First Business

Harvard Business Review is the foremost destination for smart management thinking. Now, at its 100th anniversary, this commemorative volume brings together the most influential ideas since its inception. With thought leaders including Michael E. Porter, W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne, Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Peter Drucker, and Clayton M. Christensen, this book puts HBR's greatest concepts at your fingertips. You'll learn how these groundbreaking ideas continue to be relevant in today's business context—and what to keep in mind as you prepare for the future.

Filled with sharply drawn, emotionally powerful senses, Walk Through Fire traces the hardships Sheila faced in her marriage and her professional life. Despite her skills as a violinist and music teacher, as well as her obvious entrepreneurial talent, she had to fight to overcome self-doubt and fears of failure. Sheila vividly details her struggles, including battling institutional racism, losing a child, suffering emotional abuse in her thirty-three-year marriage, and plunging into a deep depression with her divorce. And yet, out of that pain came renewed purpose and meaning.

David Rakoff's best-selling collection of autobiographical essays, Fraud, established him as one of today's funniest and most insightful writers. Now, in Don't Get Too Comfortable, Rakoff moves from the personal to the public, journeying into the land of unchecked plenty that is contemporary America. Rarely have greed, vanity, selfishness, and vapidity been so mercilessly and wittily skewered.

Fitness Professionals live paycheck to paycheck despite working a heroic amount of hours. This audiobook teaches a system that increases their cash flow so they can be home at dinner time and their gym can thrive. The system is simple to learn and implement.

In your career, there is one transition that stands out as the most crucial - going from individual contributor to competent manager. New managers have to learn how to lead others rather than do the work themselves, to win trust and respect, to motivate, and to strike the right balance between delegation and control. Many fail to make the transition successfully. In this timeless, indispensable book, Harvard Business School professor and leadership guru Linda Hill traces the experiences of 19 new managers over the course of their first year in the role.

This is the memoir of James C. Hormel - a man who grew up feeling different not only because his family owned the Hormel “empire” and lived in a 26 bedroom house in a small Midwest town, but because he was gay at a time when homosexuality was not discussed or accepted. Outwardly he tried to live up to the life his father wanted for him - he was a successful professional, had married a lovely woman, and had children - but as volatile changes in the late 1960s impeded on the American psyche, Hormel realized that he could not hide his true self forever.

How can women become effective leaders in large organizations without sacrificing who they are, as women and as mothers? This audiobook answers the question: They should live out the 10 characteristics of today's winning leaders. These characteristics - compassion, honesty, and authenticity, for example - were once seen as feminine weaknesses in the command-and-control corporate world. But today, in an inclusive and connected world, they define the leader who strengthens organizations rather than undermines them.

Developed for business professionals, The First Two Hours teaches you how to design your day, rather than be at the mercy of it. Using research on neuroscience, energy flow, and the body's natural rhythms, it divides the workday into manageable blocks and helps you determine when you are most resourceful, and therefore when you should complete your most demanding tasks.

From Mike Michalowicz, the author of Profit First, Clockwork, and The Pumpkin Plan, comes the ultimate diagnostic tool for every entrepreneur.... The biggest problem entrepreneurs have is that they don't know what their biggest problem is. If you find yourself trapped between stagnating sales, staff turnover, and unhappy customers, what do you fix first? Every issue seems urgent—but there's no way to address all of them at once. The result? A business that continues to go in endless circles putting out urgent fires and prioritizing the wrong things.

In The Employee Advantage, behavioral economist Stephan Meier explains why organizations must value their employees as much as—if not more than—their customers: those that pivot toward an employee-centric model will be more profitable, innovative, and appealing to top talent.

This practical and motivational guide provides the tools and knowledge to control your future and secure your fortune. From establishing goals and sorting out the legal and financial paperwork, to advanced marketing strategies and relationship building techniques, this indispensable book offers step-by-step instructions for you to establish and grow your own consultancy business. This extensively revised and updated fourth edition includes new and expanded coverage on utilizing informal media, changes in guidelines, key distinctions of wholesale and retail businesses, and much more.

Through her global consulting projects, keynote speeches, and work with thousands of leaders, Karen has seen first-hand how a pervasive lack of clarity strangles business performance and erodes employee engagement. Ambiguity is the corporate default state, a condition so prevalent that “tolerance for ambiguity” has become a clichéd job requirement. It doesn’t have to be this way.

Patagonia, named by Fortune in 2007 as the coolest company on the planet, has earned a reputation as much for its ground-breaking environmental and social practices as for the quality of its clothes. In this exceptionally frank account, Chouinard and Stanley recount how the company and its culture gained the confidence, by step and misstep, to make its work progressively more responsible, and to ultimately share its discoveries with companies as large as Wal-Mart or as small as the corner bakery.

You're smart. You graduated dental school. But running a business isn't something you just automatically know how to do. Things can get out of hand quickly. Drew Hinrichs, CPA, and Barbara Stackhouse, RDH, MEd, have adapted the core principles of Mike Michalowicz's book Profit First and customized them for dental practice businesses. Profit First for Dentists addresses the specific financial challenges dentists face in their businesses. Using true stories of their clients, they pull back the curtain and share the steps to creating a highly profitable practice.

AI-First companies are the only trillion-dollar companies, and soon they will dominate even more industries, more definitively than ever before. These companies succeed by design--they collect valuable data from day one and use it to train predictive models that automate core functions. As a result, they learn faster and outpace the competition in the process. Thankfully, you don't need a PhD to learn how to win with AI. In The AI-First Company, internationally-renowned startup investor Ash Fontana offers an executable guide for applying AI to business problems.

This book is for first-time startup founders in the B2B space. Maybe you’re a software engineer, product manager, salesperson, doctor, or lawyer building your first startup. My bet is that although you’re an expert at your technical skill, you yourself recognize that there’s a lot to learn when it comes to building a product, marketing it to a specific audience and overall running a company.

Everything I Know About Lean I Learned in First Grade brings lean back to its original simplicity by showing how lean is alive in a first-grade classroom. The audiobook connects common lean tools to the broader lean journey, shows how to identify and eliminate waste, and aids the listener in seeing lean for what it truly is: a way to create a learning and problem-solving culture.

Do you dream of holding that globally respected PMP certification, having doors of opportunity swing wide open, and commanding respect in the project management world? It's closer than you think. For 30 long years, we've crafted the perfect map, a guiding star, to scale this mountain. we present to you a study guide that's not just informative—it's transformative. Navigating the path to PMP certification can often seem like a Herculean endeavor.

Ronit Enos has been there and in Profit First for Salons, she walks you through exactly what she did to take control of her business — and her life — in this must-listen book for salon, spa, and barbershop owners. Enos teaches you the proven Profit First formula so you can master it to build profits, destroy debt, eliminate the work-overwork cycle, and become financially sound – no matter where you’re starting from.

How can effective project management transform not just outcomes but entire organizations? In a world of constant change, mastering project management is more crucial than ever. This guide explores key principles from the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) to Agile methodologies, helping professionals lead projects with confidence. Covering core concepts like the triple constraint—scope, time, and cost—and the impact of stakeholder engagement, it reveals how communication and collaboration drive project success.