I guess I’m auto disqualified to cite this very Community’s contribution (here and on Social) for the CS inspiration that gets me through my day as the Community Manager 
But seriously, apart from the known leaders in Community and Customer Success space, I’ve recently chanced across Jesse Cole on LinkedIn he founded an entertainment co. and then launched the Savannah Bananas, a baseball team].
His insights on branding, dressed the part in bright yellow, speaks volumes to me, especially something he said along the lines of: ‘your Customers may leave you but your Fans won’t’.
which directly connected with my personal passion of constantly discovering what could bring and keep people to Gamechanger, and that’s the line that got me hooked on to him.
This guy’s entertaining as he’s insightful. Check out this episode
This promises to be a Fantastic thread, thanks for teeing this off @matthew_lind
Community is the zone of CS that I most play in nowadays, and the podcast In Before the Lock has two long-time community experts talking about how to build and run communities. Each episode gives both conceptual and tactical advice on a specific area of community management responsibility. They have a searchable index of their episodes: https://ib4tl.fm/
You can also filter their index by topics that appear in multiple episodes:
- Advocacy
- Alignment
- Badges
- Budget Planning
- Career
- Collaboration
- Competitors
- Conferences
- Content Strategy
- Conversion
- Crisis Management
- Culture
- Customer Journey
- Customer Success
- Customer Support
- CX
- Design
- Employees
- Engagement
- Engineering
- Erica Appreciation
- Events
- Execution
- Executive Comms
- Experience
- Failures
- Feedback
- Gamification
- Goal Setting
- Gratitude
- Guidelines
- Headcount Planning
- Hiring
- Ideation
- Imposter Syndrome
- Incentives
- Industry
- Integration
- Job Search
- Launch
- Leadership
- Learning
- Legal
- Localization
- Management
- Marketing
- Measurement
- Mental Health
- Migration
- Moderation
- Naming
- Navigation
- Onboarding
- Operations
- Partners
- Personal Brand
- Personas
- Post-Launch
- Predictions
- Product
- Promotion
- Ranks
- Resume
- Roadmap
- ROI
- Sales & Revenue
- Scale
- Social Media
- Soft Launch
- Strategy
- Superuser Programs
- Swag
- Thought Leadership
- UI/UX
- Use Cases
- User Groups
- Vendor Selection
- Vision
- Web3
For me the the book that I have found most relevant for myself and not specific to CS is called “Grit” by Angela Duckworth. It’s great read and will probably resonate for anyone who believes playing the long game is the best approach
Weekend Language - I loved how this help connect why we remember the stories told on weekends better. Great to incorporate into how you are working with customers and others.
Sort of tangential to CS - I am reading “The Customer Education Playbook” by Daniel Quick and Barry Kelly to understand customer education.
Completely outside of CS, CoryGFitness.com is a blog I follow that (on top of workout plans) teaches the power of streaks and non-negotiable habits - not just getting things done, but having a streak of doing something (can be doing lunges, can be a work activity) every single day and keeping a streak of doing so, that eventually you won’t want to break.
I just listened to this episode of the RevOps Live podcast, and there’s all sorts of goodness in there about handling...and reducing...the fire-drills in our work. Great listen!
Stop the Daily Fire-Drills in RevOps
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/revops-corner/id1619571311?i=1000599842353
@matthew_lind Adding it to my queue!
Servant Leadership Principles! _ helps a lot in our day to day things and at-last to focus on community!