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It is getting to be about that time. Right about now a lot of boomers were supposed to be gracefully saying their goodbyes and stepping out of the workforce and into retirement. But with people living longer lives, and many boomers having smaller retirement accounts than they expected (thanks to the Great Recession), older workers are choosing what Marci Albohofer calls second or third acts. And many of those people are choosing to tackle more meaningful work for their second or third acts. Albohofer is author of The Encore Career Handbook and vice-president at encore.org, and she spoke about encore careers with Stewart Friedman , director of the Wharton Work/Life Integration Project .

Zillow has managed to become a consumer-focused disruptive force in real estate, much to the chagrin of many realtors. But the success of the online service is not all due to its public interface and how Zillow's web and mobile sites engage with home buyers. Zillow CEO Spencer Rascoff tells Wharton School professor of real estate Susan Wachter that the key to changing the home buying game is finding and mining reliable data.

We can't hate salespeople. Because, in today's world, we are all salespeople. So says Daniel Pink in his latest book, To Sell Is Human . And instead of being annoyed by some salespeople, we would do well to recognize that being successful in our jobs and lives requires a new thoughtful approach to sales. Holding the right questions, not holding all the answers, appears to he key. In this short interview with Wharton management professor Adam Grant , Pink explains "the new ABCs of selling":

Wharton finance professor Jeremy Siegel always strikes us as a glass-three-quarters-full kind of guy--at least when it comes to the markets. He has been projecting stronger growth than many of his friends and colleagues for some time now . So the below interview will be welcome to those looking for hope in uncertain times. To be sure, it has been another volatile week in the global markets, with Italy's inconclusive elections and another budgets standoff in Washington. But Siegel is undeterred and he thinks more bullish investing will be rewarded:

When the G20 meets later this week, avoiding a currency war will be one of the top issues for discussion . With Japan lowering the value of the yen, European nations are highly concerned that an artificially high euro (not just against the yen, but also against a relatively weak dollar) is exacerbating economic distress in the Euro Zone. In an interview with Knowledge@Wharton , Wharton School finance professor Franklin Allen explains how the actions of Japan's leaders might affect economies from Brazil to Russia:

New Year's Resolution for top executives: kill your company. Don't really kill it, of course. Rather, go through the first exercise in Lisa Bodell 's book Kill the Company: End the Status Quo . Bodell--founder and CEO of FutureThink --advises top managers fully engage with an exercise to determine their organizations' most dangerous vulnerabilities. If you figure out your weaknesses before your opponents do, you may be able to change them before they cause you real lasting harm. Bodell spoke about the need for this level of intense self reflection with Knowledge@Wharton 's Shannon Berning :

Coursera , a popular, relatively young company that offers online courses, has the potential to be a disruptive force in education. It may also present a model for a successful model of disruptive business thinking. In partnership with some of the most prestigious universities in the US, Coursera offers something called "massive online open courses," or MOOCs. Tens of thousands of people have signed up for some of these MOOCs (though only a fraction complete some of the courses). Daphne Koller , a computer science professor at Stanford University and one of the founders of Coursera, recently spoke with Knowledge@Wharton about the success in signing up students, and the challenge of converting participation to revenue.

Some corporations are finding the age of social networks difficult, as the seemingly leaderless networks gain power. Barry Libert , CEO of Open Networks and the author of Social Nation , says that corporate leaders need to embrace the reality that "risk" now resides outside the organization--in social networks. No longer do these leaders have the power to control messages, and they don't control the data behind their decisions as they once did. Libert discussed the risks and rewards of embracing social networks in this Knowledge@Wharton video: