Philippe Matthews Show Guru Advice, Author Reviews, Tech Reviews, Entertainment News

Ask yourself these questions to identify the gears that drive your company culture, and what you can do to make it exceptional. All workplaces are different, but in exceptional ones, all staffers work together and leadership is in-sync with employees. The culture breeds this

Incremental success can lull you into dangerous complacency.

If your team spends its days asking for permission before executing, taking an hour to complete expense reports or time sheets, attending redundant meetings, or answering irrelevant emails, you’ve got a problem. Processes are supposed to help organizations scale up, improve efficiency for new hires and existing employees, and so on--but they can quickly get out of control.

Alison Kosakowski, a 33-year-old former New York City brand planner turned dairy farm blogger, now helps farmers use social media to market themselves and share their unglamorous but rewarding reality. In 2009, Alison Kosakowki was living in New York, working as communications manager at the Maersk shipping company, when a kidnapping at sea brought her to Vermont. The captain of the Maersk Alabama, Richard Phillips, had been kidnapped by Somali pirates; Kosakowski was dispatched to Phillips’s home in Underhill, Vermont, to help the family handle media during the weeklong crisis, the wait for Phillips’s return, and the barrage of interview requests and book deals in the aftermath

At L.A.'s worst high schools, gangs controlled the bathrooms and students regularly set hanging artwork on fire. Today, Green Dot Public Schools have dramatically increased graduation rates and college preparedness at a fraction of the cost.

While chatting with a business colleague yesterday, she made a statement that I hear all too often from my female friends. As an independent contractor, her client asked her to do a significant amount of additional work that was not part of their original deal.

Each day thousands of small and midsize companies make big, one-shot bets--and fail. We don’t hear about most of them, just as we don’t hear about people who lose the lottery; they aren’t front-page news

Company leaders with motherly traits can help employees develop into the best they can be in their field.

The founder of Second Life, Philip Rosedale, shares his strategies for sparking employee passion about your company. Step one: Introduce the "LoveMachine." Philip Rosedale is strikingly charasmatic in person—perhaps surprisingly so, considering he's best known as the man behind a virtual world in which humans only interact through flying avatars

After a deadly fire, Providence officials enacted strict building codes that virtually dismantled the city's lively arts scene. The task has fallen to a RISD grad to rebuild it, one abandoned warehouse at a time.

It takes one to know one. So we asked a range of successful entrepreneurs to name the companies they admire most and why. If it takes one to know one, who better to know great companies than entrepreneurs who have started great companies?

It's not enough to have a great product anymore. Consumers want to buy into company culture

Adrian Grenier doesn't mind if you call him Vince. But he'd also like you to call him a community builder who has some big ideas about turning media culture into a positive way to engage teens. Oh, and he thinks you should try a little of his retro-inspired beer

Emerging headphones purveyor 50 Cent studied a predecessor closely before pressing play on his own venture. When Beats by Dre headphones debuted in 2008, the size of the $100-plus headphone market was a faint $92 million. Four years later, the good doctor's b-emblazoned earpieces have achieved near ubiquity, and the $100-plus segment has been cranked up to $512 million.

Giving your employees flexible hours cuts costs, spurs growth and lifts morale. The numbers prove it