During any given day, I’m listening to something while I work, whether it be music or talk radio or something else entirely.
One key component to my audio enrichment during a given week is a selection of podcasts that enhance my professional growth. I listen to several podcasts that focus at least in part on small business issues and I thought I’d share these with you today.
I highly encourage you to check out these podcasts. The easiest way to do this is by using Apple’s free iTunes program. Simply go to the iTunes Store section of the program and search for the names of these podcasts. You can download and listen to them for free, essentially creating your own small business success radio station.
- Marketplace is my one-stop-shop for business news and advice. It’s simply a re-airing of Marketplace, a radio program from American Public Media broadcast on many NPR stations across the United States.
- Automate My Small Business offers incredibly strong advice on techniques for automating specific aspects of small businesses, from routine marketing requests to office management tasks. In terms of pure workable ideas that directly help my small businesses, this is the single best podcast I’ve yet listened to.
- Small Business Trends, a podcast created by other wonderful contributors to OPEN Forum, offers up a great collection of ideas and perspectives on small business management, often with a strong technology bent. If you’re looking for thoughts on how to integrate the rapidly changing world of technology into the day to day activities of your enterprise, this is a must-listen podcast.
- Wall Street Journal on Small Business offers detailed coverage of current events affecting small businesses. It has a slightly conservative political stance (as does the WSJ as a whole), but the advice offered to businesses is straightforward and sound.
Want more Podcast advice? Check these out:
Beyond these, I strongly recommend that you take a look at the audio programming available via iTunes U (again, search for these in the iTunes Store). These aren’t podcasts per se, but are audio collections of lectures from business schools which can make for very good listening as you’re working or commuting.
A few of my favorites:
- Building a Business – Oxford University is perhaps the best all-around information I’ve found on what it really takes to get a small business -- a business of any size, really -- off the ground and rolling forward.
- Yale Entrepreneurial Institute is a program started by Yale students and graduates to help Yale students start scalable businesses. The advice offered here is brilliant stuff if you’re seeking to create a business that can grow long term.
- Small Business Management – Southern Institute of Technology is a series of discussions with businesspeople (from both large and small businesses) on what it really takes to make a small business work.
I use all of these audio programs much like a radio station. I’ll burn CDs of them or take an MP3 player full of these programs with me in the car when I’m driving and listen to this enriching small business information as I commute, or I’ll listen to them as I work in the office, letting the ideas wash over my ears and into my mind. These programs always provide valuable food for thought.
Image credit: Colleen Venable
