Small Business Development

If you as a leader hold on too tightly—to your people, to everyday decision-making, to the past, and more—you will cut off vital oxygen necessary for growth. The solution: stop being a control freak and instead empower your employees, get out of your own way, and establish a clear vision for the future. Embrace the growth paradox to get unstuck and grow your company to the next level. By leaning into some key, counterintuitive business ideas, you’ll make space for changes that will lead to nonlinear growth.

Lifestyle changes can be overwhelming: It’s hard to take on major goals without falling prey to self-doubt. But with kaizen, big goals become small, approachable steps. This Japanese method first made waves in the business world by launching Toyota to success; it also adds magic to Marie Kondo’s life-changing method of tidying up. As Kondo puts it: “You can take the first small step toward your dream today, and keep taking small steps to grow your passions.” Now, Sarah Harvey unlocks kaizen’s amazing potential to enhance our everyday lives.

An indispensable guide to building a start-up and breaking down the barriers for diverse entrepreneurs from the visionary venture capitalist and pioneering entrepreneur Kathryn Finney. Build the Damn Thing is a hard-won battle-tested guide for every entrepreneur who the establishment has left out. Finney, an investor and start-up champion, explains how to build a business from the ground up, from developing a business plan to finding investors, growing a team, and refining a product.

Do you struggle with public speaking or communication in your workplace or personal relations? Have you tried other solutions but find yourself slipping back into old, anxiety-ridden habits? Are you tired of feeling like a wallflower, overlooked or misunderstood when you do speak up? Many individuals struggle with social anxiety, leading to missed opportunities both personally and professionally. But what if you could transform your communication skills, master small talk, and command the room while remaining authentic to who you are?

Every iconic tech company was once a startup. And while these companies like to paint an origin story full of surefooted confidence, the truth is usually something different: the early life of most startups is pure chaos. This chaos comes from the vastly different motivations and incentives between those with the vision and those with the money. From fundraising paranoia to boardroom coups, Zalman and Neumann train their inimitable voices on the gulf between what founders and investors promise to do and what they end up actually doing.

In KIND, Graham Allcott explores how we can create work cultures that encourage kindness. He argues that, far from being a ‘fluffy’ or nebulous idea, kindness and empathy are 21st century superpowers, which can transform any organization into a dynamic environment where people want to work. The author aims to convince the doubters, as well as helping already ‘kindful’ people, to articulate the power of kindness and make a stronger case for its greater profile in their working environments.

Longtime Dollar General CEO Cal Turner, Jr. shares his extraordinary life as heir to the company founded by his father Cal Turner, Sr. and his grandfather, a dirt farmer turned Depression-era entrepreneur. Cal's narrative is at its heart a father-son story, from his childhood in Scottsville, Kentucky, where business and family were one, to the triumph of reaching the Fortune 300 - at the cost of risking that very father/son relationship. Cal shares how the small-town values with which he was raised helped him guide Dollar General from family enterprise to national powerhouse.

Leadership development speaker & consultant Andy Ellis is the former CSO of Akamai, where he contributed to the creation of Akamai's billion‑dollar cybersecurity business. He now brings his speaking, consulting, and business knowledge to listeners with 1% Leadership—based on the reality that real-world leadership is messy and complicated; it rarely fits into an acronym or a dogmatic overarching philosophy. Ellis says that there are no “irrefutable laws” of leadership or power; there is no secret.

In this imaginative and inventive new book, author and podcaster Kris McPeak shares how she had success with launching a podcast, starting a coaching business, and writing three books, while maintaining her career in higher education and running a non-profit with her husband (wow).

Entrepreneur or Wantrepreneur is a book which evaluates your entrepreneurial skill-set to a level that will make most want to quit listening. This book acts as an extreme crash course for the mind of both the entrepreneur and the wantrepreneur. Every ounce of the listener's mental fortitude is tested in an effort to provide self-identifying entrepreneurial strengths and weaknesses for all of those who embark on the entrepreneurial journey.

Competition is moving beyond industry to ecosystem. Are you ready? In the shift from pipeline to platform, value is no longer created by your company's product or process alone - it's created through interactions. And the strategy you used to become an industry leader won't help you compete in an evolving and complex ecosystem. If you listen to nothing else on platforms and ecosystems, listen to these 10 articles by experts in the field.

The Customer Success Manager has become a critical asset to organizations across the business landscape. As the subscription model has spread from the cloud and SaaS to more sectors of the economy, that pivotal role will only grow in importance. That's because if you want to compete and thrive in this new environment, you need to put the customer at the center of your strategy. You need to recognize you're no longer selling just a product. You're selling an outcome.

The Entrepreneurial Process, one of Brown University’s highest-rated courses, has empowered thousands of students to start their own ventures. You might assume these ventures started because the founders were born entrepreneurs. You might assume that these folks had technical or finance degrees, or worked at fancy consulting firms, or had some other specialized knowledge. Yet that isn’t the case. Entrepreneurship is not a spirit or a gift. It is a process that anyone can learn, and that anyone can use to turn a problem into a solution with impact.

These days it's increasingly rare to have a stable career in any field. More and more of us are blending big company jobs, startup gigs, freelance work, and volunteer side projects. We take chances to expand our knowledge, capabilities, and experience. But how do we make sense of that kind of career-and explain it? Pamela Slim, the acclaimed author of Escape from Cubicle Nation, gives us the tools to have meaningful careers in this new world of work.

If you've ever dreamed of starting your own business, this book will give you the information, inspiration, and reassurance you need to get started. It encourages budding entrepreneurs to take the leap into the dark, while shining a bright light on the first six months of a successful start-up. It breaks down what appears to be an Everest-size challenge into a series of small hills for you to conquer.

In 2003, Diane Tavenner cofounded the first school in what would soon become one of America’s most innovative public-school networks. Summit Public Schools has since won national recognition for its exceptional outcomes: Ninety-nine percent of students are accepted to a four-year college, and they graduate from college at twice the national average.

Supermaker is a guide to business and career development by Jaime Schmidt: acclaimed entrepreneur, founder of Schmidt's Naturals, and icon of the Maker Movement. In Supermaker, she shares how you too can start or grow your own business with advice on branding, product development, social media marketing, scaling, PR, and customer engagement, all based on her own hard-won mastery.

Avoiding the Continuous Appearance Trap: 12 Questions to Understand What’s Truly Underneath Your Culture is a transformational book that weaves together the stories of two companies that, on the surface, appear to be quite similar. Underneath, however, they couldn’t be more different.

In Million Dollar Women, Pimsleur introduces you to seven women who, instead of leaning in, simply left corporate America and marched into the world of entrepreneurship. They have raised capital, developed powerful networks, and generated multimillion-dollar companies from scratch. When Pimsleur herself started Little Pim, a company that produces a program for young children to learn foreign languages, she wanted to create an exceptional experience.

Purpose, Passion, and Pajamas is the story of Genevieve Piturro’s triumphant leap off the corporate ladder to find her life’s true calling. What started with a simple question from a little girl led Genevieve to conceive and build the nonprofit Pajama Program in 2001, resulting in a featured appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show and an awe-inspiring display of compassion throughout the US and beyond. Today, Pajama Program has distributed over seven million pairs of pajamas, opened 63 chapters across the US, and established reading centers for children.