The Brain Trust: Introduction

You can’t put them on your staff (unfortunately), but you can put their best new ideas to work. Ten small business thinkers worth paying attention to.

FORTUNE SMALL BUSINESS

By Stephen D. Solomon and Julie Sloane

If you could assemble the world’s most perfect board of directors, whom would you put on it? You’d probably want some theoreticians from the business schools, a venture capitalist or two, maybe a sales pro. In fact, if you gave it enough thought, you’d probably come up with a list pretty close to the one we’ve assembled. To find our dream board, we flipped through every Rolodex in our office and worked our Palms to the bone. We talked to all the people we knew with small business expertise and had them talk to everyone they knew.

The final list we settled on includes specialists across a broad range of subjects, but they all have something to offer, regardless of whether you sell fan blades or French toast. Consider Chris Shipley, a technology analyst at IDG. After covering the tech world for almost two decades and meeting with some 400 companies a year, she has developed a reputation for finding the most promising technologies before anyone else. (Right now she likes software being delivered cheaply over the Internet.) Or Malcolm Gladwell, a staff writer at The New Yorker and author of The Tipping Point, a book that demystifies the way products seem to take off on their own. Or even consultant David Birch, who tells you how to grow your business at light speed. Ready for more? The meeting will now come to order.

View the list and their comments:
http://www.fortune.com/fortune/smallbusiness/managing/articles/0,15114,396607,00.html