Fall is harvest time, when all the hard work of planting and weeding pays off with crisp apples, rich pumpkin pie and all kinds of other goodies (gotta stop writing these when I’m hungry). I love seeing how the work of our Bureau members pays off as they see their people and company grow and mature. We share a lot of these stories in the Bureau Slack, along with tools and resources to help one another succeed.
I send a selection of these links out in our weekly newsletter, which is free and available to anyone by signing up here. Once a month I also collect the best of those resources for the benefit of those who already have 500 unread emails in their inbox. Enjoy!
Planning for the Future
We never know exactly what is going to happen tomorrow or next year, but your shop is going to have to deal with a slow economy at some point. When it happens, you don’t want to be scrambling for answers. Clear Digital put together a great guide for adjusting your strategies in lean times, including how to understand changing client needs and focus on your strengths.
More about being prepared:
During Turbulent Times, Narrow Your Focus: The Two KPIs That Matter Most (Blog link)
Five Steps to Smarter Forecasting (Blog link)
Leadership and Strategy
When looking to grow your business, are you looking at unusual new practices, or are you focused on the fundamentals? Parallax has created this excellent guide to help digital service companies get better at individual processes that are key for experiencing long-term growth and success.
More tips for developing healthy company strategies:
Notes From Agency Leader Chats (Notes and findings from Promethean Research)
Resource Management vs Capacity Planning: Why You Need Both (Blog link)
Embracing the 36-hour Workweek and Its Impact on Company Culture, Health, and Productivity (Blog link)
Capacity Planning 101: Strategies, Benefits, and Challenges (Blog link)
Diversity and Accessibility
One of the most common mental health challenges individuals face today is Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). But it’s not always well understood or recognized in the workplace, where it can have an impact on productivity, job prospects and professional relationships. To help us all improve our understanding of this common condition, Medium has a great outline that walks us through it and how we can support colleagues with ADHD.
More about taking care of our actual human resources:
Designing With Diversity: Increasing Accessibility in the Insurance Industry (Blog link)
WCAG 2.2 is Now a Proposed Recommendation! What You Need to Know About this New Accessibility Update. (Blog link)
AI
AI remains as always a hot topic, and it’s not going anywhere, so we better learn to live with it and understand its uses and limitations. A new paper helps shine some light on how those using language model tools like ChatGPT are seeing performance improvements over those who aren’t.
More about our robot overlords:
Why AI can't pass this test (Video)
Digital Agencies & AI Report (Video)
Transcript: US Senate Judiciary Hearing on Oversight of A.I. (Transcript link)
That’s it for now. I highly recommend that you check out our weekly newsletter for an in-depth discussion on a weekly topic as well as links for more resources like these. See you next month!