Barbara Corcoran knows better than most what it takes to build a powerful brand. 28 years after founding The Corcoran Group, her real-estate company, she sold it for twice its estimated value. As she puts it: “They paid me for my sales . . . but then they paid me double for my brand.” Brand-building isn’t happenstance – a lucky byproduct of professional success – it’s a daily practice, and time spent becoming a name to be reckoned with is time well spent. “Good old fashioned grandstanding...

“Work-life balance”? Forget about it, says Barbara Corcoran. If you’re an ambitious person with a demanding career, the best you can hope for is “work-life separation”.

All industries experience market fluctuations, but nowhere are they so pronounced as in real estate. Yet Barbara Corcoran advises ambitious, growing businesses to take advantage of even the most extreme downturns as an opportunity to pull focus from more established competitors.

On the television show “Shark Tank”, real estate mogul Barbara Corcoran and other investors hear hundreds of pitches from hopeful entrepreneurs. The most promising pitches lead to a “feeding frenzy” in which the investors do battle over who gets in on the ground floor. So what factors lead to success or failure in the all-important pitch?

It happens to the best of us. We’re desperate for help, our business is growing faster than we can keep up. And so anyone who has the skills we’re looking for on a resume seems like an ideal candidate. Barbara Corcoran, the lovable shark on ABC’s start-up competition show, “Shark Tank,” the Co-Founder of Barbara Corcoran Venture Partners, and author of Shark Tales, a book in which she offers her best advice for anyone starting a business, recommends that you never look at another resume aga...