It’s always important to know what’s going on. The news from home and abroad affects the decisions we make on a day-to-day basis. And longer-term national and global trends influence both our organisations and the trajectory of our personal and professional lives.
Where you get your news from is equally important. Your sources need to be reliable. They need to be balanced. And they need to be up-to-date. I find it useful to draw on a range of sources, some with a short-term ‘daily news’ focus and some with a longer-term analytical perspective.
For my daily news fix, I subscribe to the digital editions of the Financial Times and the Guardian. I also receive various of the FT‘s daily and weekly newsletters as well as to the Guardian‘s morning briefing email, which ensure that the headlines are waiting in my inbox when I start the day.
For a more reflective take on things, I generally read the Guardian Weekly, to which my wife subscribes and which I can recommend highly. I also subscribe to the monthly Prospect current affairs magazine, which always manages to challenge my thinking and to introduce me to topics about which I wouldn’t usually read.
For global affairs and cultural trends, I’m a big fan of Monocle magazine, which also publishes a great range of email newsletters and podcasts. In fact, their weekend current affairs discussion is my podcast of choice while I’m doing the ironing on a Sunday evening.
And for management thinking and trends, it has to be the Harvard Business Review, of which I’ve been an avid reader since I started out as a consultant over twenty years ago.
These are just my choices. And I do try to read other news sources, too, especially when I’m travelling overseas and have access to a broader range of international titles. The important thing, though, is to find a source of reliable news and to engage with it regularly. What that source is, and how you consume it, is up to you.
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