Small Business Leadership

Whether you're in the trenches struggling to make consistent sales or dreaming of turning your art into a full-time living, this groundbreaking guide provides the inspiration and the practical steps you need to become your own art boss. There's never been a better time to turn your creative ideas into a successful business. The internet is pushing aside art world “gatekeepers” who used to decide what was "worthy”—now anyone with a laptop and a dream can make a thriving living from their creativity.

Best-selling author and creativity expert Jeff Goins dismantles the myth that being creative is a hindrance to success by revealing how an artistic temperament is in fact a competitive advantage in the marketplace.

Paul Jarvis left the corporate world when he realized that working in a high-pressure, high profile world was not his idea of success. In Company of One, Jarvis explains how you can find the right pathway to do the same, including planning how to set up your shop, determining your desired revenues, dealing with unexpected crises, keeping your key clients happy, and of course, doing all of this on your own. Company of One is a refreshingly new approach centered on staying small and avoiding growth, for any size business.

A rags-to-$9-billion-riches story. A crash course in Burger King history and fast food in America, The Burger King is McLamore's candid and conversational memoir. Written before his death in 1996, he talks of his life, the birth of the Whopper, and the rise of Burger King. McLamore's account of Burger King offers an instructive and inspiring tale to young entrepreneurs. Here's a story of entrepreneurship development from one of the top entrepreneurs of fast food chains.

Have you experienced a moment when you realized your career wasn’t as secure or fulfilling as you thought it was going to be? Maybe you’ve thought about using your skills to start your own consulting business – but you haven’t had the confidence to go for it. Donald Miller has been consulting and coaching for over two decades. He’s consulted some of the world’s top brands including TOMS Shoes, TREK Bicycles and Tempur Sealy.

Seeing What's Next is a framework for predicting industry winners and losers. Every day, individuals take action based on how they believe innovation will change industries. Yet these beliefs are largely based on guesswork and incomplete data, and can lead to costly errors in judgment. Internationally renowned innovation expert Clayton M. Christensen and his research partners, Scott D. Anthony and Erik A. Roth, present this guide for predicting outcomes in the evolution of any industry.

How well does your organization respond to changing market conditions, customer needs, and emerging technologies when building software-based products? This practical guide presents Lean and Agile principles and patterns to help you move fast at scale - and demonstrates why and how to apply these methodologies throughout your organization. Through case studies, you'll learn how successful enterprises have rethought everything from governance and financial management to systems architecture and organizational culture in the pursuit of radically improved performance.

Blueprint to Business is the ultimate guide to becoming a successful entrepreneur. Best-selling author and CEO Mike Alden puts aside the rainbows and sunshine, gets real about what it takes to "make it", and gives you the real-world guidance you need to hear. Through anecdotes and advice, he shares his experiences along with those of other top founders and entrepreneurs to give you a realistic picture of what it takes to build a business. It's a bit of tough love, a healthy dose of reality, and a tremendously motivating guide to striking out on your own.

Crack the Funding Code will show listeners how to find the money, create pitches that attract investors, and then structure fair, ethical deals that will bring them new sources of outside capital and invaluable professional advice. It will give listeners the broader perspective - how funding works, how investors think, and what they need to hear to put their money where your mouth is.

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.

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.

Don’t trade your 40-hour workweek for an 80-hour-a-week side hustle. The promise of entrepreneurship is to create a lifestyle of freedom—but the pursuit often leads to a time-bankrupt life. If you’re an overworked employee who’s done with the 9-to-5, a serial entrepreneur who has yet to realize the American dream, or a burned-out side hustle owner who’s tired of the grind, this book was written for you.

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.

The traditional attitude toward creativity in the American business world is to "think outside the box": to brainstorm without restraint in hopes of coming up with a breakthrough idea, often in moments of crisis. Sometimes it works, but it’s a problem-specific solution that does nothing to engender creative thinking more generally. Inside the Box demonstrates Systematic Inventive Thinking (SIT), a method that systemizes creativity as part of the corporate culture. SIT requires thinking "inside the box", working in one’s familiar world to create new ideas independent of specific problems.

From the time we learn to speak, we're told that if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all. When you become a manager, it’s your job to say it--and your obligation. Author Kim Scott was an executive at Google and then at Apple, where she developed a class on how to be a good boss. She has earned growing fame in recent years with her vital new approach to effective management, Radical Candor. Radical Candor is a simple idea: to be a good boss, you have to Care Personally at the same time that you Challenge Directly.

The essential skill of creating and maintaining new businesses - the art of the entrepreneur - can be summed up in a single word: managing. In High Output Management, Andrew S. Grove, former chairman and CEO (and employee number three) of Intel, shares his perspective on how to build and run a company. Born of Grove’s experiences at one of America’s leading technology companies, this legendary management book is a Silicon Valley staple, equally appropriate for sales managers, accountants, consultants, and teachers, as well as CEOs and start-up founders.

Attorney and CPA Mark J. Kohler targets the leading tax and business issues among small business owners, across all stages of business, and delivers a practical guide to the fundamental tax and legal conflicts faced by new and established entrepreneurs. Coached by Kohler, business owners are armed to seek out the right professionals relevant to their concerns, confidently ask the right questions, and ultimately, save time, money, and in many cases, potential heartache.

BE 2.0 is a new and improved version of the book that Jim Collins and Bill Lazier wrote years ago. In BE 2.0, Jim Collins honors his mentor, Bill Lazier, who passed away in 2005, and reexamines the original text of Beyond Entrepreneurship with his 2020 perspective. The book includes the original text of Beyond Entrepreneurship, as well as four new chapters and 15 new essays. BE 2.0 pulls together the key concepts across Collins' 30 years of research into one integrated framework called The Map.

In How to Be a Great Boss, Gino Wickman and René Boer present a straightforward, practical approach to help bosses at all levels of an organization get the most from their people. They share time-tested tools that have worked for more than 30,000 bosses in every industry. You can learn to be a great boss - and dramatically improve both your organization's performance and your team's excitement about their work.

If you had the opportunity to work where, when, and with whom you wanted - all while getting paid very well - would you take it? Self-made multimillionaire and best-selling author Michael Masterson did, and with Ready, Fire, Aim he'll show you how to do the same.