Our Daily Read
by Jenna Schnuer.com. Once she has the latest read in hand, she "has a Puritan work
ethic of starting out on page one … and then skipping around," once
she's determined the central themes of the book.
Because the
software developers and other staffers in Brown's group
often "have their heads down" working away on a specific task,
she's one of the central information gatherers for her team. But
she's not the sole reader; they all read and share what they learn,
a process that's the linchpin to her getting-all-the-reading-done
strategy. Plus, trading information is fun, she says: The software
world "is almost a café society. People drop articles on my desk
and are always exploring."
A fiction fan, Brown says that in this age of globalization there
are plenty of lessons to be learned from international novels and
short stories. "You start to get insight into other cultures and to
be entertained at the same time," she says.
The Fashionable Luddite
Don't even ask Kalman Ruttenstein which websites he visits. There's
no computer in his life. "I'm back in the twentieth century," says
the senior vice president for fashion direction at
Bloomingdale's.
Ruttenstein, who has to stay way ahead of fashion trends so he and
his team of nine fashion directors can stock the shelves and racks
of 30 stores, leaves the
web surfing to his assistant. She reads
all the online journals and then passes any intriguing bits along
to him. This way, he can focus on the fashion trade and consumer
magazines he prefers, including DNR, WWD, Elle, Glamour, and Vogue,
along with "lots of international publications." He also hits
several papers daily, but he only reads the sections that interest
him, including the business section of
the New York Times and the
business and "junk" sections of the New York Post.
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