Small Business Leadership

Management consulting is seen as a glamorous profession. Behind the mystique are the consultants who put in extraordinary effort, synthesize great problem-solving skills, and display fine personal attributes that enable them to capture the attention and respect of their clients. This book opens up to that world through the story of Samanta Thomas, a character based on countless excellent consultants, through whom we get inside the very mind of a consultant and their journey.

Lean Six Sigma is a technique for process improvement designed to eliminate challenges, remove waste and inefficiency, and improve working conditions to better respond to customer needs. It integrates the Lean and Six Sigma techniques, processes, and concepts into one popular and powerful approach to improve the operations of your company.

Do you have a hobby or passion that has nothing to do with your nine-to-five job? Do you craft vintage jewelry, make handmade furniture, or offer expert negotiating advice to family and friends in your spare time? Then you, too, could join the one-third of Americans who turn their talents into a lucrative side hustle. In What If It Does Work Out? life coach and professional side-hustler Susie Moore offers expert tips and guidance to help you earn an extra source of income by doing something you love.

Scrum is the most successful framework for agile product development, and much has been written about how to follow the Scrum process, but the key to success is in the leadership skills of the product owner. Product Mastery explores the traits of the best product owners, offering an insight into the difference between good and great product ownership and explaining how the best product owners are driven to be successful.

The myth of innovation is that brilliant ideas leap fully formed from the minds of geniuses. The reality is that most innovations come from a process of rigorous examination through which great ideas are identified and developed before being realized as new offerings and capabilities. This is not a book by designers for designers; this is a book for creative leaders seeking to infuse design thinking into every level of an organization's products or service to drive new alternatives for business and society.

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.

Innovation is the subject of countless books and courses, but there's very little out there about how you actually innovate. Innovation and entrepreneurship are not one and the same, although aspiring innovators often think of them that way. They are told to get an idea and a team and to build a show-and-tell for potential investors. In Innovating, Luis Perez-Breva describes another approach.

Take Your Shot is the story about Russ Hibbert. Russ is a hard worker, dedicated to his wife and children, and building a career as a golf professional. But one day he wakes up and realizes his business is going nowhere. A chance meeting with business coach, David, leads to a dramatic change and an opportunity, for Russ, to design the business that he always wanted.

Will Africa be the world's next hub of manufacturing? China is answering in the affirmative and investing accordingly. This book dispels the notion that this crucial story is merely about China's exploitation of Africa's resources, illuminating deep questions about our own Western approach to development and the implications for the future of manufacturing. The fact that China sees Africa not for its poverty but for its potential wealth is a striking departure from the attitude of the West, in particular the United States.

Thriving on Chaos is the national best seller that offers prescriptions for an economic world turned upside down.

For a decade, Areva Martin has used the media to build a huge platform that expanded the influence and power of her brand exponentially. Media appearances on Dr. Phil, Anderson Cooper 360, The Doctors, CNN, MSNBC, FOX, and more have virtually eliminated the need of a marketing budget for her thriving law firm and nonprofit organization while securing her place as one of America's most sought after thought leaders.

Delane Parnell is not your typical tech entrepreneur. He was raised in a gang-riddled neighborhood on Detroit’s west side, bouncing between homes as his mother tried to make ends meet. Many of his closest friends and family members ended up in jail or dead. This makes it even more incredible that Delane became the 25-year-old founder and CEO of PlayVS, a Los Angeles company that is forever changing the gaming landscape in America.

In addition to his work as an entrepreneur, corporate executive, and consultant, for the last 16 years August Turak worked alongside the Trappist monks of Mepkin Abbey, watching firsthand as they undertook new enterprises and sustained an incredibly successful business practice. Service and selflessness are at the heart of this 1,500-year-old monastic tradition’s remarkable business success, an ancient though immensely relevant economic model that preserves what is positive and productive about capitalism while transcending its ethical limitations and internal contradictions.

In this compelling book, strategy guru Roger L. Martin and Skoll Foundation President and CEO Sally R. Osberg describe how social entrepreneurs target systems that exist in a stable but unjust equilibrium and transform them into entirely new, superior, and sustainable equilibria. All of these leaders - call them disrupters, visionaries, or changemakers - develop, build, and scale their solutions in ways that bring about the truly revolutionary change that makes the world a fairer and better place.

When Mark Rampolla filled a notebook with potential start-up ideas, his wife asked him some tough questions. What about this idea is exciting, beyond the possibility of a profit? How will it fit into a life that makes you and your family happy? How will it change the world? Eventually Mark found his great idea: coconut water. He had seen the developing world use coconut water, but this valuable resource was being discarded in the US. While taking on the beverage industry was a big goal - high-hanging fruit - it was worth the risk.

His favorite personality was a “free spirit”: an obsessed individual with a vision of the future and the will to make it so, a rebel who creates the future with childlike enthusiasm. Now, serial entrepreneur Dave Jilk and venture capitalist Brad Feld extract from Nietzsche a modern Art of War, connecting the dots to our high-tech business environment. Each quick, digestible chapter expands on a quote from Nietzsche to stimulate your thinking about a vital aspect of entrepreneurship, and stories from entrepreneurs help make the ideas concrete.

Based on in-depth interviews with more than 200 leading entrepreneurs, a business executive and senior fellow at Harvard's Center for Public Leadership identifies the six essential disciplines needed to transform your ideas into real-world successes, whether you're an innovative manager or an aspiring entrepreneur.

UCLA psychologist and organizational consultant Dr. Robert Maurer provides a simple and proven effective technique for making major changes with minimal disruption. Applying the operational concept of kaizen - small, continual improvements - to common management challenges, managers can drive major improvements with a series of well-planned techniques for boosting quality, innovation, sales, and morale.

Every iconic tech company was once a startup. And while these companies like to paint an origin story full of surefooted confidence, the truth is usually something different: the early life of most startups is pure chaos. This chaos comes from the vastly different motivations and incentives between those with the vision and those with the money. From fundraising paranoia to boardroom coups, Zalman and Neumann train their inimitable voices on the gulf between what founders and investors promise to do and what they end up actually doing.

Make achieving your goals and finding success possible with this one-of-a-kind guide by Robert Irvine, popular host of Food Network’s Restaurant: Impossible.