Your must-read guide for the weekend: Coffee with Mike Bloomberg; Be an ‘ideas entrepreneur’; Delve into a dangerous business

When the mayor of New York, Mike Bloomberg, started his first business, he knew that to get ahead he needed to network and learn from the experts.

So he’d buy a round of takeaway coffees, prowl the office floor and offer a caffeine hit to people he wanted to chat to. They never said no, so he’d take the chance to introduce himself and find out what he needed to know.

For LinkedIn, Bloomberg tells this tale, and offers five of his best tips for business entrepreneurs.

How to be an ideas entrepreneur

If you have an idea that you believe will change your business for the better, how do you go about presenting it to your team and getting people to take notice? Some people are natural “idea entrepreneurs” and generate a following, while others struggle to present the concept in a way that makes people sit up and take notice.

For the Harvard Business Review, John Butman looks into how the experts do it, and offers seven strategies to emulate their success.

Black market business

Delve into the dark side with this feature from Forbes, where reporter Andy Greenberg explores a business of the dangerous variety. With a false name ‘Dread Pirate Roberts’, the business owner of Silk Road, an online drug trading website, refuses to meet in person or reveal his nationality or address.

It took the reporter eight months to tease an interview out of him, and he only achieved it with messages via anonymity software.

Spring is coming, get off your chair

As we wait out the last few weeks before spring arrives, it’s a good time to be thinking about getting our health back on track.

We all know sitting too long at desks and working in front of our laptops late into the night at home is causing damage to our health. But fitting in exercise between business commitments can seem like an insurmountable hurdle.

Australian author and blogger Sarah Wilson offers her advice on how to get more movement into your day – without it being a big deal.

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