Definitely not going on my office layouts board, but this is what it's like...

PORTLAND, Maine — A small startup in Portland targeting the country’s $56 billion wedding industry has just received an infusion of capital from a group

One thousand startups will be orphaned; many will die. One billion dollars will have gone for naught. Bright young minds across the country will be out...

“Starting your own business is like riding a roller coaster. There are highs and lows and every turn you take is another twist. The lows are really low, but the highs can be really high. You have to be strong, keep your stomach tight, and ride along with the roller coaster that you started.” – Lindsay Manseau

Reprint: R0610D Employers can choose from lots of tools when they want to encourage employees to work together toward a new corporate goal. One of the rarest managerial skills is the ability to understand which tools will work in a given situation and which will misfire. Cooperation tools fall into four major categories: power, management, leadership, and culture. Choosing the right tool, say the authors, requires assessing the organization along two critical dimensions: the extent to which people agree on what they want and the extent to which they agree on cause and effect, or how to get what they want. The authors plot on a matrix where various organizations fall along these two dimensions. Employees represented in the lower-left quadrant of the model, for example, disagree strongly both about what they want and on what actions will produce which results. Those in the upper-right quadrant agree on both dimensions. Different quadrants call for different tools. When employees share little consensus on either dimension, for instance, the only methods that will elicit cooperation are “power tools” such as fiat, force, and threats. Yugoslavia’s Josip Broz Tito wielded such devices effectively. So did Jamie Dimon, current CEO of JPMorgan Chase, during the bank’s integration with Bank One. For employees who agree on what they want but not on how to get it—think of Microsoft in 1995—leadership tools, such as vision statements, are more appropriate. Some leaders are blessed with an instinct for choosing the right tools—Continental Airlines’ Gordon Bethune, General Electric’s Jack Welch, and IBM’s Lou Gerstner are all examples. Others can use this framework to help select the most appropriate tools for their circumstances.

‎"Waiting is a trap. There will always be reasons to wait. The truth is, there are only two things in life, reasons and results, and reasons simply don’t count." – Dr Robert Anthony

What happens after companies jettison traditional year-end evaluations?

No one gives you initiative, you have to take it. Seth Godin

“I think the biggest thing to do — the hardest thing to do — is to start. You have all these ideas and everyone has an idea but it’s really about executing the idea and building the idea and attracting other people to help you work on the idea. That is the biggest challenge. But the way to begin is to get the idea out of your head, draw it out, talk about it, program it if you’re a programmer or make it if you’re building something.” – Jack Dorsey (Founder Of Twitter & Square)

The inaugural Maine Startup and Create Week was a success and exceeded organizers’ expectations, chief organizer Jess Knox told Mainebiz on Tuesday.Next year’s conference is already being planned, he said, adding that he hopes to have the 2015 conference dates set by August.

I don’t care if you’re a billionaire. If you haven’t started a company, really gambled your resume and your money and maybe even your marriage to just go crazy and try something on your own, you’re no pirate and you aren’t in the club. - Michael Arrington, TechCrunch

"The key to our success is focusing on one insurmountable task each day and surmounting the hell out of it. It's tenacity--that's what powers the entrepreneurial spirit." --Jackie Summers, co-founder, Jack from Brooklyn

The year featured major investments in exciting new technology companies, from business software makers, biofuel farmers--and one troubled electric carmaker.

Far from being an established, sleepy market, the website builder market is going through significant growth and change. This is being driven by the fact that customers’ expectations about a merchant’s online presence are also changing. Gone are the days when a merchant could take out a Yellow Pages listing, print up some business cards

Below you will find some standard forms of documents used for early stage financings. These documents were developed at Cooley and were originally based on the

Verizon and Yahoo will need to heed the lessons from failed tech mergers as they navigate the road ahead, writes David Cohen.

BANGOR, Maine — For the fourth year in a row, Forbes has ranked Maine the worst state in the nation for business. “Not much has changed,” Forbes said

First Round Captial's top ten investments of all time, based on value created for investors, had at least one female founder, far higher than the percentage of female tech founders in the data set.

“The last 10% it takes to launch something takes as much energy as the first 90%.” —Rob Kalin, Etsy founder