recent study by business consultancy MBO Partners, approximately 14% of employees hope to go independent in the next two years by starting their own business or freelancing.

Many employers have been coping with the economic downturn by cutting salaries and bonuses and reducing the number of new hires. This leads to anxious, demoralized and overworked employees on the lookout for something better. Some employees will remedy this by starting their own business.

Do you have dreams to start your own business, but aren’t quite sure if this is the right time? If so, here are a few things to think about.

---

Funding in This Economy

---

If you’re involved in the tech/social scene, there’s good news that some venture capital opportunities are returning. However, traditional bank funding for Main Street businesses is still tight. As part of the American Jobs Act, President Obama plans to ask the SEC for ways to reduce the “regulatory burdens on small business capital formation,” perhaps via crowdfunding and mini-offerings.

What this means is that many aspiring business owners will need to start small and self-finance. After all, it’s more than possible to start a successful business with just a small investment. Keep in mind, however, that only you and your family can truly assess how much risk is appropriate, and for how long you can forgo a salary.

---

Market Opportunities in This Economy

---

As a result of this recession/recovery, businesses everywhere are looking for ways to cut costs and be more efficient. While the idea of leaner operations doesn’t translate positively for the majority of the American workforce, it can be advantageous for some enterprising small businesses. For instance, if your business idea can help companies reduce costs or increase productivity, look forward to a receptive audience. This is particularly true for freelancers and contract professionals and developers of collaboration tools and other “streamlining” technology.

---

The Advantage of Starting When the Economy Is Down

---

It may seem counter-intuitive, but many experts think an economic downtime is the perfect time to start a business. If you wait for the economy to be in full swing, you’ll be too late.

Right now real estate prices and low interest rates are attractive. You have an opportunity to get the wheels in motion now, so that your product or service/business are ready to take advantage of a return in consumer confidence.

---

Be Honest About Your Motivation

---

Sit down and ask yourself, “Do I really want this business, or am I just trying to escape something else?” If you’re truly passionate about your business idea, get a move on. But workplace disillusion is not a good enough reason to become an entrepreneur. Starting a business takes tremendous sacrifice and hard work; you’ve got to love what you’re doing to keep at it.

---

Starting a business in a down economy can be a scary endeavor, but isn’t the idea of abandoning your dreams even more terrifying? No one can advise you whether starting a business is right for you, or whether the timing is right, but sometimes a challenge can be an opportunity in disguise.

Image courtesy of Flickr, timsnell

Over 700,000 American households have no car and no access to public transit, and transit advocates say those households are also less likely to be able to find and keep a job.

“We knew there were pockets of households who are economically hampered by the fact that they own no car and have no access to transit, but we didn’t fully understand the true scope of the problem until now,” said Adie Tomer, who authored the report for the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program.

It’s no surprise to public transit advocates, who have watched low-income families get priced out of transit-dense urban cores and move to older, car-centric suburbs where housing is more affordable but vehicle ownership is a must. In fact, the Brookings report shows that 42 percent of suburban residents without cars don’t have transit access. Employers have suburbanized, too, moving out of city centers for far-off office parks.

“Folks have followed the affordable housing, followed the jobs, but if they lose a job or lose a little bit of income, or if the car breaks down and they can’t afford to fix it, they’re stuck,” said David Goldberg, communications director at Transportation For America, a public transportation advocacy group.

“You want to hang on to that job at all costs and you want to be seen as a good employee, but if there’s no alternative, you’re in a world of hurt,” he said.

Even where transit access is strong, many employers lie outside the reach of buses and trains. The Brookings report found that most households could only access 40 percent of total nearby jobs in under a 90 minute ride on public transit.

Metropolitan Atlanta residents without cars are worst off when it comes to access to public transit. Nearly a third of carless Atlantans live in areas that can’t be reached by public transit. Not far behind were Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, Phoenix and St. Louis. Surprisingly, car-loving Los Angeles came in tops for transit access for no-car households, with fewer than 1% of the carless not served by transit. New York, San Francisco, Seattle and Miami-Fort Lauderdale rounded out the top metro areas for transit.

Where transit access is low, it’s not all because of broken-down cars and spread out cul-de-sacs. Faced with strained budgets, transit authorities are raising fares, trimming routes and cutting back on frequency. “We’ve seen this large surge in transit ridership in the past few years, but we’ve seen corresponding cuts in service,” said Goldberg.

And though the majority of individuals stranded without public or private transit are low income, it’s a problem that affects anyone who leaves the house. “These days, people are really looking for flexibility,” Goldberg said. “People are looking for ways to save money, avoid traffic congestion, and they are increasingly wanting to be in places where they don’t necessarily have to use a car every time they go somewhere.”

In the short term, Tomer says lack of transit access is a major economic drain on low-income families. ““If you’re going to keep afloat during the recession, you have to be able to get to work,” he said. In the long term, areas with robust public transportation may even recover faster than their car-centric counterparts. “In terms of indicators like real estate values, places that have decent transit, those places are holding their value pretty well,” said Goldberg. “The places that are utterly car dependent have not recovered.”

Photo: Flickr/Joel Mann

Monster is adapting its job search functionality to social networking with BeKnown, an app that lets users set up a professional network on Facebook.

BeKnown, set to go live on Monday, will let Monster users import their data to Facebook and set up professional networks there as well. Matthew Mund, global vice president of product for Monster, reasons that since Facebook has around 700 million members, most people are on it already. “This is the path of least resistance,” Mund says. “You can manage your professional identity and your social identity in one place.” BeKnown will also be targeted at recruiters. Mund says Monster gets about 38 million unique visitors a month.

In starting a network from scratch, though, Monster faces a formidable challenge. Most notably, there’s LinkedIn, which has more than 100 million members and has established itself as the premier professional social network. Monster is also not the first to consider using Facebook as a backdrop for a new professional network — BranchOut, which has more than 800,000 users — is trying to do the same thing.

Monster has added a few bells and whistles to BeKnown that it hopes will diferentiate the offering. For instance, users get Foursquare-like badges when they complete certain professional goals, such as graduating from college. Users can also follow companies and get endorsements a la LinkedIn, features not yet available on BranchOut.

The offering comes as the recession has hit Monster’s bottom line. Monster’s net sales have dropped 11% (annualized since 2008) and its stock price has declined 8.9%. However, the company posted a 23% jump in revenues in its first quarter, which ended March 31.

Commuting sucks, no two ways about it. It’s a slog, and a lot of us are saying to hell with it. A study of eight industrialized countries shows passenger travel appears to have peaked in 2003.

The study suggests demand for travel and automobile ownership has reached a saturation point despite predictions, by the International Energy Agency, of 1.5 percent annual growth through 2030. The researchers concede the findings are not conclusive but say they could mean projections of fuel consumption and CO2 emissions will be lower than previously believed.

“A major factor behind increasing energy use and carbon dioxide emissions since the 1970s has ceased its rise, at least for the time being,” Lee Schipper, one of the study’s two authors, told Miller-McCune. “If it is a truly permanent change, then future projections of carbon dioxide emissions and fuel demand should be scaled back.”

Schipper is a researcher at Global Metro Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and at the Precourt Energy Efficiency Center at Stanford University. He was joined in the research by Adam Millard-Ball, a doctoral candidate at Stanford. They analyzed travel trends between 1970 and 2008 in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Sweden, France, Germany, Japan, and Australia. In each case they plotted the distance traveled per capita per year by car, pickup, bus, airplane, train, light rail, streetcar, and subway. Then they compared the data to the country’s gross domestic product per capita.

They found a correlation between rising prosperity and passenger travel from 1970 to 2003. But passenger travel stopped growing after 2003 even as GDP per capita continued to rise. Motorized travel has plateaued at about 16,155 miles per year per person in the United States, 6,213 miles in Japan and between 8,077 and 10,563 miles in the other countries.

“Since 2003, motorized travel demand has leveled out or even declined in most of the countries studied, and travel in private vehicles has declined,” the authors wrote in their study. “Car ownership has continued to rise, but these cars are being driven less.”

More than rising fuel prices are at work here, as the researchers say. They did not delve too deeply into the reasons why motorized travel has plateaued, but they speculate on several factors:

• Saturation in vehicle ownership. There are about 700 cars per 1,000 people in the United States, which is more cars than licensed drivers. The figure is about 500 cars per 1,000 people in most of the other countries. Car ownership in the U.S. has declined since 2007 due to the recession.
• Rising fuel costs.
• An aging population that doesn’t commute as often or as far.
• Traffic congestion. People spend an average of 1.1 hours per day traveling. Schipper told Miller-McCune, “My basic thesis is, ‘There ain’t room on the road.’”

The authors note that if passenger travel remains the same even as automobiles become more fuel efficient, reducing transportation emissions may not be as daunting as previously believed. They concede the findings are by no means conclusive and more research is needed but their findings should not be dismissed.

“The assumption of continued, steady growth in travel demand, which is inherent in many transport models and energy use projections, is one that planners and policy makers should treat with extreme caution,” they write.

Photo of Atlanta traffic: jandclindenbaum photos / Flickr

According to data just released by Dow Jones, venture capital had a good year in 2010, showing more exits than we’ve seen since the recession began.

Web-based startups had a particularly strong year, with a grand total of 62 aquisitions worth a total of $4.1 billion — almost double both the number of deals and the dollar amount of all deals in both 2008 and 2009. In both prior years, consumer information services startups saw 34 acquisitions worth $2.2 billion and $715 million respectively.

So, who was making all these big acquisitions? In the web sector Google, IBM and Facebook were the top three acquiring companies, nabbing 10, five and five startups respectively. Zynga also made the list with four companies acquired throughout the year.

Across all startup sectors, 514 companies achieved liquidity in 2010 with deals totalling $39.3 billion, up 25% from 2009 exits and much closer to the 613 exits we saw in pre-recession 2007.

Another interesting area of activity in 2010 was initial public offerings. In 2010, 46 venture-funded companies had IPOs that netted a total of $3.4 billion. That’s almost five times both the number and dollar amount of IPOs last year.

Jessica Canning is Dow Jones VentureSource’s director of global research. In a release, she said, “While it isn’t clear if companies with blockbuster potential, like Facebook and Groupon, will come to market in 2011, there is a healthy IPO pipeline. Currently, 44 companies are registered to go public, up from 25 at this time last year.”

Mergers and acquisitions were also up from 2009. Throughout 2010, a total of 445 M&As raised $33.9 billion, up 17% from last year, which saw 381 exits netting $20.8 billion. Another interesting and hopeful note: The median amount paid for a venture-backed company this year was $46 million — that’s a full 70% more than the median in 2009, a mere $27 million.

Here’s a look at the past four years in M&As for consumer-facing web services:

Image courtesy of Flickr, elycefeliz.

There are two recessions going on.

One is gradually ending. This is the cyclical recession, we have them all the time, they come and they go. Not fun, but not permanent.

The other one, I fear, is here forever. This is the recession of the industrial age, the receding wave of bounty that workers and businesses got as a result of rising productivity but imperfect market communication.

In short: if you’re local, we need to buy from you. If you work in town, we need to hire you. If you can do a craft, we can’t replace you with a machine.

No longer.

The lowest price for any good worth pricing is now available to anyone, anywhere. Which makes the market for boring stuff a lot more perfect than it used to be.

Since the ‘factory’ work we did is now being mechanized, outsourced or eliminated, it’s hard to pay extra for it. And since buyers have so many choices (and much more perfect information about pricing and availability) it’s hard to charge extra.

Thus, middle class jobs that existed because companies had no choice are now gone.

Protectionism isn’t going to fix this problem. Neither is stimulus of old factories or yelling in frustration and anger. No, the only useful response is to view this as an opportunity. To poorly paraphrase Clay Shirky, every revolution destroys the last thing before it turns a profit on a new thing.

The networked revolution is creating huge profits, significant opportunities and a lot of change. What it’s not doing is providing millions of brain-dead, corner office, follow-the-manual middle class jobs. And it’s not going to.

Fast, smart and flexible are embraced by the network. Linchpin behavior. People and companies we can’t live without (because if I can live without you, I’m sure going to try if the alternative is to save money).

The sad irony is that everything we do to prop up the last economy (more obedience, more compliance, cheaper yet average) gets in the way of profiting from this one.