Leadership and learning are indispensable to each other.
-- John F. Kennedy 

He who learns but does not think is lost.
-- Confucius

Small business marketing has a lot of moving parts - even more so in a recession and it's often up to the CEO or business owner to keep all the parts moving all the time. That can be challenging, to say the least. Here are some ideas to keep your momentum up.

Never stop learning. Go back to school or read books. Get training and acquire skills. But never think of learning as learning for its own sake.

Take what you've learned and apply it, modify it, expand it, develop it, share it, teach others, and boil it down to its essence in real, concrete business terms that you can use in your immediate environment.

In any learning situation, focus like a laser beam on application, application, application! Learn from every source, think, and then translate that learning into appropriate, useful, meaningful action.

Don't just focus on learning - focus on unlearning, relearning, and learning differently. With the economy in a meltdown, financial markets undergoing tectonic shifts on a weekly and sometimes daily basis, and everything else up for grabs as giant corporations stumble, falter, and collapse - it's an understatement to say "the rules have changed."

Stay alert for small business marketing ideas that you would have never considered before. Scan the horizon, see where your customers and clients are going, and then as the great Wayne Gretzky advises, "Don't skate to where the puck is... skate to where the puck is GOING to be."