Small Business Leadership

Forget about building a business - businesses fail and fade into oblivion. Start a revolution instead. James Watt started a rebellion against tasteless mass market beers by founding BrewDog, now one of the world’s best-known and fastest growing craft breweries, famous for beers, bars, and crowdfunding. In this smart, funny book, he shares his story and explains how you too can tear up the rule book and start a company on your own terms. It’s an anarchic, DIY guide to entrepreneurship - and a new manifesto for business.

How can we learn to deal with uncertainty at work? The answer is to learn from the adaptive behaviors of entrepreneurs. Play, the authors show, is a crucial component of this. It encourages exploration, experimentation, and curiosity, while it also challenges established practices and orthodoxies. It facilitates change in people and organizations. Drawing on in-depth interviews with entrepreneurs and innovators, this audiobook explains why we should incorporate play into work, what play looks like, and how to encourage playfulness in individuals and organizations.

Confronting change is incredibly hard, both organizationally and personally. Yet the pace of change in our world will never be slower than it is right now, says Beth Comstock, the former vice chair and head of marketing and innovation at GE. Imagine It Forward is an inspiring, fresh, candid, and deeply personal audiobook about how to grapple with the challenges to change we face every day. It is a different kind of narrative, a big-picture audiobook that combines Comstock’s personal story in leading change with vital lessons on overcoming the inevitable roadblocks.

In Go Big Now, Pimsleur distills two decades of studying complex mindset practices into eight essential “mindset keys” that can be used by anyone to get the Go Big Mindset and achieve ambitious professional and life goals. Pimsleur shares personal stories of how she used these keys to raise venture capital and build multimillion-dollar companies, and illustrates each key with an example from a leader, CEO, or celebrity whose mindset catapulted them to success.

Every day, there are multiple things vying for our attention - people, businesses, technologies, apps. But many of us don’t realize that our attention is our property. It belongs to us just like any other resource we own. And when we choose what we give our attention to, we can focus fully on our own purpose and on what’s best for us. When you take a step back and think about your thinking, you can take control of your attention, as well as your time and your purpose, rather than allowing others to be in control. It’s up to you.

After founding or co-founding over 15 start-ups and investing in another 50 early stage ventures as an angel investor, author Howard Love came to understand that a start-up unfolds in a predictable pattern. The more aware entrepreneurs are of this pattern, the better able they will be to capitalize on it.

In my book, I will show you exactly how to go about starting and running your own pre-loved clothing business. You gain not only the monetary benefits of selling a high-demand product, but you will also be saving the world’s landfills from unnecessary waste. In 2012 alone, an estimated 14.3 million tons of textiles were discarded to the landfill as reported by the Environmental Protection Agency - an alarming number for something seemingly harmless as discarding old clothes.

Art Thinking combines the mind-sets of art and the tools of business to protect space for open-ended exploration and manage risks on your way to success. Art Thinking takes you from "Wouldn't it be cool if...?" to realizing your highest aims, helping you build creative skills you can apply across all facets of business and life. Warm, honest, and unexpected, Art Thinking will help you reimagine your work and life-and even change the world-while enjoying the journey from point A.

This timeless text is required listening for any business person or athlete interested in strategy. It includes a soundtrack entitled "The Mysterious Sound of Wind In the Bamboo", a 43-minute collection of Zen-inspired Japanese music by the Matsu Take Ensemble.

For the past 10 years, Rohit Bhargava’s signature annual Non-Obvious Trend Report has helped over a million readers discover more than 100 trends changing our culture. Now for the first time, Rohit and his team of Non-Obvious trend curators reveal 10 revolutionary new megatrends that are transforming how we work, play, and live.

Business schools teach that the most important prerequisite for starting a business is a business plan. Nonsense, says Carl Schramm in Burn the Business Plan, who for a decade headed the most important foundation devoted to entrepreneurship in this country. Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, and Google are just a few of the companies that began without one.

Positive Leadership shows how to reach beyond ordinary success to achieve extraordinary effectiveness, spectacular results, and what Kim Cameron calls “positively deviant performance” - performance far above the norm. Citing a wide range of research in organizational behavior, medical science, and psychology as well as real-world examples, Cameron shows that to achieve exceptional success, leaders must emphasize strengths rather than simply focus on weaknesses.

Addressing diverse issues depends on improving your soft skills - such as time management, team-building, communication and listening, creative-thinking, and problem-solving. But this isn’t as easy as it may seem. Sue Ashford has the solution. In this timely book, she introduces Flexing - a technique individuals, teams, and entire organizations can use to learn, grow, and develop their skills and knowledge with every new project, work assignment, and problem. Flexing empowers you to embrace any challenge and adapt to any change, yielding valuable takeaways that ensure growth.

You’re just one Jump away from greater fulfillment in your career, your life, and your future. Discover the simple, successful formula for facing fear head on, ditching the excuses that hold you back, and finding the courage to Jump into the next chapter of your life. It’s time to learn the approach that made serial entrepreneur Kim Perell a multimillionaire - and it could make you one too.

The standard text on innovation advises would-be innovators to conduct creative brainstorming sessions and seek input from outsiders - users or communities. This kind of innovating can be effective at improving products but not at capturing bigger opportunities in the marketplace. In this book, Roberto Verganti offers a new approach - one that does not set out to solve existing problems, but to find breakthrough experiences. There is no brainstorming - which produces too many ideas, unfiltered - but a vision, subject to criticism.

First published in 2012, Startup Communities became a blueprint for what it takes to build a supportive entrepreneurial community. Now regarded as a classic, the "Boulder Thesis" created and popularized by Feld within the book generated enormous media attention nearly a decade ago.

Whether your goal is to open a neighborhood wellness business, work independently from home, or launch the next highly successful wellness brand, Building a Wellness Business That Lasts: How to Make a Great Living Doing What You Love is your definitive guide. This book will teach you how to translate your passion for wellness into a compelling business vision, weave that vision into an effective business plan, and leverage the latest technologies to accelerate your growth.

What would you be willing to do for the rest of your life? It's a question most of us consider only hypothetically - opting instead to "do what we have to do" to earn a living. But in the critically acclaimed best seller The Monk and the Riddle, entrepreneurial sage Randy Komisar asks us to answer it for real.

You already know the Starbucks story. Since 1992, its stock has risen a staggering 5,000 percent! The genius of Starbucks success lies in its ability to create personalized customer experiences, stimulate business growth, generate profits, energize employees, and secure customer loyalty - all at the same time. The Starbucks Experience contains a robust blend of home-brewed ingenuity and people-driven philosophies that have made Starbucks one of the world's "most admired" companies, according to Fortune magazine.

Here are really two books in one: McNeilly's synthesis of Sun Tzu's ideas into six strategic principles for the business executive, plus the entire text of Samuel B. Griffith's popular translation of The Art of War. Within, McNeilly explains how to gain market share without inciting competitive retaliation, how to attack a competitor's weak points, and how to maximize the power of market information for competitive advantage.