SMITH BRAIN TRUST – Americans are known to be good at many things. Vacationing isn't one of them. Year after year, workplace surveys reveal that millions of American workers failed to take their allotted vacation days. And increasingly, the overriding reason is fear.

SMITH BRAIN TRUST – All those emotions you've been bottling up in the workplace in the interest of projecting a professional image? You might have been better off letting some of them fly free.

Juggling a career and home life is often complicated. Smith management and organization lecturer Nicole Coomber has figured out how to apply business principles to managing her own career and family – and now she has outlined some of the most effective tools to help you, too.

SMITH BRAIN TRUST — The global proportion of women among the planet's billionaires is still shy of 3 percent. That's a slim minority, but the proportion has tripled in the past decade. And as Forbes recently documented, 56 of these women are self-made billionaires — an increase from 42 in 2016.

SMITH BRAIN TRUST – When you envision the future of autonomous delivery, do you imagine an army of drones for every supermarket and corner store, waiting to be deployed to customers' homes?

SMITH BRAIN TRUST — Google’s mea culpa for ads appearing alongside extremist video content on YouTube has culminated in promises from the tech giant, including a measure to block ads from channels with fewer than 10,000 views and a new system in which third-party firms will verify ad quality standards.

SMITH BRAIN TRUST – What does it mean when a pioneer of the telecommuting workforce begins to curb its work-from-home practices? For IBM, it means a massive culture shift, say experts from the University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business. And while the tech giant might be hoping it results in a surge in innovation, it also might spark a surge of resignations.

SMITH BRAIN TRUST — Can U.S. companies simultaneously encourage that employees get enough sleep (seven-plus hours nightly) and maintain a competitive edge? Sleep deprivation costs U.S.

SMITH BRAIN TRUST — Those annual employee performance reviews can be pretty stressful. But what if instead of being a once-a-year thing with just your boss, they were every day, with everyone you work with? JPMorgan Chase & Co. is revamping the way it evaluates its 240,000 employees, deploying a mobile app that will let colleagues across the organization send and receive instant feedback about each other any time.

SMITH BRAIN TRUST – Could activism inspired by International Women's Day, such as State Street Global Advisors' placing a statue of a young girl before the iconic charging bull of Wall Street, actually hamper the push to gain more women on U.S. corporate boards?