Small Business Leadership

The Fieldbook is an intensely pragmatic guide. It shows how to create an organization of learners where memories are brought to life, where collaboration is the lifeblood of every endeavor, and where the tough questions are fearlessly asked. The stories here show that companies, businesses, schools, agencies, and even communities can undo their “learning issues” and achieve superior performance. If ever a work gave meaning to the phrase hands-on, this is it.

Here’s what’s happened...you’ve become the bottleneck in your business, wondering why it isn’t growing and why you’re not making the money you want to make, working too many hours with no freedom. Overwhelmed at six figures, you wonder whether it’s even worth it to keep going, let alone try to grow to seven figures. It doesn’t have to be this way! By following these proven strategies that leverage all aspects of your business, you can remove yourself from the day-to-day grind and experience the freedom and joy you set out to create when you first opened your company.

Longtime Dollar General CEO Cal Turner, Jr. shares his extraordinary life as heir to the company founded by his father Cal Turner, Sr. and his grandfather, a dirt farmer turned Depression-era entrepreneur. Cal's narrative is at its heart a father-son story, from his childhood in Scottsville, Kentucky, where business and family were one, to the triumph of reaching the Fortune 300 - at the cost of risking that very father/son relationship. Cal shares how the small-town values with which he was raised helped him guide Dollar General from family enterprise to national powerhouse.

In The 10% Entrepreneur, Patrick McGinnis shows you how, by investing just 10% of your time and resources, you can become an entrepreneur without losing a steady paycheck. McGinnis details a step-by-step plan that takes you from identifying your first entrepreneurial project to figuring out the smartest way to commit resources to it. He shows you how to select and engage in projects that will provide you with upside outside the office while making you better at your day job.

What if the smartest people in the world understand something that the rest of us don't? (They do.) What if they know that in order to achieve success, they will sometimes have to do things that others may initially perceive as stupid? The fact of the matter is that the smartest people in the world don't run from stupid, they lean into it (in a smart way). In The Power of Starting Something Stupid, Richie Norton redefines stupid as we know it, demonstrating that life-changing ideas are often tragically mislabeled stupid.

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.

Before you venture into the business world, however, you need to know what you are doing. That is where this guidebook comes in. Nothing is going to kill your business quicker than making too many mistakes. Some of these mistakes could very well be the difference between success and failure. Mistakes are one of the biggest concerns for many new entrepreneurs, especially since they have no idea what they are doing when they are fresh in the industry. Dropshipping for Beginners, The Ultimate Guide: E-Commerce 101 is going to help set you on the right path to success.

The nonprofit sector of our society is growing rapidly, creating a major need for guidelines and expert advice on how to manage these organizations effectively. Management guru Peter F. Drucker provides excellent examples and explanations of mission, leadership, resources, marketing, goals, people development, decision-making, and much more. Included are interviews with nine experts that address key issues in the booming nonprofit sector.

Coach Mike Krzyzewski reveals his personal principles for leadership, from dealing with adversity in life or on the basketball court, to taking responsibility for your actions and learning how to trust your heartfelt instincts in times of trouble. Leading with the Heart is about bringing out the best and demanding the best, from ourselves, from those around us, and from any organization that is playing to win.

In Whale Done!, Ken Blanchard shows how positive reinforcement and redirection can help increase productivity. These techniques are remarkably easy to master and can be applied equally well at home, allowing listeners to become better parents and more committed spouses and have happier personal lives.

Fitness Professionals live paycheck to paycheck despite working a heroic amount of hours. This audiobook teaches a system that increases their cash flow so they can be home at dinner time and their gym can thrive. The system is simple to learn and implement.

Baseline Selling: How to Become a Sales Superstar by Using What You Already Know About the Game of Baseball will dramatically change the way we approach the sales process, replacing the gratuitous complexity advocated by today's sales "experts" with an elegant and very effective simplicity. Studies have shown that the selling techniques of the last two decades have had very little impact on most of the sales population. Why?

Best-selling author Laurie Beth Jones brings you the ultimate guide to transforming your team and sparking inspiration in your business. In Jesus, CEO, Jones compares Jesus to a CEO who turned a disorganized "staff" of 12 into a thriving, long-lasting enterprise. With the 25th anniversary edition of Jesus, CEO, Jones revises and updates her original modernized guidance, ensuring that everyone can continue to apply the ancient wisdom pulled straight from the Bible.

We experience change in four phases. The first is panic. Then we adapt. Then we find a new normal. And then, finally, we reach the phase we could not have imagined in the beginning, the moment when we realize that we wouldn’t go back. Build for Tomorrow is designed to accelerate that process—to help you lessen your panic, adapt faster, define the new normal, and thrive going forward. And it arrives as we all, in some way, have felt a shift in our lives.

Former consultant Dr. Paul Friga distills the guiding principles first presented in the best-selling The McKinsey Way and the tested-in-the-trenches methodologies outlined in The McKinsey Mind, and combines them with many of the principles and procedures implemented by the military and other organizations. The result is nothing less than the business equivalent of a Special Forces Field Manual.

For more than 40 years, The Boston Consulting Group has been shaping strategic thinking in business. The Boston Consulting Group on Strategy offers a broad and up-to-date selection of the firm's best ideas on strategy with fresh ideas, insights, and practical lessons for managers, executives, and entrepreneurs in every industry. Here's a sampling of the provocative thinking you'll find inside.

Leadership succession made easy. Leaders leave. It's inevitable. It might even happen today. Are you prepared? Every organization needs a plan for leadership succession, but few leaders know how to start the process. Who Comes Next? solves that problem and easily guides you through the steps of creating and implementing a viable succession plan. This essential guidebook simplifies the process and gives you the tools you need to build and activate your leadership succession.

Fraser Doherty's 48-Hour Start-Up is your handy and essential cheat sheet to starting your own business, giving the key steps for developing an idea and getting it to market quickly. Almost everyone dreams of starting their own business, but very few do it. What if it had to be only a decision of a weekend, and it didn't cost a fortune?

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.

Scott Wozniak leverages his decades of brand-building experience within some of America’s most-loved companies to show you how to create world-class customer experience. After years of battle-tested work, Scott realized that there was a set of systems that all the great brands used to create raving fans. He captured these practices in an engine diagram, a simple tool to help leaders become legends. If you use this approach, you can build a Customer Experience Engine that will create those same kinds of raving fans that always seem to dominate dinner-party conversations and water-cooler chats.