Small Business Leadership

It's easy to feel like networking is a waste of time, energy, or money - but that just means you're doing it wrong. In this new edition of Networking Like a Pro, networking experts Dr. Ivan Misner and Brian Hilliard reveal key networking techniques to help you grow your business. In this comprehensive guide, you'll discover strategies that go beyond collecting business cards and turn networking into a profitable resource for your business. Dive into this book and discover how the most successful networkers leverage their brand, expertise, and customers to achieve greatness in life.

Most startups fail. But many of those failures are preventable. The Lean Startup is a new approach being adopted across the globe, changing the way companies are built and new products are launched.

Whether you are moving up, moving on, or just starting out, America's top career coach, Robin Ryan, offers proven, easy-to-learn techniques for mastering the job interview and landing the job of your dreams. This brief, compact book, newly updated in 2008, is packed with useful tips such as: how to establish a career identity or personal brand in the opening minutes of an interview using the 60 Second Sell¿, answers to more than 100 of the toughest interview questions.

Ben Horowitz offers essential advice on building and running a startup - practical wisdom for managing the toughest problems business school doesn’t cover, based on his popular ben’s blog. While many people talk about how great it is to start a business, very few are honest about how difficult it is to run one. The Hard Thing About Hard Things is invaluable for veteran entrepreneurs as well as those aspiring to their own new ventures, drawing from Horowitz’s personal and often humbling experiences.

Limited Liability Companies For Dummies, 3rd Edition offers a clear, concise guide that explains the pros and cons of LLCs, and shares insider tips on everything from choosing your members and your company name to creating and filing your Articles of Organization and managing day-to-day operations. You'll find the most current, real-world advice on customizing an LLC for your specific business needs, creating a great operating agreement, keeping accurate records, and new information on federal regulations and fees that are applicable to LLCs.

With Peter Drucker's five essential questions and the help of five of today's thought leaders, this little book will challenge readers to take a close look at the very heart of their organizations and what drives them. A tool for self-assessment and transformation, answering these five questions will fundamentally change the way you work, helping you lead your organization to an exceptional level of performance.

Daniel Goleman's international best seller Emotional Intelligence forever changed our concept of "being smart," showing how emotional intelligence (EI) - how we handle ourselves and our relationships - can determine life success more than IQ. Now Goleman and company apply that knowledge to leadership in a must-hear presentation.

This book is the first-ever explanation of McKinsey’s step-by-step approach to transforming leaders both professionally and personally, including revealing lessons from its legendary CEO leadership program, The Bower Forum, which has counseled more than five hundred global CEOs over the past decade. It is a journey that helps leaders hone the psychological, emotional, and, ultimately, human attributes that result in success in today’s most demanding top job.

A behind-the-scenes, revelatory history of McKinsey & Company, America's most influential and controversial business consulting firm, told by one of the nation's leading financial journalists. In The Firm, Duff McDonald uncovers how these high-powered, high-priced business savants have ushered in waves of structural, financial, and technological shifts. With unrivaled access to company documents and current and former employees, McDonald reveals the inner workings of what just might be the most influential private organization in America.

Globally recognized digital expert David L. Rogers argues that digital transformation is not about updating your technology but about upgrading your strategic thinking. Based on Rogers' decade of research and teaching at Columbia Business School and his consulting for businesses around the world, The Digital Transformation Playbook shows how pre-digital-era companies can reinvigorate their game plans and capture the new opportunities of the digital world.

This is the first book to present innovation and entrepreneurship as a purposeful and systematic discipline. It clearly explains and analyzes the challenges and opportunities of America's new entrepreneurial economy. Peter Drucker, the most influential and widely-read thinker and writer on modern organizations, gives us a superbly practical book that explains what established businesses, public service institutions, and new ventures have to know, have to learn, and have to do in today's economy and marketplace.

In this accessible guide, franchise expert Rick Grossmann and franchise attorney Michael J. Katz impart decades-worth of insight and advice on what it takes to make your franchise operation successful. Grossmann and Katz share expert tutorials, tricks of the trade, and access to sample franchise documents, checklists, and questionnaires designed to get you organized, support you through the process, and get your new franchise off the ground.

When it comes to how to succeed as an entrepreneur, we are besotted with advice. According to best-selling author Alan Weiss, success is a combination of opportunism, very disciplined work, luck, timing, and ignoring most advice. In other words, it means striking out on your own original path to success. In Million Dollar Maverick, he explains that entrepreneurs don't take advice; they create value and then monetize it. They do what they love and are great at and find a way to sell it to people.

In Startup Boards, Brad Feld - a Boulder, Colorado-based entrepreneur turned-venture capitalist - shares his experience in this area by talking about the importance of having the right board members on your team and how to manage them well. Along the way, he shares valuable insights on various aspects of the board, including how they can support you, help you understand your startup's milestones and get to them faster, and hold you accountable.

It's an axiom of business that great companies grow their revenues and profits year after year. Yet quietly, under the radar, a small number of companies have rejected the pressure of endless growth to focus on more satisfying business goals. Goals like being great at what they do, creating a great place to work, providing great customer service, making great contributions to their communities, and finding great ways to lead their lives. In Small Giants, veteran journalist Bo Burlingham takes us deep inside 14 such remarkable companies.

Trevor Blake built three successful startups and sold them for more than $300 million. Now he's written a complete instruction manual that covers everything the budding entrepreneur or existing business owner needs to know to build the career or business of their dreams. Unlike the many theoretical guides out there, this is a practical handbook based on Blake's wildly successful in-the-trenches experience.

This book triggers you to think and act strategically, shows what you can learn from business models inside and outside your industry, and urges you to apply those learnings to make your own shift.

It's been over a decade since Verne Harnish's best-selling book Mastering the Rockefeller Habits was first released. Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make It...and Why the Rest Don't is the first major revision of this business classic. In Scaling Up, Harnish and his team share practical tools and techniques for building an industry-dominating business.

Visionaries have groundbreaking ideas. Integrators make those ideas realities. This explosive combination is the key to getting everything you want out of your business. It worked for Disney. It worked for McDonald's. It worked for Ford. It can work for you. From the author of the best-selling Traction, Rocket Fuel details the integral roles of the visionary and integrator and explains how an effective relationship between the two can help your business thrive.

In Measure What Matters, Doerr shares a broad range of first-person, behind-the-scenes case studies, with narrators including Bono and Bill Gates, to demonstrate the focus, agility, and explosive growth that the Objectives and Key Results system has spurred at so many great organizations. This book will help a new generation of leaders capture the same magic.