1. Tom Friedman’s piece on the “New Untouchables” is great for two reasons: it focuses our attention on education, which really deserves more discussion AND it serves as a reminder for all of us that we need to be striving to be “Untouchable” if we want to end our concerns about job security.
2. Greg Coleman, former Head of Sales at Yahoo! (and AOL for a brief bit of time), writes a piece he calls “Sharpen the Saw” about how he spent his summer of unemployment. I worked with Greg at Yahoo! and thought his story was both inspiring and sad. 31 years without pauses to really sit back and evaluate what you’re doing and why is a LONG time. I applaud him for sharing something so deeply personal publicly.
3. Ian Kennedy (also a former Yahoo!) wrote an excellent overview of what he saw as being crucial at the Web 2.0 Summit. He and I have chatted about these topics before and he really nails why Social Filtering is a very big opportunity.
4. Working on startups means that I spend a lot of time thinking about how to sell better. Steve Blank’s focus on the “Customer Development Process” has really resonated with me. He writes about it a lot, but here’s a great post elaborating on his view that most companies try to apply Product Development processes to Customer Development and as a result, fail miserably.

Let me know what you think of those pieces and pass along any suggestions for related materials.