Small Business Leadership

In Scaling Up Excellence, best-selling author Robert Sutton and Stanford colleague Huggy Rao tackle a challenge that determines every organization’s success: scaling up further, faster, and more effectively as a program or an organization creates a larger footprint. Sutton and Rao have devoted much of the last decade to uncovering what it takes to build and uncover pockets of exemplary performance, to help spread them, and to keep recharging organizations with ever-better work practices.

What if you learned that to lead well, you’d need to live like a drug addict? During treatment for drug addiction, Michael Brody-Waite learned three principles that became the difference between life and death: Practice rigorous authenticity, surrender the outcome, and do uncomfortable work. Leaving rehab, Michael entered the workplace where he was shocked to see most business leaders doing what he had been taught would kill him. He began to see striking similarities between drug addiction and what he calls “mask addiction”.

To create a more sustainable transformation in the people you coach, you need to start with your own mindset. As a coach, you know you can’t change what you do, unless you alter what you believe first. By shedding the ineffective scripts, trappings and beliefs that a lifetime of personal interactions, professional training and even your parents have taught you, you can reset your thinking to a beginner’s mentality and so begin a fulfilling and exciting journey to coaching mastery.

Frustrated by the high costs and difficulty of accepting credit card payments, McKelvey joined his friend Jack Dorsey (the cofounder of Twitter) to launch Square, a startup that would enable small merchants to accept credit card payments on their mobile phones. The Innovation Stack is a thrilling business narrative that's much bigger than the story of Square. It is an irreverent first-person look inside the world of entrepreneurship, and a call to action for all of us to find the entrepreneur within ourselves and identify and fix unsolved problems - one crazy idea at a time.

Imagine what Atari might have achieved if Steve Jobs had stayed there to develop the first massmarket personal computer. Or what Steve Case might have done for PepsiCo if he hadn't left for a gaming start-up that eventually became AOL. What if Salomon Brothers had kept Michael Bloomberg, or Bear Stearns had exploited the inventive ideas of Stephen Ross? Scores of top-tier entrepreneurs worked for established corporations before they struck out on their own and became self-made billionaires.

Rand Fishkin, the founder and former CEO of Moz, reveals how traditional Silicon Valley "wisdom" leads far too many startups astray, with the transparency and humor that his hundreds of thousands of blog readers have come to love. Everyone knows how a startup story is supposed to go: A young, brilliant entrepreneur has a cool idea, drops out of college, defies the doubters, overcomes all odds, makes billions, and becomes the envy of the technology world. This is not that story. It's not that things went badly for Rand Fishkin; they just weren't quite so Zuckerberg-esque.

The fact is, over 90 percent of all new start-ups fail. Every entrepreneur must face this harsh reality and learn to master it if they hope to survive and wind up on top. In Surviving a Startup, Hoffman brings listeners on a wild ride, sharing with them the tumultuous journey of launching a venture-funded start-up and revealing what it takes to make it.

Every start-up founder feels overwhelmed and uncertain at various times. From Start-Up to Grown-Up gives you, the founder and CEO of a great start-up, the knowledge and experience that executive coach Alisa Cohn has gained from helping companies such as Etsy, Foursquare, InVision, and The Wirecutter become headline names. The audiobook provides you with effective and practical ways of maximizing your strengths, defusing your triggers, controlling your self-doubt, and building on your motivators.

Rob Sperry is one of the top coaches and leaders in the network marketing industry. With decades of experience and success in his network marketing business, Rob is now known for hosting the most prestigious masterminds in all of the network marketing profession. Rob has a passion for processes, making it simple, and finding wins that create momentum for everyone in the network marketing business. Rob's life's work is coaching and showing people the way to create the lifestyle that they have always wanted through network marketing.

The one book you need to navigate the complex decisions and critical relationships necessary to create and sustain a healthy family business - and business family.

Why do some companies consistently win in the consumer and capital markets while others struggle from crisis to crisis?The answer, says Noel Tichy, is that winning companies possess a "Leadership Engine" - a proven system for creating dynamic leaders at every level. To get ahead and stay ahead, a company needs agile, flexible, innovative leaders who can anticipate change and turn on a dime. Fortunately, says Tichy, just as everyone has untapped athletic potential, everyone has untapped leadership potential that can be developed.

Imagine if you could start your dream business, work from home, and make a real difference in people's lives. When you become a life coach, all of this is possible. The authors of Make Money as a Life Coach get it. They know what it’s like to navigate the world of online business and coaching. After considerable learning and several wrong turns, they’ve both gone on to create successful coaching businesses.

Become a digital-first organization. If you read (or listen) to nothing else on leading digital transformation, listen to these 10 articles. We've combed through hundreds of Harvard Business Review articles and selected the most important ones to help revitalize your offerings and processes, stay ahead of disruptors and technology shifts, and manage the necessary cultural change.

With the horrific failure rates of restaurants, how can you ensure yours will not only survive but grow and thrive? If your restaurant sucks, it is because you suck at running it; 100 percent. Donald Burns, author of Your Restaurant Sucks has created a methodology and mindset honed from his Special Operations training in the US Air Force. As a Pararescueman, his training developed a keen sense of purposeful and fast decision making. In the military, he learned the phrase, "embrace the suck".

Coach your small group leaders. Lead Small: Five Big Ideas Every Small Group Leader Needs to Know (narrated by Reggie Joiner) is full of both personal insight and practical advice. It clarifies the responsibilities of small group leaders of children and teenagers and delivers five proven strategies for leaders. Most small group leaders want to do something significant and are itching to make a difference. This is the audiobook for them. Because when we lead small, we make a big impact on the faith of the next generation.

The pressure to generate big ideas can feel overwhelming. We know that bold innovations are critical in these disruptive and competitive times, but when it comes to breakthrough thinking, we often freeze up. Instead of shooting for a $10-billion payday or a Nobel Prize, the most prolific innovators focus on Big Little Breakthroughs - small creative acts that unlock massive rewards over time. By cultivating daily micro-innovations, individuals and organizations are better equipped to tackle tough challenges and seize transformational opportunities.

Being a startup CEO is a job like no other: it's difficult, risky, stressful, lonely, and often learned through trial and error. As a startup CEO seeing things for the first time, you're likely to make mistakes, fail, get things wrong, and feel like you don't have any control over outcomes. Author Matt Blumberg has been there, and in Startup CEO he shares his experience, mistakes, and lessons learned as he guided Return Path from a handful of employees and no revenues to over $100 million in revenues and 500 employees.

In Applied Empathy, Michael Ventura, CEO and founder of Sub Rosa, a design firm that finds creative solutions for iconic brands and institutions such as GE, Nike, Citibank, Nikon, and Warby Parker and also West Point and the White House, offers entrepreneurs and executives a radical new business book and way forward. Applied Empathy presents real strategies, based on Sub Rosa’s design work as well as the popular class Ventura and his team have taught at Princeton University, on how to make lasting connections and evolve your business internally (your employees, culture, and product/services) as well as externally (your brand, consumers, and value).

The bar business continues to grow; however, securing running capital and having knowledge about the business are cited as the two biggest reasons new bars fail. Running a Bar for Dummies, 2nd Edition shines a light on these issues to help bar owners prepare properly. The book helps you find your way through the maze of licensing and permits, developing a business plan, and preparing for your grand opening, plus offers clear, no-nonsense guidance on dealing with tough customers. Every step of the way, Running a Bar for Dummies, 2nd Edition is a reference you can count on.

In this hands-on successor to the popular book The Trusted Advisor, you'll find answers to pervasive questions about trust and leadership - such as how to develop business with trust, nurture trust-based relationships, build and run a trustworthy organization, and develop your trust skill set. This pragmatic workbook delivers everyday tools, exercises, resources, and actionable to-do lists for the wide range of situations a trusted advisor inevitably encounters.