New York SBDC Research Network

The balance sheet for any company will list all kinds of assets and liabilities, except company culture. There should be a way to account for this, because culture is a critical factor in the success of any company. A great corporate culture is like a propellant – it helps accelerate an organization toward achieving its goals. Likewise, a toxic corporate culture is like dragging a boat anchor behind you: no matter how high the throttle is set you just can’t seem to pick up speed. Great leaders understand the value and impact of culture, and that’s why they put effort into creating a healthy one. Culture is the collectively held values, ideology, and social processes embedded in a firm. Every organization has a culture, whether it was created intentionally or is the product of evolutionary chance. For example, a set of contrasting corporate cultures is empowerment and fear. Lessons in Corporate Culture

From the Washington Post : Small business owners and entrepreneurs from around the country have started to feel the ripple effects of the closure — some left waiting for contract updates, some left waiting for loans, and some left waiting to see whether customers are going to keep walking through their doors. "We have all seen the offices locked down, the monuments closed," President Obama said during a speech on Thursday. "But the impacts of the shutdown go way beyond those things that you are seeing on television." See also: Headaches Loom for SBA Borrowers in Shutdown's Second Week

As an avid LinkedIn user, I have discovered some wonderful tips and tricks that don’t seem to be universally known to the LinkedIn community. Most people know what LinkedIn is, but many don't know how to use it to its full potential. It’s taken some time to learn these tricks. LinkedIn can be a little hard to initially navigate, but don’t let this scare you away. It is one of the absolute best tools you can use to build your personal brand! Here are 5 LinkedIn tricks I wanted to share to make your LinkedIn experience just a little bit easier. What you did not know about LinkedIn

There has been no shortage of conversations about women at mid-career and the challenges they face. Offering some clarity are 10 rising stars in the field of communications, who are the winners of the inaugural New York Women in Communications' WiCi Awards. Drawing on their careers in advertising, journalism, marketing and social good, the WiCi Award winners shared words of wisdom, including the best advice imparted upon them by the people they look up to most. Lesley Jane Seymour, editor-in-chief of More magazine, asked the honorees on Sept. 18 about the turning points in their careers and their biggest influencers, which ranged from encouragement from Steve Jobs to sage advice from their parents. More from Mashable here .

It's one of the first things people ask you when you tell them about your new job: What are the benefits? Health insurance is such an integral part of life that people take jobs just so they will be guaranteed issuance. Now that the Affordable Care Act application process is up and running, people have been buzzing about how it will affect their lives. Startups and entrepreneurs, though, have the potential to be the biggest winners come January when the Obamacare plans go into effect. Chris Mihm, owner of Medicoverage, believes that for a few different reasons the Affordable Care Act is going to revolutionize startup hubs around the country. "Group insurance offers guaranteed issuance – every single employee will get approved no matter if they have cancer or any pre-existing condition of any type," Mihm said of the way health care traditionally worked. "On January 1, 2014, every single person who signs up for insurance is guaranteed issuance. So even if you have a

Chess Media Group has released its latest whitepaper on how to select an enterprise collaboration software vendor. Instead of providing a review of various technologies which would most likely be outdated by the time it was published, CMG decided to focus on providing a guide to help YOU figure out which vendor is the best for your company. In other words Chess wants to give you the tools you need. The whitepaper is focused on two key things in order to help you accomplish this evaluation. The first is a breakdown of the 8 common variables that most companies use to evaluate vendors; these include things such as features, price, support, and others. The second is a framework for how to evaluate vendors based on those variables. CMG created a simple four-step process which is both easy to understand yet highly customizable to the needs of your company. Download the whitepaper on how to select an enterprise collaboration vendor .

Regardless of your definition of success, there are, oddly enough, a great number of common characteristics that are shared by successful businesspeople. You can place a check beside each characteristic that you feel that you possess. This way, you can see how you stack up. Even if you don't have all of these characteristics, don't fret. Most can be learned with practice and by developing a winning attitude, especially if you set goals and apply yourself, through strategic planning, to reach those goals in incremental and measurable stages. 1. Do what you enjoy. How many of the 25 characteristics do you have?