People are bombarded with a constant steam of information today: emails, twitters, media, text messages, and many more. It's getting hard to find time to do anything and to separate the important from the unimportant. However, I'm firmly convinced a leader needs to stay current on emerging trends, new technologies, market dynamics, and many more factors daily impacting our lives and our businesses. To be efficient and effective in managing our information flows, we need to learn to work smarter and use technology to our advantage. One good example is in reading books. I'm convinced leaders have to be readers. Yet, there are hundreds of good business and personal development books published every year. How, does one stay on top of all this important information. I've found, as have many of my colleagues, that using a book service is a huge help. There are a number of good services out there that read the latest books and provide you with an email summary of the books in various formats including PDF, PDA, HTML, and audio. The summaries are brief, concise, and hit the key take-aways from the book - and it only takes about 10 minutes to read the summary. For several years, I've used Business Summaries and I highly recommend them. It's the quickest and most cost effective method I know to stay current - keep on learning.
