It’s an interesting question, and one that managers everywhere would love a definitive answer to, because that’s an easy fix. If all it takes to improve performance is a shirt and tie, a quick mass e-mail and you can go take a long lunch, right? Mission accomplished and productivity up 4-6 points.

Entrepreneurs are a breed apart. The entrepreneurial spirit is not something you can teach; you’ve either got it or you haven’t. Having said that, technology can help to sharpen and enhance your natural skills. Below, you’ll find a marvelous collection of apps that, once you begin using them, you’ll wonder how you ever got by without them.

One of the biggest problems facing any business is how to handle customer support. Most businesses take the wrong approach towards customer support; they treat it as overhead or expense, when it can, in fact, be the core of making money in almost any company.

Attention Target shoppers, we regret to inform you that up to 40 million of you may have had your credit card information stolen, and up to 70 million may have had some, or all of your personal information compromised. Oops. Have a nice day.

Five Months After The Target Data Breach – Lessons Learned

Despite the bit of snark above, Target’s post-breach behavior was solid, if not exemplary.

First things first, if you haven’t heard of hashtag shopping, you’re not alone. A month after its roll out, it had less than four thousand users, so it’s not like it’s an idea whose time has come. It’s an emerging thing that some companies are toying with right now.

E-Commerce and auction giant eBay confirmed yesterday that the website did indeed take a hit from hackers, and that the database that contains user passwords and usernames was compromised.

At the moment, eBay believes that no financial information was accessed.

It’s a tough world out there in business today. You work hard at your business, and you value your staff – their abilities, their dedication to their jobs, and their loyalty to the company. You want to reward your staff, but you’re at a loss as to how to go about it.

It may be somewhat more appropriate to call this article, “How Instagram Changed The Internet.” I say that because Instagram’s surging popularity was the primary reason for both the recent FaceBook redesign, and now Twitter’s. Many people will say that Twitter’s redesign is in many ways a carbon copy of FaceBook’s, and it’s true that they do bear some, even many similarities.

Training is one of those aspects of running a business that never seems to get a lot of attention, and what press it does get is usually negative. Employees do it only grudgingly, and most businesses take a scatter shot or minimalist approach to it. It often seems to wind up being one of those necessary evils that people slog through when they have to.

Sometimes, the worst happens. You’ve got a crew of great people and the bottom falls out. If you don’t let some of them go, everybody gets let go when you have to shut your doors. It’s a no-win situation, but business is driven by the market, by demand.