Everybody complains about the weather – but, now, more companies are doing something about it.

The weather risk industry represents a $32-billion a year market, according to a recent survey by the Weather Risk Management Association and PricewaterhouseCoopers. I’ll briefly discuss how it works and what industries it applies to. Why is “WRM” used? Because, says Weather Risk Management Association President Martin Malinow, “weather risk management will protect the bottom line.” more

In the spirit of March Madness, marketing professor Jonah Berger and operations professor Devin Pope, both at Wharton, have been studying the NCAA basketball games. While their research won’t guarantee you a slam-dunk in the office pool, it could help you to energize your team.

The catalyst for the study was Berger’s experience coaching youth soccer. He noticed that the teams always seemed more energized and ready to fight when they were trailing at halftime. He wondered whether being slightly behind during a game motivated most teams enough to overcome the deficit. more

States are hurting for revenue, and the $140 billion in fiscal relief in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act won’t be enough to dig them out of the hole. A new study from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates the states’ budget shortfall at $350 billion to $370 billion in the next two and a half years. The stimulus package funds will cover about 40 percent of that.

So it’s no wonder that state lawmakers are slavering over a potential stream of sales tax income that continues to flow by, seemingly forever out of reach, in the form of Internet transactions. Their hands are tied by a Supreme Court ruling dating back to the Pleistocene era of the World Wide Web (1992) that bars states from requiring remote sellers — catalog merchants as well as online retailers — to collect sales taxes.

But the Amazons of this world may not be able to shield their sales from state taxation for much longer. more

There are some things that Republicans and Democrats agree on. Bipartisan support for health reform is on the rise, and the employer-based system that’s been in place since World War II is going to look very different very soon. It’s coming not a minute too soon; average costs paid by employers for health insurance premiums have risen eight times faster than average income in the United States, according to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. more

The government announced its program to deal with toxic bank assets on Monday, and the stock market went wild. It was big news in all major newspapers the following day.

Most companies are sitting on a different kind of toxic asset, their critical business applications. These applications are large, complex, and often a decade old or older. Most haven’t been revamped since before Y2K. No one really knows how they work anymore. Most companies spend 80 percent or more of their IT budgets just maintaining the systems they have. What should be a valuable corporate asset—your application portfolio—could turn out to be a toxic liability.

Toxic applications are time bombs just waiting to explode at the most inopportune moment. For example, a computer glitch brought AirTran Airways to full stop at its Atlanta hub for several hours on a busy Monday morning. What do you think that cost? more