Business - Opinion

More than half of employees who have Internet access at work say they will shop for holiday gifts from the office, according to a November poll conducted for Shop.org, a division of the National Retail Federation.While online shopping may be more efficient than braving the crowds at lunch hour, employee shopping can compromise both security and productivity, says David Kelleher of GFI Software, which sells remote monitoring and management software primarily to small and medium firms.He spoke recently about this topic with Smart Answers columnist Karen E. Klein. ... Full Story »

A few clicks of a television remote reveal a lot about the American family in 2009. In place of the images portrayed in the 1950s shows Father Knows Best and The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, we now have The New Adventures of Old Christine, which follows the travails of a single mother, and Modern Family, which includes a male couple who adopt a baby girl from Vietnam. Full Story »

(Bloomberg) -- Harvard Business School (Harvard Full-Time MBA Profile) Dean Jay Light, who oversaw the school during the global financial crisis that challenged business education and slashed the value of Harvard's endowment, will retire in June, after five years in the position. Full Story »

Students who have tried to get a leg up on the Graduate Management Admission Test (GMAT) by visiting Web sites carrying illegally obtained test-preparation material may soon come to regret their actions. The Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC) is aggressively pursuing more and more Web sites that illegally provide copyrighted GMAT materials to test-takers, as well as using high-tech gadgets to catch "proxy" test-takers who are hired to take the exam in place of applicants, the organization says. Full Story »

(Bloomberg) The U.S. Treasury Dept. will begin taking action against lenders that aren't doing enough to ease mortgage payments for troubled homeowners as part of the Obama Administration's $75 billion pledge to curb foreclosures. Lenders> The> The> "We> Seriously>The> The> Eligible> Mortgage> The> A>Robert> One> The> Bank> "As> The> Full Story »

Last month we watched as news broke of one of the largest insider-trading scandals in history. While the urgency of the financial crisis may be dissipating, the need for a higher ethical standard in business is as relevant as ever. Full Story »

From her home base in Uruguay, Tuck admissions officer Kristine Laca has become a cheerleader of sorts for Dartmouth University's Tuck School of Business (Tuck Full-Time MBA Profile) in Latin America. She is a frequent visitor to countries such as Argentina, Chile, and Peru, stopping in each at least four times during the critical fall admissions season. Fluent in Spanish, she holds information sessions, attends MBA fairs, and conducts admissions interviews with prospective students in their home cities. ... Full Story »

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As founder and CEO of baby goods retailer Giggle, Ali Wing does her best to ensure that the strollers, toys, and other gear she sells are as safe as possible. From the time of Giggle's launch six years ago, she avoided baby bottles containing the controversial chemical bisphenol A (BPA). But other products she sells still contain BPA and scores of other chemicals, and she doesn't know what's really safe. "We can't guarantee everything is healthy," she says. "We haven't found a way to get the answers." Full Story »

If you are a pundit, or get paid to watch trends, then this message doesn't apply to you. It's your job to go out and find the next shiny object that could influence how we live and do business. Full Story »

It's been a hard year to work at General Electric . Salary freezes have hit its famously performance-driven employees, with some managers taking pay cuts. The price of GE stock, which once made millionaires out of even hourly workers, has gone nowhere as the rest of the market has risen. A 68% dividend cut -- the first in 71 years -- has stung execs who rely on a heavy dose of restricted shares. Full Story »

About a year ago, observers of the UK commercial property market would not have been shocked to see the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse riding around the corner. Full Story »

I am not your typical MBA student. I chuckle thinking about the havoc I will wreak on the incoming class pie charts that the admissions office will prepare at the Georgetown McDonough School of Business (McDonough Full-Time MBA School Profile), where I will start this fall. How will they categorize a gay Bosnian Muslim refugee, a former chemist who writes about sexuality in Islam while counseling college students? Full Story »

Santiago - Valeria Garcia has come a long way in the past two decades. As a high school dropout, she lived in a wooden shack with a dirt-floor kitchen and a tin roof in San Ramn, one of the Chilean capital's roughest neighborhoods. But at age 33 she went back to high school and then earned a degree in psychology from a local university. For seven years she commuted an hour each day by bus to classes, all the while taking in washing to make ends meet. Full Story »

From the marbled corridors of Congress to the tony salons of Georgetown, liberal lawmakers are abuzz with ideas on how to rein in U.S. corporations. Yet over in the courts, two conservative lawyers are mounting a serious challenge to a law, enacted earlier in the decade, that imposed tough restrictions on American businesses. A ruling in their favor could deal a serious blow to the pro-regulatory movement in Washington. Full Story »

One silver lining in the current economic cloud is that job-seekers are answering President Obama's call to service: Applications to Teach for America are up 42% from last year; AmeriCorps applications have nearly tripled. Full Story »

In July you may have heard that the recession was over. If so, you were probably in Canada. Full Story »

To many, October 19, 1987 is a fateful date. To some it represents Black Monday, the day where a tidal wave of financial destruction swept across the globe. Relentlessly this wave traveled from Hong Kong to London to New York, destroying any assets in its path. Young college graduates were forced to sell their first cars, young families lost their first homes, and young entrepreneurs lost their first businesses. However, Black Monday doesn't mean the same thing to all people. Full Story »