About 1.7 billion people around the world live off the grid, most of them not by choice.  Children doing their studies at home at night are disproportionately impacted by not having light.

MPOWERD, a New York based company committed to ending poverty and to solar justice, is creating products to make living off the grid comfortable and affordable.

They lauched with Luci in 2012. A response to the earthquake in Haiti, which left so much of the population in the dark, MPOWERD brings light to places electricity does not reach.

Solar Justice day is April 15^th.  Join the movement as an Ambassador.  Give the give of light.  Buy

Enlightened Functionality

Unlike other solar lamps, Luci offers the benefits of a task light, flashlight and diffused lantern in one attractive design. Never reliant on the power grid, she shines brightest where light is inaccessible or unaffordable. To light up life with clean energy, Luci is your girl.

Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman writing in the Harvard Business Review:

A businesswoman has a conversation with her five-year-old daughter. “What if I told you that as Mommy does better at work, fewer people like me. But when Daddy does better at work, more people like him. What would you say?” She expected her child to say, “Well thatʼs really unfair, Mom.” But what she said instead was, “Well then, Mommy, I would be less successful at work so more people will like me.”

In a recent interview,  Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg recounted this story to underscore the importance of a body of research that she cites in her book Lean In indicating “that success and likability are positively correlated for men and negatively correlated for women.”

We share Sandbergʼs disappointment in this young girlʼs response. We too would like to see women lean in further. And we share her view that barriers, both external and self-imposed, stand in the way. But our work with leadership development and 360-degree assessments does not confirm that a likability penalty as women rise to the top is one of those barriers. While, certainly, some individual women may find themselves disliked as they move up the organization, our aggregate data show the opposite is more common — that male leaders are perceived more negatively as they rise, whereas women generally maintain their popularity throughout their entire careers.

Hereʼs how we came to this conclusion. Taking items from our 360-degree feedback instrument such as “Do you stay in touch with issues and concerns of individuals in the work group?” and “How well do you balance getting results with a concern for othersʼ needs?” we created a likability index. (For a detailed explanation of how it was created and to take the quiz yourself, go to our website. (http://zengerfolkman.force.com/likabilityquiz) ) We then analyzed a group of 9,500 male and 5,000 female leaders who participated in our programs in the past three years. Using our scale, we compared their level in the organization with how well liked they were by their bosses, peers, and direct reports. On average, 10 people assessed each leader.

 Likability and success actually go together remarkably well for women. Parents can accurately and unhesitatingly tell their daughters, “Aspire for positions of power and influence, and when you get promoted, it is totally your choice whether you act in a way that will have people continue to like you or not.”

Daniel Marron comments:

America’s tax system is needlessly complex, economically harmful, and often unfair. Despite recent revenue gains, it likely will not raise enough money to pay the government’s future bills. The time is thus ripe for wholesale tax reform.

1. Tax compliance places a large burden on small businesses, both in the aggregate and relative to large businesses.

The Internal Revenue Service estimates that businesses with less than $1 million in revenue bear almost two-thirds of business compliance costs. Those costs are much larger, relative to revenues or assets, for small firms than for big ones.

2. Small businesses are more likely to underpay their taxes.

Because they often deal in cash and engage in transactions that are not reported to the IRS, small businesses can understate their revenues and overstate their expenses and thus underpay their taxes. Some underpayment is inadvertent, reflecting the difficulty of complying with our complex tax code, and some is intentional. High compliance costs disadvantage responsible small businesses, while the greater opportunity to underpay taxes advantages less responsible ones.

3. The current tax code offers small businesses several advantages over larger ones.

Provisions such as Section 179 expensing, cash accounting, graduated corporate tax rates, and special capital gains taxes benefit businesses that are small in terms of investment, income, or assets.

4. Several of those advantages expired at the end of last year and thus are part of the current “tax extenders” debate.

These provisions include expanded eligibility for Section 179 expensing and larger capital gains exclusions for investments in qualifying small businesses. Allowing these provisions to expire and then retroactively resuscitating them is a terrible way to make tax policy. If Congress believes these provisions are beneficial, they should be in place well before the start of the year, so businesses can make investment and funding decisions without needless uncertainty.

5. Many small businesses also benefit from the opportunity to organize as pass-through entities such as S corporations, limited liability companies, partnerships, and sole proprietorships.

These structures all avoid the double taxation that applies to income earned by C corporations. Some large businesses adopt these forms as well, and account for a substantial fraction of pass-through economic activity. Policymakers should take care not to assume that all pass-throughs are small businesses.

6. Tax reform could recalibrate the tradeoff between structuring as a pass-through or as a C corporation.

Many policymakers and analysts have proposed revenue-neutral business reforms that would lower the corporate tax rate while reducing tax breaks. Such reforms would likely favor C corporations over pass-throughs, since all companies could lose tax benefits while only C corporations would benefit from lower corporate tax rates.

7. Tax reform could shift the relative tax burdens on small and large businesses.

Some tax reforms would reduce or eliminate tax benefits aimed at small businesses, such as graduated corporate rates. Other reforms—e.g., lengthening depreciation and amortization schedules for investments or advertising but allowing safe harbors for small amounts—would increase the relative advantage that small businesses enjoy. The net effect of tax reform will thus depend on the details and may vary among businesses of different sizes, industries, and organizational forms. It also depends on the degree to which lawmakers use reform as an opportunity to reduce compliance burdens on small businesses.

The economic crisis in Italy continues even in the prosperous north. In the province of Milan a project to stimulate new route out of poverty for families and individuals in need has been founded.

The town of Busto Garolfo, the Bcc Busto Garolfo and Buguggiate and parish Caritas have signed an agreement to create a new experimental project using microcredit. If the project is successful, it will be copied elsewhere.  Here is a concrete, local solution to economic problems.

The underlying philosophy is that of shared responsibility. Or rather, ” to aid each other ,” says the president of the Bcc Busto Garolfo and Buguggiate , Roberto Scazzosi . “As the local reality and reality as we have done credit cooperative of mutuality and to grow our core principles.  We write in our Charter of Values ​​”the goal of the Cooperative Credit is to produce utility and advantages, to create economic, social and cultural benefit of members and the local community and to build a foundation of trust.  We have taken the initiative.

The experimental project microcredit fits in collaboration initiated three years ago between the same three cities to create employment opportunities through community service.   Microcredit is a response to the needs characterized by uniqueness , simplicity and sustainability. That is, sudden and temporary needs that relate to basic needs – such as paying rent or utility bills, medical expenses – as long as there are conditions for a return of the loan. You want to stimulate the autonomy , responsibility, the ability of those who receive funding , putting him in a position to carry out the project to life.  In other words, let’s talk about education welfare, adds Don Ambrogio Colombo Busto Garolfo pastor and president of Caritas.  The post office network creates a driving force for growth. The concept of aid is a prerequisite for the growth of education and to ensure that those being helped today may one day help others.

Latest business school studies suggest:

Men appliy ethical standard relative to their role (or personal benefit) in transaction.

Wharton School asked if you had to decide on ingredients based on profit versus potential harm, women would not harm.  Men wanted profit.

Women targeted for deception by both men and women.

Women take themselves out of the game because they feel morally compromised.  Women may find a way to stay in the game and be ethical if they understand this dynamic.

When Tina Brown announced that she would leave The Daily Beast, she reported that she would begin to organize conferences.  Re/Code, a tech news site run by two veteran reporters from the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post was launched with backing from NBC Universal among others.  They also have a conference company, Code Conference, which is charging $6,500 a person for their upcoming conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, Ca. Do people still want (and need) to interface live?  Is some combination of ether and live talk the answer to delivering news?

Global Invest Her makes these suggestions:

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Sam Bracken, himself a former foster child, started Orange Duffel Bag to offer life coaching and other help to teens dealing with the challenges of homelessness or foster care.

For all his subsequent experiences as a ward of the state, Dimitri (not his real name) seems pretty well-adjusted. Tall and friendly, he’s a senior at a suburban Atlanta high school. In not too long, he – like 250,000 other foster kids a year in the US – will be “emancipated” from state care, an 18-year-old left to fend for himself.

Dimitri and his cohort face a daunting statistic: Only 22 former foster care kids graduate from college each year in the US, out of the 2 million people who get their diploma. Equally troubling, 48 percent of aged-out foster care kids become chronically unemployed by age 26.

To avoid becoming part of that statistic, the young Russian expatriate is attending an unusual program inspired by another homeless kid: a former Georgia Tech football standout named Sam Bracken who found his way from a broken home and abusive childhood in Las Vegas – where his role models were “mobsters” and “stoners” – to a successful college football and post-college career.

What no one – even Mr. Bracken’s closest advisers – knew was the extent to which his trademark orange duffel bag was stuffed not just with clothes and books, but with the memories of a chaotic childhood – a time when, Bracken writes, he “thought it was normal for a dad to punch his son square in the face.”

A notably big man still packing much of his football muscle, Bracken published his shocking personal story in 2010 in a book called “My Orange Duffel Bag: A Journey to Radical Change” with the thought of starting an independent 501(c)(3) nonprofit group to convey his message of personal transformation to teenagers, especially those who “age out” of foster care every year.

Rather than an up-by-your-bootstraps tale, “My Orange Duffel Bag” is an exploration of personal pain and a paean to determination and dreams – and also to the people who help foster and safeguard those ideals in hard-bitten and often jaded foster and homeless kids.

In four years, 300 students have graduated from the Orange Duffel Bag Initiative’s 12-week after-school program. Operating chiefly around Georgia in the US, the organization has received numerous awards – including the Martin Luther King Jr. Community Service Award. Now it’s in the process of gearing up a national model to address the stubborn post-foster care problem, one that Bracken calls “big, but not so big it can’t be solved.”