Blog Posts by Adrienne Burke

The Small Business Administration has teamed with American Express OPEN and Women Impacting Public Policy to launch a national initiative aimed at boosting government contracting opportunities for women-owned small businesses. Representatives of the three participating organizations unveiled the program, dubbed ChallengeHER, at a luncheon for women business owners in Washington this week.

ChallengeHER will help women business owners compete in the government contracting marketplace by providing  online curriculum and resources, mentoring with experienced women contractors, and access to government buyers and prime contractors. A series of 9 free events and workshops to take place around the country will kick off on May 23 with a Department of Energy event.

SBA Administrator Karen Mills said one of the agency’s top priorities is making sure that more qualified women-owned, veteran-owned, and minority-owned small businesses have access to government and commercial supply chain

Mark Zuckerberg might have been cast by the media as a Gen Y hero, but it turns out that not too many twenty-somethings want to emulate him. Most college students say they do not aspire to entrepreneurship. Asked in a recent survey if they are interested in starting a company in the next few years, more than 60 percent said “no” and only 8 percent said they are “very” interested. Only about one in five students wish their school offered entrepreneurship courses.

AfterCollege, an online career network for college students and recent graduates, surveyed 600 of its registered college students from a variety of U.S. colleges and universities. The resulting report, issued jointly today with Millennial Branding, a Gen Y research and consulting firm run by 29-year-old Dan Schawbel, reveals how students are developing their careers while in college. The outlook is rather grim.

According to "The Student Employment Study," most students do take internships, but most don’t get paid for them, and

If you think your dismal office culture isn’t costing you talented workers, think again. Ninety-five percent of respondents to a recent survey said they consider a positive office culture to be important, and 75 percent said it’s “very important” to them. More than 60 percent said office culture plays an important role in their decision to take a job, and 30 percent said the culture is as important a consideration as salary when considering a job offer.

uSamp, an online and mobile market research technology company, gathered the data from 1,000 business professionals in more than 40 industries who are part of its exclusive B2B Whiteboard panel.

Respondents overwhelmingly agreed that the definition of office culture is “an environment that promotes collaboration.” Few were unfamiliar with the term and a majority agreed that their own office culture promoted a good work/life balance. And a good culture is more important than foosball tables, Nerf guns, and bean bag chairs: only 28

More and more small businesses are leveraging communications and data sharing technologies to get work done among a remotely distributed workforce. And some are using it to do away altogether with the office.

Kevin Kuske, chief anthropologist and general manager for the business furniture company turnstone, says it’s not necessary for every startup to invest precious capital to buy furniture and sign a lease. “Join an incubator or shared workspace or work in a network of spaces,” Kuske recommends. “You don’t have to own the space. Work in coffee shops, a public park, or libraries,” he suggests.

What’s more, he says, “that movement across different locations is good for your health and mental state; no type of work is ideally done in the same space.”

When Carey Albertine and Saira Rao started In This Together Media, a children’s book publisher, both wanted the flexibility that working from home offered for their young families in Hoboken, NJ, and suburban Connecticut. As the company has

Showing how advertising and marketing dollars translate directly to revenues is a challenge for any business, so it’s no surprise that 60 percent of small business owners reported in a recent survey that they cannot prove a return on investment from their social media efforts. What is notable is that nearly 40 percent say they can, and of those, nearly a third reported returns of $2,000 or more.

The small business community Manta, which conducted the online survey of more than 1,200 small business owners during the last week of March, reports that “with the potential to generate a compelling return on investment, social media involvement is trending upward in the small business community.”

More than one-third of business owners surveyed indicated that their primary goal in using social media is to acquire and engage with new customers, and most dedicate just one employee to the effort.

Still, asked where they would spend the majority of their business dollars in Q2 2013, more than a

In This Together Media founders Albertine and Rao

One year before Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s book pointed out to the world that girls who demonstrate leadership skills on the playground get labeled “bossy,” Carey Albertine and Saira Rao started a company to tackle that problem at its root.

The two women had plenty of leadership skills of their own. Albertine holds an MBA and worked as an executive recruiter, and Rao was an attorney and published author. But as new mothers, they lamented the dearth of media that didn’t present girls as “tomboys, princesses, super-chicks, sex objects, or vampires,” Rao says.

Friends since their University of Virginia undergraduate days, the duo thought of parlaying early-career broadcast experience into producing a children’s TV show about “real, bold, complex, and interesting” girl characters. But market research convinced them that book publishing was where they could have a greater impact. Disruptive technologies were opening the industry to new entrants, the e-book market was booming, and their

Mixbook founders Aryk Grosz, left, and Andrew Laffoon

To “fail fast” is a maxim of the social media startup world: If you’re not going to hit it big, get out before losing too much money. But Andrew Laffoon and Aryk Grosz were in no rush when they started Mixbook. Grosz was still in college, and Laffoon had just graduated.

The two University of California, Berkeley, engineering students had gotten interested in entrepreneurship while taking a course with professor Jon Burgstone, who sold his own internet software company for $1.1 billion in 2000. When Laffoon and Grosz met him, Burgstone was hatching plans to create the Berkeley Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology. They joined the first class of the new program.

Five years later, their web-based custom photobook business is also its first success story. Mixbook employs 60 people and generates $25 million in annual revenues, its founders say. It is headquartered in Palo Alto offices that were once home to Groupon and Box.com.

But Grosz, now 28, and Laffoon, 30, say that if they had

When we defined the 5 traits of the worst bosses here last month, we hit a nerve. Among the more than 3,000 readers who commented, many said things like, “This describes my boss, but what can I do about it?” After all, as tempting as it is some days, it’s just not practical for most of us to up and quit when a boss is making us miserable.

For answers on how to handle a less-than-stellar supervisor, we went back to Michelle Benjamin, CEO and founder of Benjamin Enterprises and an expert in helping companies improve their management cultures. Benjamin’s spinoff TalentReady grooms middle managers for leadership positions as they climb the ranks, so her forté is to help rising stars get beyond bad bosses, as well as to avoid becoming them.

Here are 7 steps to survival with a bad boss—some of them a bit of tough love for employees—derived from our conversation with Michelle Benjamin.

1. Look in the mirror. It might not be what you want to hear, but Benjamin suggests any employee facing bad