If you don’t have Corner Office set up for your Sunday morning New York Times read, you’re missing out on a great column and an opportunity to become a more effective leader. It doesn’t matter whether you’re the CEO, just getting started in a new career or anywhere along the way. For that matter, you’ll find the insights valuable and applicable for life in general.

Columnist Adam Bryant conducts interviews of top leaders and explores provocative, interesting, insightful topics that mine the perspectives of these CEOs and top industry executives.  These are challenging times, and finding new views, effective tools, insights from the experts and the candid comments from those who have learned lessons from real-world experience is worth the few minutes you’ll invest.

More than that, make it a point to find a lesson in each interview, something that you can apply yourself or pass along to someone you know who can benefit.  And be sure to check out the blogs for lively debate on the range of issues you’ll discover from your read.

Simple. Easy. And I guarantee you’ll find something useful within the first few doses!

Just finished reading Tim Sanders’ book, “Love is the Killer App: How to Win Business and Influence Friends.” Tim is the Chief Solutions Officer at Yahoo! and his book will push your “abundancy thinking” to the next level. For those of you who have heard me speak about abundance, I’m a big believer in advocating for an abundant life and abundant world. By that I don’t mean “you can have it all!” Abundancy vs. scarcity is the place you come from in terms of how you approach your world; you either see it as a place of scarcity, that doesn’t have enough to go around and everyone needs to get theirs or someone else will get it. Or you’re an abundancy person, who gives away what they have to offer the world, believing that the world will mirror your giving and give back even more. Tim’s book advances this concept in the workplace. Read it and I’m sure you’ll find it challenging, informative and, hopefully, useful if you’re willing to take some risks.

Seth Godin: Marketing Genius – A colleague and friend of mine turned me on to Seth Godin’s site awhile back; I find something useful all the time. If you’re not receiving Seth Godin’s blog, you’re really missing out. Guaranteed to stretch your mind (the kind of experiences we believe keep us creative, exciting and intellectually-stimulated!), sign-up for a test drive and you’re bound to find something in Seth’s words of wisdom as he challenges your thinking.

More to come in future posts. Just a few to get you thinking and experimenting. If you have favorites of your own, pass them along and we’ll take a look and post here what we think our connected world might find useful and interesting.

Books, Tapes and More – If you’ve not visited half.com, you’re missing a great on-line resource for books, tapes, books on DVD, etc. Half is a resource where you can find all this stuff at drastically reduced price as part of the underground economy. Leading books for sometimes pennies on the dollar because someone else is passing along their good stuff after they’ve learned from it. Fast delivery right to your door, a wide range of offerings and an easy-to-use site… customer service at its best.

All You Ever Wanted to Know About Boards – Whether serving on one, serving one or considering either, BoardSource is the definitive site for information. If you’re one of our clients, we use them all the time to help with best practices, training info, books and related tools. They’re customer-service driven and we love the range of information they make available to use to help you and your organization.

Another site from our ongoing list of good things we’ve found on the ‘net.

News You Can Use – If you’re in California and not checking out Rough and Tumble, you’re not really reading the news each day; this site tallies and prepares all the California-profiled news for you long before you sip your first cup o’ Joe. It’s a great aggregator of sites with political, economic, education, environmental, healthcare and other topics of interest. And, with California a big trend-setting state, it’s useful to see what’s happening and how it might affect other parts of our nation, and our world.

There’s so much available on the ‘net now that it’s hard sifting through it all to find what’s useful to your needs. I’ll be doing a series of blogs on a few places to go and things to do we’ve found useful in our client work and for staying on top of the information and resources important in our field of communications, media, coaching and public affairs.

Facilitation 101 – Two places to check out what we do in our facilitation work and how to get a sense of what really matters are the IAP2 and IAF sites. IAP2 is the International Association of Public Participation – if you want to know about best practices, here’s the place. IAF is the International Association of Facilitators; mostly a place for us facilitator-types, however, it gives you a good idea of the kind of standards and ethics you should expect from a pro.

More to come in future posts. Just a few to get you thinking and experimenting. If you have favorites of your own, pass them along and we’ll take a look and post here what we think our connected world might find useful and interesting.