Guy Kawasaki's book The Art of the Start: The Time-Tested, Battle-Hardened Guide for Anyone Starting Anything is an excellent resource and I recommend it for anyone starting a business or running an existing business. Guy spends a lot of time talking about venture capital and dealing with investors, but even if you don't need (or want) funding for your business, there are a lot of interesting insights and tons of useful information nuggets, on a wide range of topics

"To really stand for something, you must make difficult decisions, mostly about what you don't do. We don't ship products like that, we don't stand for employees like that ("you're fired"), we don't fix problems like that."

That quote is from a classic post from Seth Godin that I recommend everyone read. It's not very long or deep but has a key message that is very important to understand.

If you are a heavy consumer of various blogs like I am, you might want to check out AllTop, which is an aggregator of top news feeds and blog posts. It seems to have more blog posts than articles that I would classify as "stories", but regardless it's great content largely focused on technology and business.

Yes, I know, there are lots of sites that aggregate content from other sites - but I'm mentioning this one because the topics focus on areas mostly of interest to me - so perhaps to you too, and you might want to check it out.

Another resource I stumbled across recently in iTunes is an iTunes U Podcast (should they be called Podcasts?) series presented by the Center for Creative Leadership. Their podcasts are short (about five minutes each) audio-only sessions on a variety of leadership topics. It’s very basic stuff – you can’t get too deep on a topic in just five minutes - but still another good resource for daily reminders on fairly basic leadership skills.

(Hi Guy!)

If you don't know who Guy Kawasaki is, you might want to check out his blog and get familiar with his content. (He's a MAC-guy, but I try not to hold that against him.) Guy writes on topics ranging from marketing and sales, to entrepreneurship and venture capital. Even the occasional post about cars (check out this post on the Audi R8).

He's frank in his communication even when it goes against the grain. He also shares differing opinions from various contributors. One example being two posts from 2007 about public relations. One being "The Top Ten Reasons Why PR Doesn't Work" and a bit of a counter point named "DIY PR".

You might think some of his posts are rather common-sense, like I do - but it's amazing how people (myself included) can sometimes "forget" or "neglect" certain common sense items due to the distractions of incredibly busy schedules. Consuming information like Guy's blog and others, is a great way to both stay reminded of things we all already know, and to add further to our knowledge base - both lending to personal improvement.