Are You Keeping Up With What's Happening? by Ken Bernhardt Regents' Professor Robinson College of Business, Georgia State University Atlanta Business Chronicle - November 19, 2004  As the end of the year approaches, it seems the reading pile gets higher and higher for most marketers and every year it seems that it gets harder to stay on top of what's happening in the external environment.  Yet, at the same time, most savvy marketers would say that is more important than ever to track what is happening in marketing.  Most people do a pretty good job of staying current with their industry, including competitive activity, major shifts in consumer buying patterns, and industry happenings reported in the major trade journals.  The real issue is what to read the covers things worth knowing outside of your industry.  Let's take a look at the 3 types of reading that are the hardest to keep up with: books, business magazines, and on-line newsletters.  Books are probably the hardest because it takes so long to read them. On the other hand, they are the source that is most likely to have a major impact on your thinking.  How do you find out what marketing or business books are worth reading?  I pay attention to the American Marketing Association Berry AMA Book Prize finalists.  I am currently reading this year's winner as the best book in marketing published during the previous 3 years, which is Trading Up: The New American Luxury by Boston Consulting Group consultant Michael Silverstein and Neil Fiske, CEO of Bath and Body Works. Other notable marketing books which were finalists during the past 2 years that I have read or are on my reading pile include How Customers Think: Essential Insights Into the Mind of the Market, by Harvard Business School professor Gerald Zaltman; Marketing ROI: The Path to Campaign, Customer, and Corporate Profitablity by James Lenskold; and The Myth of Excellence: Why Great Companies Never Try to Be the Best at Everything by Fred Crawford and Ryan Mathews. Another great source for identifying worthwhile marketing books is www.CEOread.com.  This website has reviews of current business books that should be of interest (see their blog at www.CEOread.com/blog). One trick I have used to keep up with all the worthwhile marketing and business books is to buy the books on audiotape or CD's and spend my time in the car keeping up with these new and sometimes "big" ideas.  A bigger problem for most marketing executives is how to keep up with the magazine reading.  I'm sure many of you do what I do, which is to always take a stack of these with me when I get on an airplane.  One advantage to subscribing to these individually rather than just being on the company's route list is that you can look at the table of contents, identify the articles of interest and rip out them out and throw away the rest of the magazine. This cuts down considerably on the bulk - - I often give the flight attendants 2 or 3 stacks to throw away during the flight.  Another trick used by some executives is to assign each person on their team 2 or 3 of these magazines and have them read them and disseminate to everyone the articles worth reading, sometimes even highlighting the sections which are most noteworthy.  An added benefit of this method is that it communicates to all that keeping up is valued and also makes sure that everyone gets to read "the good stuff."  So, what business and marketing magazines do I think are worth reading?  I personally try to read (that is, scan for the worthwhile articles) the major marketing magazines such as Ad Age, Adweek, Brand Week, Sales & Marketing Management, and Marketing Management (which is a wonderful magazine published by the American Marketing Association). In addition, more general business publications such as Harvard Business Review, Business Week, Fortune, Forbes, and MIT's Sloan Management Review often have very valuable articles on marketing. Finally, there are a number of email newsletters that are worthwhile, although admittedly, they often come along with a huge number of other emails and thus get buried.  My strategy is to open them up and if the subject doesn't resonate, I delete it without reading it and if it does, I print it out to read later.  Examples of the ones I look at include: www.marketingpower.com (compiled by the American Marketing Association, it enables you to set up the topics and industries of interest to you and only sends you information on those); www.emarketer.com (articles and statistics on e-commerce and on-line marketing); www.mckinseyquarterly.com (articles written by McKinsey's consultants); www.reveries.com/coolnews (Reveries Magazines reports on cool new things happening in the marketplace); knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu (Wharton's Marketing faculty perspectives on today's hottest marketing topics); www.knowledge.emory.edu (same thing from the perspective of Emory's faculty); www.MarketingProfs.com (white papers on a variety of marketing topics); and www.trendsetters.com (trend-watching website with cool new "stuff"). Undoubtedly, trying to keep up with all of these things (and others like Atlanta Business Chronicle and the Wall Street Journal's Marketplace section) seems like an impossible task.  My suggestion is to block out a certain period of time each week that is for you to use to stay current with what's happening around you.  There are things going on in other industries that your competitors don't know about that could give you a competitive edge.  In today's competitive market, that's something that is really hard to get; the several hours  a week spent on keeping up with the external environment might be the most valuable time you spend all week.  Happy reading!