As financial institutions come under pressure from competitors and regulators, they are driving up demand for well-trained talent. The need for financially fit graduates is high. "The [financial] job market remains very favourable for business school graduates," says Viet Ha Tran, a senior associate director for the master in finance programs at IE Business School. (BusinessBecause)

Pay attention! We hear this command a lot, often from parents and teachers. People want to remind us to focus on what we’re doing. But I’ve been thinking about a more literal meaning: paying with our attention. Attention is a currency. We choose how to spend it, just like we spend our time, energy and money. (The New York Times)

Lauren Tucker is throwing down a gauntlet. As an African-American woman who built a 25-year career in the (mostly white) world of advertising, she’s skeptical of diversity initiatives like the much publicized $300 million investment that Intel is making to promote ethnic and gender diversity among its ranks. Ditto for quotas and mandates. (Fast Company)

Getting passed up on a promotion can be brutal. Especially when you were so confident they were going to pick you, yet somehow they picked someone else. It can feel like a huge diss and shot to your ego. But while initial feelings of defeat can feel overwhelming, it’s important to look to the next step as soon as possible — and get back on your feet. The sooner you are able to evaluate and move forward, the sooner you will be on to the next awesome thing. (Fortune)

Johnson & Johnson’s recruitment of MBAs and undergraduates surged by 20% last year, underscoring a hiring drive by the world’s biggest healthcare groups as the industry grapples with a rapidly ageing global population and new digital technologies. J&J’s college hiring fell by 10% during 2012-13. But after revising its recruitment strategy with big data the company has turned that figure around. (BusinessBecause)

Thanks largely to social media, the ubiquitous humblebragging is often the way people show off their successes today. Just take a scroll through your Facebook feed and you'll find examples everywhere of people talking themselves up. And it’s not just the average person who does it; even the most successful people humblebrag. (Fast Company)

On a recent telephone job interview, Maria Sciarrino did well enough that the hiring manager asked her to come for an in-person interview. Oh, and could she just tackle one task at home, to give them a sense of her work? It wasn’t the first time Sciarrino, a Philadelphia-based user experience researcher and designer, received homework in her job hunt. More often than not, at some point in the hiring process she’s been given a task – such as designing an elevator interface for a 1,000-floor building – that can take two, four, eight or even more hours to complete. (Fortune)

Three months after the first African American woman was confirmed as the nation's attorney general, another is starting her term as president of the nation's largest professional association of lawyers. Paulette Brown, a labor and employment law partner at the firm Locke Lord LLP in Morristown, N.J., took office Tuesday as the American Bar Association's first African American female president, a role she was elected to a year ago. (The Washington Post)

We know the problem: there aren’t enough women pursuing STEM careers and there are about to be a lot fewer. There are fewer women earning engineering and computer science degrees than there were 10 years ago. We understand the impact: homogenous workplaces aren’t good for business as they report lower profits, less engagement, productivity, and innovation. (Fast Company)

n a four-story building on the fringe of Kenya’s capital, "Ninjas" and "Pirates" are working on finding solutions to problems. The young tech entrepreneurs, laptops plastered in stickers, dress casually and sit around big tables, on couches and sometimes on the floor at the iHub, a tech incubation center that has spawned 150 startups and created more than 1,300 jobs. (Bloomberg)

For heavily pregnant Camilla Francis, another strike on London's underground transport network will mean one more tiring and costly journey to work. The British capital, one of the world's biggest financial centers, looks set to descend into chaos Wednseday as "Tube" drivers called another 24-hour stoppage, following on from last month's action. (CNBC)

There is one bloc that operates outside the business school. While their opinions comprise only 15% of U.S. News’ ranking, they wield heavy influence on what matters most to students: Who gets hired where. Indeed, recruiters act as gatekeepers, advisors, matchmakers, and project managers. And their views on schools don’t always align with academic orthodoxies. Take MIT Sloan, where the major recruiters of the past three classes are McKinsey, Bain, Amazon, and Boston Consulting Group. On a scale of 1 (marginal) to 5 (outstanding), Sloan earned a 4.6 score from recruiters in the 2016 U.S. News’ survey – equal to Stanford and Harvard (and higher than Wharton and Booth). If you’re to believe the U.S. News poll of recruiters, MIT’s esteem among MBA employers has grown. (Poets & Quants)

Classes at the University of North Carolina’s Kenan-Flagler Business School don’t officially start until this week, but most of this fall’s incoming class have been on the Chapel Hill campus for weeks. That’s because summer crash courses in math and statistics, typically offered for incoming M.B.A.s with non-finance backgrounds, have become unexpectedly popular lately – even for students with business experience. (The Wall Street Journal)

Rates Increase August 17! Register Now for The National Black MBA Association® 37th Annual Conference and Exposition 

Celebrating 45 years of Black professional development and executive leadership, The National Black MBA Association® (NBMBAA®), the nation's premier organization for Black business professionals, today announced early bird registration is open for  the upcoming NBMBAA® 37th Annual Conference and Exposition at the Orange County Convention Center, Orlando, FL where more than 9,000 attendees are anticipated to convene for networking, leadership development, and career opportunities.

Registration rates increase August 17, so register today!

Visit Conference Website
Register Now!

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It is nearly 11:30 p.m., and I’m lying in bed, way overtired. I ought to turn out the lights, but instead, my laptop is perched on my stomach. I have just finished reading email from earlier in the day. Now, I am surfing aimlessly, reading the latest news updates about Donald Trump and Bill Cosby, looking over sales on Gilt, watching videos on YouTube and perusing LinkedIn invitations from people I don’t know. "Why don’t you go to bed?" my wife asks. "You need to wake up early." (The New York Times)

Investing in technology can help lift people out of poverty, and investments that use technology for development are good for business, creating millions of new customers. But the development landscape is littered with projects that never got past the pilot stage. When the seed funding from philanthropies or governments runs out, if projects haven’t signed up enough paying users, there’s nothing to fuel growth.(Harvard Business Review)

You can learn these precepts the way most people do--by getting them wrong and setting yourself back. But it doesn't have to be that way. And the more quickly you pick them up, the more successful you can be. (Inc.)

The best advice to those seeking money online might sound more like this: Be thin, fair-skinned, and attractive. It is true that in many realms, crowdfunding has delivered on its democratic promise. Take female entrepreneurship: It’s been shown that professional investors consistently view pitches from men more favorably than those from women, even when the content of those pitches was the same. Kickstarter has subverted that. On the site, projects launched by women are more likely to secure funding than those started by men. (The Atlantic)

When Jeff and Zizi Patmont, both 30, found a house they could afford in the competitive suburban markets outside San Francisco, they had very little time to make an offer. As first-time home buyers, they needed proof of financing fast. So, like most people of their generation, they turned to the Internet for help. (The New York Times)

When he spoke in Parliament in 2011, former Barclays boss Bob Diamond claimed the time for apologizing and remorse from lenders was over. He may have thought he had misjudged the mood when he was forced out of his bank a year later, under pressure from regulators. But as Chancellor George Osborne presses for change at the City's watchdog after sacking its chief, Martin Wheatley, cuts back a key tax on banks, and starts selling the government's stake in Royal Bank of Scotland, are things now finally looking up for our financial institutions? (BBC News)

To get what you want most in life, you need to first settle on exactly what that is. Make a list of things you want. Decide which goals take priority and work toward the lesser goals only after the really important ones are well provided for. Once you have your list together, rank it in order of importance. (CNN/Money)

Back in the day, TVs were all basic black-and-white sets with on-off knobs and a choice of four channels. People saved money in a bank account, carried a department-store charge card, and could fit all of their important papers in the proverbial shoebox. Today’s big-screen entertainment centers come with hundreds of channels and multiple remotes. (Kiplinger's)

Last year, I wrote an article for this publication showing how over the past two decades, talent has taken over as the dominant factor in the economic equation, and today is using its bargaining power to extract an ever-greater share of the value it helps create. Hedge fund managers exemplify the phenomenon: with their clever combination of annual fees and carried interest charges, they take as much as 84% of the fund’s net earnings, while the actual providers of the risk investment capital get the remaining tiny sliver. (Harvard Business Review)

Cable TV’s signal is getting shaky on Wall Street. The latest round of earnings from major media companies is stoking fears that as more consumers drop their traditional pay-TV services, the long-term health of the industry’s biggest players will be threatened. The growing unease about the state of the pay-television ecosystem was on display Wednesday, as media stocks were battered. (The Wall Street Journal)

It’s no secret a lot of us hate meetings. According to the National Statistics Council, 37% of employee time is spent in meetings, and 47% of employees consider too many meetings to be the biggest waste of time during the day – more than social media or email. Some innovative leaders have found ways to make meetings a little more bearable as well as productive. Take a look at what these 12 companies do to boost the effectiveness of the dreaded meeting. (Fast Company)

Imagine someone waved a magic wand and suddenly you were twice as creative. You would be better able to find new ways to deal with problems, situations and people. Ultimately, the ability to generate better ideas in all realms of your life could help you be more productive, successful and happy. So, how can you make it happen? (Inc.)

If you're dealing with a major problem at work, the strategy to overcome your stress is almost effortless: Get a good night's sleep. Research has long shown that there are plenty of benefits to sleep. You're more likely to positively maintain physical health, consolidate new information and process your emotions, since sleeping lets your brain recover from the previous day's stresses. (Inc.)