Rochester Business Journal Leading source of business news and information in Rochester, N.Y.

We’ve all heard the saying, “jack of all trades, master of none.” This might be used to describe your neighborhood handyman who is often helping people out with various home improvement projects. When you have a serious home renovation, however, ...

Tagged with: Digital Marketing Karl Heberger

“My team is being asked to fill out yet another “confidential” employee survey on engagement. Despite numerous email reminders, most of my team members plan to ignore it or refuse to fill it out, believing that their confidentiality won’t be ...

Tagged with: Kathleen Driscoll Managers at Work

Over the course of his nomadic, 13-season professional baseball career, World Series hero Steve Pearce has worn the laundry of 20 different teams. And perhaps no season was more challenging for this 35-year-old journeyman-turned-most valuable player than 2012, when he ...

Tagged with: On Sports Scott Pitoniak

As a manager, it’s easy to pigeonhole team members based on what you hired them to do, and within that, what they do especially well. There’s benefit to that, of course, including the confidence of knowing your colleague has the ...

Tagged with: great workplaces Lauren Dixon

October is National Women’s Small Business Month, and we’ve made progress in the United States to reach gender parity in business ownership. Today, there are more than 11 million women-owned businesses and women now represent more than half of the ...

Tagged with: Corporate Finance James Barger

When you hire or promote a leader, what attributes do you look for? Most organizations emphasize intelligence, talent and accomplishments. They want to know what someone is good at, and they ask about an individual’s record of success. Top-level job-hunting ...

Tagged with: John Engels leadership

Somewhere high above, Yogi Berra is shaking his fist in disgust. Somewhere high above, the late baseball catcher and wordsmith is wondering why in the world my friends and I didn’t heed his sage advice that “it ain’t over, ’til ...

Tagged with: On Sports Scott Pitoniak

Recent developments in the use of noncompete agreements and trade secret laws have important implications for businesses with employees in New York. A noncompete agreement is a contract where an employee agrees not to enter into competition with the employer ...

Tagged with: Jeremy J. Wolk law

I recently had the honor of attending The Business Council of New York State’s annual meeting where Duke and Columbia public policy professor and retired IBM Vice President of Corporate Citizenship and Corporate Affairs Stan Litow received the Corning Award. ...

Tagged with: On Business Robert Duffy

The world is at our fingertips more than ever before. Anyone with an Amazon Prime account can attest to this—placing an order with free delivery one day and receiving it within 36 hours, even on a Sunday. When we have ...

Tagged with: Advancing Business Jacqueline Mozrall

Mutual funds are essentially a 1920s innovation. The modern mutual fund dates back to 1924 with the creation of the Massachusetts Investors Trust by the company now known as MFS Investment Management. But the mutual fund’s antecedents reach back much ...

Tagged with: David Peartree The Informed Investor

History is a little sketchy here, but Australians claim this tradition of wearing numbers in team sports can be traced to a rugby match in the Land Down Under just before the start of the 20th century. It took us ...

Tagged with: On Sports Scott Pitoniak

“The ink of the scholar is more sacred than the blood of the martyr.”–Mohammed Data, informatics, data analytics, financial analysis, benchmarking, key performance indicators—the continued rapid advancement in technology capabilities (e.g., Apple sold 217 million iPhones last year) has resulted ...

Tagged with: Gerald Archibald Non-profit Management

Philip Seymour Hoffman. Prince. Tom Petty. Heath Ledger. John Belushi. Janis Joplin. All celebrities who died of an opioid overdose. The list goes on and on. It seems like the opioid crisis is always in the news, and for good ...

Tagged with: On Health Travis Heider

Marv Levy would pose the question just before games kicked off in the stadium then known as Rich. With his Buffalo Bills players huddled around him, the legendary coach would bellow above the roar of 80,000 vociferous spectators: “Where else ...

Tagged with: On Sports Scott Pitoniak