Small Business Leadership

This is a complete guide to how to create a plan for, open, operate, and market a new small business. This book intends to help you overcome fear and inspire you to own and operate your own small business.

In business, performance is key. In performance, how you organize can be the key to growth. In the past five years, the business world has seen the birth of a new breed of company - the Exponential Organization - that has revolutionized how a company can accelerate its growth by using technology.

Koch shows how to maximize success in your career and life by using the proven principle that 80 percent of changes in the world result from the most powerful 20 percent of actions and ideas. He'll show how to use your own powerful "20 percent spike" - your most creative ideas and unique skills - to measure the amount of value you bring to your employer, clients, or customers. For most people, there is a huge disparity between their intrinsic value and the compensation they receive for their efforts.

Whether you're an entrepreneur, an intrapreneur, or a not-for-profit leader, there's no shortage of advice on such topics as writing a business plan, recruiting, raising capital, and branding. In fact there are so many books, articles, and websites that many startups get bogged down to the point of paralysis, or they focus on the wrong priorities and go broke before they discover their mistakes.

What’s missing in most small businesses and why is it that most fail? In Zen and the Art of Small Business, Michael Gerber, not only answers that question, but provides a deep understanding of the process for transforming any small business into a “sacred space.”

Famously, over a four-year period, James Dyson made 5,127 prototypes of the cyclonic vacuum cleaner that would transform the way houses are cleaned around the world. In devoting all his resources to iteratively developing the technology, he risked it all, but out of many failures and setbacks came hard-fought success. In Invention: A Life, Dyson reveals how he came to set up his own company and led it to become one of the most inventive technology companies in the world. It is a compelling and dramatic tale, with many obstacles overcome.

In Scale or Fail, author Allison Maslan shares her revolutionary SCALEit Method for successfully growing, replicating, and expanding your business. She also shares pivotal mindset strategies she's used to break the fear barrier as a trapeze artist so you can move past any obstacle, take strategic big-picture risks, and fulfill your dreams of business expansion and skyrocketing profit.

Every company needs a 3HAG - a three-year highly achievable goal! The 3HAG way is a prescriptive framework that takes the guessing out of your strategy and ensures you and your whole team are confident in where you are going. You’ll find step-by-step instructions to gut out your first 3HAG while building the confidence required to execute with speed toward your goals.

The subject of “design thinking” is the rage at business schools, throughout corporations, and increasingly in the popular press - due in large part to work of IDEO, a leading design firm, and its celebrated CEO, Tim Brown, who uses this audiobook to reveal how the techniques and strategies of design belong at every level of business. Change by Design is an audiobook for creative leaders seeking to infuse design thinking into every level of an organization, product, or service to drive new alternatives for business and society.

How can you take your skills and expertise and package it to become a successful consultant? There are proven time-tested principles, strategies, tactics, and best practices the most successful consultants use to start, run, and grow their consulting business. Consulting Success teaches you what they are.

Few would argue with the fact that on many fronts, we are a world in crisis. And there are two sides to every crisis, be it a leadership crisis, an economic crisis, an education crisis, or a moral crisis. The two sides to crisis are danger and opportunity. Robert Kiyosaki's new book, Second Chance: for Your Money and Your Life, uses the lessons from the past and a brutal assessment of the present to prepare listeners to see - and seize - the future.

Why do startups fail? That question caught Harvard Business School professor Tom Eisenmann by surprise when he realized he couldn’t answer it. So he launched a multiyear research project to find out. In Why Startups Fail, Eisenmann reveals his findings: six distinct patterns that account for the vast majority of startup failures.

What is it that makes someone a success in business? What drives an individual to create success? Is it being hit by a lucky stick or is it something else? Lorenz started from nothing, a common theme, but founded two companies, ran them successfully, and sold them to Fortune 500's. Through thought-provoking, insightful, and engaging stories with real world examples, Lorenz provides intuitive practical advice on the fundamentals of life success: Seek and seize the opportunities in front of you. Your ears will be opened to new possibilities with every chapter.

Samit has been at the helm of businesses in the ecommerce, digital video, social media, mobile communications, and software industries, helping to navigate them through turbulent economic times and guide them through necessary transformation so that they stay ahead of the curve and profitable. In Disrupt You!, he reveals how specific strategies that help companies flourish can be applied at an individual level. By challenging assumptions, pinpointing one's unique value, and identifying weaknesses in the structure of current industries, anyone can achieve success and lasting prosperity.

The road to licensing a profitable, innovative product or technology is riddled with curves, holes, and rocky cliffs. The President of the United Inventors Association shows inventors, innovators, and makers a better path toward monetizing your creations and how to avoid the get-rich-quick scammers. Inventor Confidential will show them where to best spend their hard-earned money to maximize their odds for success.

In Whale Done!, Ken Blanchard shows how positive reinforcement and redirection can help increase productivity. These techniques are remarkably easy to master and can be applied equally well at home, allowing listeners to become better parents and more committed spouses and have happier personal lives.

Often downplayed in the excitement of starting up a new business venture is one of the most important decisions entrepreneurs will face: should they go it alone, or bring in cofounders, hires, and investors to help build the business? More than just financial rewards are at stake. Friendships and relationships can suffer. Bad decisions at the inception of a promising venture lay the foundations for its eventual ruin.

Bending Reality is Victoria Song's innovative process used by billionaires, tech founders, and the world's most successful leaders to make the impossible probable. After achieving success without fulfillment at Yale University, Harvard Business School, and then as a Forbes 30 Under 30 Venture Capitalist, Victoria set off on an unusual quest to study with over 24 of the world's best coaches, therapists, and healers.

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.

As anyone in business knows, strategic planning is critical to achieving long-term success. In How to Be a Power Connector, super-networker Judy Robinett argues that strategic relationship planning should be your top priority.