Small-business owners are often ecstatic that customers want to buy their products and services, and once an offering is successful and has been improved upon, it could be time to consider a price increase. However, this is a decision that does not come easily.To get to the bottom of when and why you should raise your prices and how to roll out price increases without upsetting your loyal customers, I tapped three owners fo...

Ever heard of Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One?It’s a novel that takes place in the year 2045. Human civilization is in a dark period, so people seek refuge in a virtual reality world called the OASIS. Many spend all their waking hours in the simulation – working, taking classes, exploring different cultures, and trying out new hobbies.The book became a pop culture phenomenon when Steven Spielberg signed on to direct the fil...

Just when we thought things were getting better…According to the 2015 annual Edelman Trust Barometer Study, the business world is experiencing an evaporation of trust across all kinds of institutions, reaching the lows of the Great Recession in 2009. Trust in business specifically is below 50 percent in two-thirds of countries, including the U.S., U.K., Germany and Japan. Trust deficits are so significant that they’re hinde...

Last summer, I wrote about a Rackspace/University of London study that assessed productivity levels in 120 employees outfitted with wearable monitoring technology. The participants were equipped with one of the three devices – the GENEActiv high-velocity accelerometer wristband, which measures movement and activity; the NeuroSky Mindwave portable biosensor EEG, which monitors brain activity; and the LUMOback posture and act...

Edward Hess, a professor at the University of Virginia’s Darden Graduate School of Business and the author of the new book Learn or Die: Using Science to Build a Leading-Edge Learning Organization, says that artificial intelligence is the most significant human invention since fire. We’ve known for some time that AI is quickly replacing rote human tasks, but as technology becomes more sophisticated, traditional “white colla...

Perfectionists are often reminded that “done is better than perfect.” But it turns out that there’s another reason we should all try to create more “done” moments in our workdays.Fellow Fast Track writer Alison Green tipped me off to a great new study on productivity, and it reminded me of a British sci-fi movie I just watched called Frequencies. In it, human beings interact with the world and with each other based on their...

In order to get to the bottom of where IT is now and where the industry is going, Spiceworks recently surveyed over 1100 IT professionals in North America and EMEA. A majority of respondents work for small to medium-sized organizations with between 20-249 employees, although companies of all sizes were included. Industries with the highest representation were manufacturing, IT services, education, and non-profit. Ninety per...

Paper-free is catching on, but not as quickly as you’d think.Last year, the Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM) surveyed over 500 constituents to learn more about the adoption of paper-free processes. In the research, 68 percent of respondents said they believe paper-centric processes to be unacceptable, yet 21 percent find their paper use to be increasing.Although the thousands of external paper documen...

Remember when the only people to use more than one monitor were designers, programmers, and gamers? In the last five years, multiple monitor use has entered mainstream business to the point that if organizations have the money and the space, theyfre providing average employees with tricked-out monitor configurations. The question is, does this actually improve onefs productivity? I have been using the 24 desktop monitor...

There’s no way to prevent change and the discomfort that comes along with it, especially in the unpredictable 21st century business world. What you can do, though, is learn to be at peace while chaos swirls around you.When I entered the business world for the first time, I took my Type-A self with me. I was accustomed to executing, perfectly, everything I wanted to do. The thought of my company having a mind of its own terr...