Small Business Leadership

In his sixth business book, best-selling author, entrepreneur, and investor Gary Vaynerchuk explores the 12 essential emotional skills that are integral to his life - and business - success and provides today’s (and tomorrow’s) leaders with critical tools to acquire and develop these traits.

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.

Hundreds of thousands of business leaders and aspiring professionals have profited from the wisdom and savvy of Lead the Field! Now you can, too. Lead the Field has often been referred to as the "Program of Presidents" because so many top executives and business leaders have incorporated Earl Nightingale's insight and guidance into their management philosophies. This landmark book is a practical guide on how to think and act like a success. The timeless stories Nightingale uses to make his points are as profound as they are accessible.

Blue Ocean Shift is the essential follow-up to Blue Ocean Strategy, the classic 3.6 million copy global best seller by world-renowned professors W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne. Drawing on more than a decade of new work, Kim and Mauborgne show you how to move beyond competing, inspire your people's confidence, and seize new growth, guiding you step by step through how to take your organization from a red ocean crowded with competition to a blue ocean of uncontested market space.

With a nod to Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs, Walt Disney, and other ruthless yet highly successful managers, author Dan S. Kennedy delivers the answer. In this new edition, Kennedy expands on his proven (if radical) strategies to get accountability, profitability, and productivity from employees. In his traditional "No B.S." style, Kennedy kicks traditional leadership and management ideas squarely in the teeth with a realistic, straightforward assessment of the real relationship between business owners and their employees.

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.

UTV founder and pioneer of the media industry Ronnie Screwvala is one of India’s most successful first-generation entrepreneurs. An avid philanthropist, he has penned Dream with Your Eyes Open: An Entrepreneurial Journey as one of the most inspiring entrepreneurial self-help books.

Patagonia, named by Fortune in 2007 as the coolest company on the planet, has earned a reputation as much for its ground-breaking environmental and social practices as for the quality of its clothes. In this exceptionally frank account, Chouinard and Stanley recount how the company and its culture gained the confidence, by step and misstep, to make its work progressively more responsible, and to ultimately share its discoveries with companies as large as Wal-Mart or as small as the corner bakery.

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.

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.

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.

A one-stop start-up guide from an accountant-turned-restaurateur. Ninety percent of all restaurants fail, and those that succeed happened upon that mysterious X factor, right? Wrong! A man of many hats - money-guy, restaurant owner, and restaurant consultant - Roger Fields shows how a restaurant can survive its first year and keep diners coming back for years. Featuring real-life start-up stories (including many of the author's own), this comprehensive how-to walks listeners through the logistics of opening a restaurant: concept, location, menu, staff, and, most important, profit.

The best products can still lose in the marketplace. Why? They are beaten by stronger product marketing. Yet, product marketing is widely misunderstood. It includes segmenting and targeting customers, positioning products vs. alternatives, creating product collateral, and supporting sales teams. But great product marketing achieves much more: it identifies the best way to bring your product to market, accelerates your product's ability to penetrate markets over time, shapes what the world thinks about your product and your category, and inspires customers to tell your product's story.

Much of what we hear about who gets to the top, and how, is wrong. Those who become chief executives set their sights on the C-suite at an early age. In fact, over 70 percent of the CEOs didn't have designs on the corner office until later in their careers. You must graduate from an elite college. In fact, only seven percent of CEOs in the dataset are Ivy League graduates - and eight percent didn't graduate from college at all. To become a CEO you need a flawless résumé. The reality: 45 percent of CEO candidates had at least one major career blowup.

This special edition of A Book of Five Rings contains one hour of traditional Japanese flute (shakuhachi) and 43 minutes of music by traditional japanese ensemble. The music appears track by track at the end of the two and a half hour audiobook and is included as wonderful compliment to this dynamic and elegant listening experience. Legendary 17th-century swordsman Miyamoto Musashi’s exposition of sword fighting, strategy, and Zen philosophy.

What does an executive director actually do? And how can you lead your organization to a stronger place? Nonprofit expert Erik Hanberg wrote The Little Book of Nonprofit Leadership to speak directly to executive directors of small (and very small) nonprofits who are asking these questions. EDs, especially at small nonprofits, tend to be dropped into the deep end of the pool with the expectation that they know how to swim. The Little Book of Nonprofit Leadership will be a welcome rescue line.

In this book, Melissa Perri explains how laying the foundation for great product management can help companies solve real customer problems while achieving business goals. By understanding how to communicate and collaborate within a company structure, you can create a product culture that benefits both the business and the customer. You'll learn product management principles that can be applied to any organization, big or small.

Wildpreneurs illuminates how surf guides, ski builders, yoga and wellness instructors, environmental activists, nature lovers, food trucks, podcasters, artisans, and other creatives achieve an adventurous lifestyle and financial viability. Whether you’re stuck in the nine-to-five grind, are an enterprising college grad, a dynamic retiree, a family of daydreamers, or are just an out-of-the-box thinker, it’s time to embrace your free spirit and become a Wildpreneur! The possibilities are infinite....

The fact is, over 90 percent of all new start-ups fail. Every entrepreneur must face this harsh reality and learn to master it if they hope to survive and wind up on top. In Surviving a Startup, Hoffman brings listeners on a wild ride, sharing with them the tumultuous journey of launching a venture-funded start-up and revealing what it takes to make it.

This book triggers you to think and act strategically, shows what you can learn from business models inside and outside your industry, and urges you to apply those learnings to make your own shift.