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Research released recently by iseecars.com seems to indicate a fleeting happiness with luxury cars. New buyers of BMW, Jaguar, Land Rover, Mercedes-Benz, and Porsche sell them more frequently in the first year than owners of other models. Car owners who drive their vehicles into the ground scoff knowingly: Money can’t buy you a happy ride.

But looking at the statistics more closely reveals a more nuanced reality. The vehicles traded in are often baseline models of those prestige brands, favored more by aspirational buyers than the filthy rich. “Despite the popularity of these vehicles, they generally have below-average reliability ratings from Consumer Reports, which could contribute to why owners get rid of them so quickly,” said iSeeCars CEO Phong Ly, in a statement accompanying the report. Owners of ultra-high-end vehicles, in general, hold on to them.

This sad scenario plays out at many firms: Top-performing salespeople get promoted to become sales managers, but don’t actually know how to manage. The result is a disaster—productivity takes a dive, disgruntled salespeople start heading for the door, and the new managers themselves burn out.

Why are so many salespeople so terrible at managing?

It’s because even after they put on their manager hats, they continue to suffer from the “super salesperson syndrome,” unable to disconnect from the thrill of selling. They hover over their salespeople and micromanage every deal to make sure it closes, says Harvard Business School’s Frank V. Cespedes, the MBA Class of 1973 Senior Lecturer of Business Administration.

“Every company has examples of people who persist in their behaviors as salespeople, and as a result they flame out as managers,” says Cespedes, who teaches management strategies at HBS and recently wrote an article called Sales Managers Must Manage for Top Sales Magazine.

Entrepreneurs aren’t short on ideas for exciting new products or companies, but they are often short-sighted when it comes to finding ways to fund and build those projects.

“There is a huge amount of discussion about how you come up with a new entrepreneurial possibility, Yelp for dogs or Uber for cats, or whatever,” says Andy Wu, assistant professor of business administration in the Strategy unit of Harvard Business School. “What’s overlooked is a comprehensive framework for how you mobilize the resources—such as financing, employees, and partners—to bring the idea to life.”

Along with colleagues David R. Clough, Tommy Pan Fang, and Balagopal Vissa, Wu recently conducted a review to examine how the entrepreneurial community thinks about acquiring resources, publishing their work in the paper, Turning Lead Into Gold: How Do Entrepreneurs Mobilize Resources to Exploit Opportunities? in the Academy of Management Annals.

Their conclusion: Far too much focus is placed on raising money and signing formal contracts, but far too little attention on informal and non-financial resources that can make or break a new business.

Ignore This Advice at Your Own Peril

Refusing to act on advice from a respected colleague or mentor can backfire and damage your working relationship, a new study says. Hayley Blunden explains the career implications of seeking counsel from others.

Women make up more than half of the labor force in the United States and earn almost 60 percent of advanced degrees, yet they bring home less pay and fill fewer seats in the C-suite than men, particularly in male-dominated professions like finance and technology.

This gender gap is due in part to “occupational sorting,” with men choosing careers that pay higher wages than women do, labor economists say. For example, women represent only 26 percent of US workers employed in computer and math jobs, according to the Department of Labor.

New research identifies one reason women might be shying away from certain professions: They lack confidence in their ability to compete in fields that men are stereotypically believed to perform more strongly in, such as science, math, and technology.

Women are also more reluctant to share their ideas in group discussions on these subjects. And even when they have talent—and are actually told they are high-achievers in these subjects—women are more likely than men to shrug off the praise and lowball their own abilities.

This weak self-confidence may hold some women back as they count themselves out of pursuing prestigious roles in professions they believe they won’t excel in, despite having the skills to succeed, says Harvard Business School Assistant Professor Katherine B. Coffman.

“Our beliefs about ourselves are important in shaping all kinds of important decisions, such as what colleges we apply to, which career paths we choose, and whether we are willing to contribute ideas in the workplace or try to compete for a promotion,” Coffman says. “If talented women in STEM aren’t confident, they might not even look at those fields in the first place. It’s all about how good we think we are, especially when we ask ourselves, ‘What does it make sense for me to pursue?’”

Coffman has recently co-written an article in the American Economic Review as well as two working papers, all aimed at studying men’s and women’s beliefs about their own abilities.

“WOMEN ARE MORE LIKELY THAN MEN TO SHRUG OFF THE PRAISE AND LOWBALL THEIR OWN ABILITIES.”

What she found, in essence, is that gender stereotypes distort our views of both ourselves and others—and that may be especially troubling for women, since buying into those stereotypes could be creating a bleak self-image that is setting them back professionally.

The global community faces staggering challenges this century. We spent much of the 21st century learning how to get along with each another. According to data collected and analyzed by Harvard cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker, we’ve made much progress toward that goal, judging from per capita declines in both natural and unnatural deaths worldwide.

While the problem of nuclear weapons proliferation remains with us, the 21st century challenges relate to such things as space exploration and the ever-present issue of climate change and the natural disasters associated with it. At the same time, we have made giant strides in methods of addressing nearly any problem one can imagine. Many are associated with the development of artificial intelligence (AI).

In a nutshell, cloud-enabled data collection and storage can accommodate the so-called big data that provides inputs to machine learning and the creation of artificial intelligence. Each of these related fields of activity and opportunity encompasses a wide swath of the economy. Together, they describe a sector that promises to dwarf, in terms of economic opportunity and impact, traditional activities including mining, manufacturing, and even agriculture.

We already see problems such as threats to personal privacy, national security, and competition associated with this AI “package.” And in recent hearings in which tech executives appeared before US congressional committees, we saw, in terms of the uninformed, naïve questions posed by legislators to the executives, how unprepared the legislative branch is to deal with issues associated with AI.