Business Blog

Jeff Smith spent a year in prison. But what he discovered inside wasn’t what he expected — he saw in his fellow inmates boundless ingenuity and business savvy. He asks: Why don’t we tap this entrepreneurial potential to help ex-prisoners contribute to society once they’re back outside? (From the TED Talent Search event TED@NewYork.) In [...]

In our digital world, social relations have become mediated by data. Without even realizing it, we’re barricading ourselves against strangeness — people and ideas that don’t fit the patterns of who we already know, what we already like and where we’ve already been. A call for technology to deliver us to what and who we [...]

In this Ted Talk, Sir Ken Robinson outlines 3 principles crucial for the human mind to flourish — and how current education culture works against them. In a funny, stirring talk he tells us how to get out of the educational “death valley” we now face, and how to nurture our youngest generations with a [...]

In this Ted Talk, Angela Lee Duckworth talks about leaving her high-flying job in consulting to take a job teaching math to seventh graders in a New York public school. She quickly realized that IQ wasn’t the only thing separating the successful students from those who struggled. Here, she explains her theory of “grit” as [...]

Plenty of people need jobs with very flexible hours — but it’s difficult for those people to connect with the employers who need them. Wingham Rowan is working on that. He explains how the same technology that powers modern financial markets can help employers book workers for slivers of time. In this Ted Talk, Wingham [...]

In this Ted Talk, Timothy Bartik makes the macro-economic case for preschool education — and explains why you should be happy to invest in it, even if you don’t have kids that age (or kids at all). The economic benefits of well-educated kids, it turns out, go well beyond the altruistic. The author of “Investing [...]

Nilofer Merchant suggests a small idea that just might have a big impact on your life and health: Next time you have a one-on-one meeting, make it into a “walking meeting” — and let ideas flow while you walk and talk. In this Ted Talk, business innovator Nilofer Merchant thinks deeply about the frameworks, strategies [...]

Tech columnist David Pogue shares 10 simple, clever tips for computer, web, smartphone and camera users. And yes, you may know a few of these already — but there’s probably at least one you don’t. David Pogue is the personal technology columnist for the New York Times and a tech correspondent for CBS News. He’s [...]

The US economy has been expanding wildly for two centuries. Are we witnessing the end of growth? In this Ted Talk, economist Robert Gordon lays out 4 reasons US growth may be slowing, detailing factors like epidemic debt and growing inequality, which could move the US into a period of stasis we can’t innovate our [...]

Making money ain’t everything. Before you e-mail me and tell me I am crazy, watch this TED Talk from Behavioral economist Dan Ariely. He lays out the argument that what motivates us to work isn’t necessarily money or joy. Instead, it would appear that most of us thrive on meaning more than money. Making constant progress [...]