Comments have been pouring in about your preferred “brain food.”  Gini Deitrich, one of our favorite guest bloggers, has chimed in with her two cents, as has my friend, Scott Collins, Present of SRA.  Take a look and share your own.

Hi Tom,

There’s so much to read out there that it’s important to home in on what really serves your needs.  Here are the blogs and reporters that I read daily:

• Del Jones at USAToday
• Randy Hall at 4th Gear Consulting
• Jay Goltz at The New York Times Small Business Blog
• Harvard Business Review blog
• American Express OPEN Forum
• BusinessWeek blog
• WomenEntrepreneur
• Jay Baer at Convince & Convert

I also subscribe to SmartBrief leadership, and daily entrepreneur and social media newsletters for new ideas and articles.

And, of course, I read YOU!

Gini

And from Scott:

Hi Tom,

Here are some of my favorite information sources to share with your readers.

Vistage: I utilize a pretty wide variety of their speaking resources to enhance what we are doing.  Sometimes I read additional information from them, sign up for their newsletters, etc.

New strategic facilitator: We are going to engage the services of Harry Kangis (developer of the “One Page Strategic Plan”) to facilitate a completely redesigned strategic planning process.  I felt like we needed to do something very different to “shake things up” given our desire to accelerate our transformation…now was the right time.

LinkedIn: I have gotten some very good ideas through various LinkedIn groups as well as introductions to additional thought leaders.

Get Abstract: I can’t tell you how great a resource this has been.  New content every week in small, digestible chunks on a very wide variety of topics. You can always buy the book if the preview sparks deeper interest

Blue Ocean: I use this as a broad term to define bringing together a wide array of thought leaders from very unrelated industries to help us think about the future of SRA.  This has done so much to help us redefine the model and our target markets resulting in a much shorter timeline for us to complete our transformation (frequency – once or twice a year)

Building our business from the outside in: Coordinating our customers, vendors, and unrelated business visionaries in an “Advisory Board” capacity to help us think about and refine various parts of our business and product offerings.  We are now doing this with our redeveloped SRA University initiative and it is already paying dividends.  (Frequency is almost monthly as an ongoing part of the tactics that help us achieve our strategic objectives)

Six Thinking Hats by Edward deBono: Great resource to help improve the thinking and decision making process in your business.

Enjoy!

Scott