More successful meetings focus on outcomes, not process, by doing away with agendas, according to research from Ashley Whillans of Harvard Business School and Miter executives Dave Feldman and Damian Wisniewski, confirming other studies that showed the ineffectiveness and wasted time of creating agendas. They explain how to use the why, what, who, how and when to guide meeting preparation.

Employees in your organization will be more courageous if they are recognized for taking bold actions and leaders are generous with their feedback and encouragement, writes executive coach Joel Garfinkle. "As a group, you'll become more innovative and productive as you unleash your people's courage," Garfinkle writes.

Interviewing for a sales job can be challenging, but sales leaders can make the experience positive in part by starting with a talent assessment, which saves both parties time, Kate Rehling of The Center for Sales Strategy writes. A sales leader can better gauge how an applicant will fit into the company culture by asking people from key departments to observe the interview and offer you their perspectives afterward.

Women are told they must show self-confidence for career success, yet they can't appear forceful or domineering, and they are blamed for lacking self-confidence if they don't achieve career goals or, paradoxically, are assertive, writes Darren Baker and Juliet Bourke, who conducted a study on the topic. Most women, but few men, see confidence as a central factor in career success, and men who did mention confidence did so in the context of women's careers.

Inflation bonuses are being used by some employers to offset their workers' rising costs of living. The bonuses are taking the form of a periodic bump in pay to gift cards that may help them stretch their grocery dollars.

When a company that makes those automatic card-shuffling machines you see in casinos needed to test one of its new prototypes, they called on a magician-turned-mathematician who works at Stanford named Persi Diaconis. After Persi examined the prototype, the company had to go back to the drawing board. If you dive deeper into the story, you will learn a lot about the different ways a deck of cards can be shuffled. Techniques like the "ruffle shuffle" and "faro shuffle" (which is also known as the "perfect shuffle") mix up the cards in different ways -- and with varying degrees of randomness.