Small Business Leadership

Many smart entrepreneurs prefer to buy an existing business instead of beginning a new one. Buying a business that is already operational will bring many benefits, including an already established product or service, well-trained staff who know the business, and enough success to have kept the company afloat for a period of time. Not having any money to purchase the business will not necessarily keep you from buying it.

Traditionally, an entrepreneur develops a detailed plan, finds money to fund it, and then pursues it to its conclusion. But conditions can change drastically at any point - you can end up locked into a process based on now-obsolete assumptions. The lean startup is all about agility and flexibility. Its mantra is "build, measure, learn": create small, experimental initiatives, get real-world feedback on them quickly, and use that data to identify what works and discard what doesn't. And then test some more.

How does a suburban pizza joint end up profiled on national magazine covers and network TV news? (Hint: The secret is not in the sauce.) When Nick Sarillo decided to open a family-friendly pizza restaurant in the suburbs of Chicago, people thought he was nuts. Having worked as a carpenter for much of his adult life, he lacked any formal experience in restaurants or in managing a small business. Everyone told him no one else would ever care about his place the way he did.

In Leading Through Disruption, Andrew Liveris provides a new leadership paradigm for resilience and agility in a rapidly changing world. This book is a must-listen guide for leaders in various sectors who are keen on not only ensuring current success, but protecting the planet’s future for everyone.

How have Japanese companies become world leaders in the automotive and electronics industries, among others? What is the secret of their success? Two leading Japanese business experts, Ikujiro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi, are the first to tie the success of Japanese companies to their ability to create new knowledge and use it to produce successful products and technologies.

While playing hooky from a conference in Boston a few years back, three former colleagues from Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management hopped in a car and headed on a road trip. They pulled into a shoe store in Maine and noticed that the sales help was unusually pushy. After a few questions, they discovered the store had a "secret shopper" program, in which employees would be marked down if they were not sufficiently aggressive with customers. A lightbulb went off.

In 1962, Stephanie 'Steve' Shirley created a software company when the concept of software barely existed. Freelance Programmers employed women to work on complex projects such as Concorde's black box recorder from the comfort of their own homes. Shirley empowered a generation of women in technology, giving them unheard of freedom to choose their own hours and manage their own workloads. The business thrived, and Shirley gradually transferred ownership to her staff, creating 70 millionaires in the process.

Competition is moving beyond industry to ecosystem. Are you ready? In the shift from pipeline to platform, value is no longer created by your company's product or process alone - it's created through interactions. And the strategy you used to become an industry leader won't help you compete in an evolving and complex ecosystem. If you listen to nothing else on platforms and ecosystems, listen to these 10 articles by experts in the field.

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.

When Elizabeth ascended the throne in 1558, England was the laughing stock of Europe. Economic, political, and religious calamities were numerous, and Elizabeth endured constant criticism. But by the end of her 45-year reign, England was one of the world's mightiest nations. Axelrod uses the legendary Queen's life as a model for modern leadership, and a powerful example of how one person can make an extraordinary difference. Elizabeth I CEO is an indispensable guide for today's business managers and leaders. It is also an inspiring listen for those taking their first steps up the corporate ladder, or those who simply love history. Nelson Runger's narration gives a renewed energy to Elizabeth's lessons, which are as relevant today as they were four centuries ago.

Do you wish you knew how to manage your team better, and get them to commit to your bold vision? The truth is...the majority of managers are simply not very good at goal-setting. (Because they were never taught how to do it properly.) Most corporate goals are never completed on time, and even your highly-educated employees are (usually) not working on essential tasks during the workday. This can be damaging to your career, and can destroy your productivity.

The ultimate do-it-now guide to getting started in managed services. Now includes chapters on cloud services, bundling, and more. Whether you're a new computer consultant or an experienced technician making the move to managed services, this is the perfect audiobook for you! The audiobook includes step-by-step instructions for creating service offerings, reformulating your business, creating service agreements, and more!

Few business topics have aroused more skepticism in recent years than the notion of corporate purpose, and for good reason. Too many companies deploy purpose, or a reason for being, as a promotional vehicle to make themselves feel virtuous and to look good to the outside world. Some have only foggy ideas about what purpose is and conflate it with strategy and other concepts like “mission,” “vision,” and “values.” Even well-intentioned leaders don’t understand purpose’s full potential and engage half-heartedly and superficially with it....

In The Billionaire Mindset, Daniel Strauss, the Strauss in the investment firm Stocks & Strauss, and a highly successful venture capitalist, explains how to adopt this life-changing new mindset. He shares his secrets of success, including how to access capital, where to find the right people to help you reach your goals, and explains how to free your mind from self-imposed limitations, so that you can also think like a billionaire.

The lean entrepreneurship movement has captivated Silicon Valley and entrepreneurs across the country. It provided an agile framework to develop the right product solution for a given target market and is now used by almost every fledgling company to do just that. The next challenge is growth - to achieve the financial returns and, more importantly, the impact they dreamed of when starting off on their adventure.

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 nearly three billion people living on two dollars a day are not just the world’s greatest challenge - they represent an extraordinary market opportunity. The key is what Paul Polak and Mal Warwick call Zero-Based Design: starting from scratch to create innovative products and services tailored for the very poor, armed with a thorough understanding of what they really want and need, and driven by what Polak and Warwick call "the ruthless pursuit of affordability". Polak has been doing this work for years, and Warwick has extensive experience in both business and philanthropy.

A bold, useful, uncomplicated guide to mastering the three keys of business success: In this practical book, Dr. Howard Farran shows that running a business isn't all that complicated - if you're focusing on the right three areas: people, time, and money. People: maximizing the potential of employees, customers, and yourself. Time: mastering the efficiency that helps a business turn the biggest profit possible. Money: learning to love the numbers that function as the business's scorecard.

Imagine what Atari might have achieved if Steve Jobs had stayed there to develop the first massmarket personal computer. Or what Steve Case might have done for PepsiCo if he hadn't left for a gaming start-up that eventually became AOL. What if Salomon Brothers had kept Michael Bloomberg, or Bear Stearns had exploited the inventive ideas of Stephen Ross? Scores of top-tier entrepreneurs worked for established corporations before they struck out on their own and became self-made billionaires.

An ordinary leader is someone who leads a small organization or team that is doing great things. They manage the majority of the world's workforce, but they don't lead large corporations or big government agencies. Ordinary leaders are rarely written about in books or quoted in magazines. They are, however, important. Maybe not globally, but in their own realm of influence, their leadership makes a difference.