Small Business Leadership

The Blue Square Method is a philosophy and process for the enlightened fee-for-service professional who is striving to grow on their own terms. Panoramic success requires continual refinement and optimization both personally and professionally. This actionable playbook is designed to put you on a predictable trajectory and ensure you never plateau.

Leadership development speaker & consultant Andy Ellis is the former CSO of Akamai, where he contributed to the creation of Akamai's billion‑dollar cybersecurity business. He now brings his speaking, consulting, and business knowledge to listeners with 1% Leadership—based on the reality that real-world leadership is messy and complicated; it rarely fits into an acronym or a dogmatic overarching philosophy. Ellis says that there are no “irrefutable laws” of leadership or power; there is no secret.

The Focus workshop presents an engaging and inspirational learning experience and will change your life in ways you never thought possible.

What does it take to turn ideas into action? What are the elements of a perfect pitch? How do you win the war for talent? How do you establish a brand without bucks? These are some of the issues everyone faces when starting or revitalizing any undertaking, and Guy Kawasaki, former marketing maven of Apple Computer, provides the answers.

Based on six years of research, Harvard Business School Professor Thales Teixeira shows how and why industries are disrupted and what established companies can do to respond - as well as what potential start-ups must master if they hope to gain a competitive edge.

With Zoom, Fortune magazine extends one of its most successful franchises, 40 Under 40, to bring you original insight on the best-kept secrets of top entrepreneurs, business leaders, and rising tech stars. Discover how Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh built a uniquely attractive corporate culture, how Under Armour founder Kevin Plank took on Nike, and what Marissa Mayer told herself before leaping from a safe post at Google to the high-risk top job at Yahoo. Zoom features the fascinating profiles of these and other young innovators and provides listeners with tips to fast-track their own career success.

Language and culture can change the way you look at your business! For almost three decades, English has been the most widely used language of cross-outskirt associations, yet focus on corporate language techniques and their significance for globalization have been rare. In The Language of Global Success, the writer gives an inside-out glance at a solitary organization, the innovative monster Rakuten, in the five years following its most widely used language order English.

The one book you need to navigate the complex decisions and critical relationships necessary to create and sustain a healthy family business - and business family.

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.

Being a startup CEO is a job like no other: it's difficult, risky, stressful, lonely, and often learned through trial and error. As a startup CEO seeing things for the first time, you're likely to make mistakes, fail, get things wrong, and feel like you don't have any control over outcomes. Author Matt Blumberg has been there, and in Startup CEO he shares his experience, mistakes, and lessons learned as he guided Return Path from a handful of employees and no revenues to over $100 million in revenues and 500 employees.

In this leadership book, renowned industry analyst Josh Bersin introduces a new way to think about organizational design, employee engagement, and employee development. Distilled from decades of research and management theory into seven practical yet profound management principles, Bersin outlines how business leaders can create enduring companies that thrive with improved customer satisfaction, employee retention, and business agility.

In 1998, three Harvard Business School graduates - two men and one woman - turned down six-figure salaries at big corporations, bet on themselves, and launched their own new companies. By their 10-year reunion, their audacity had paid huge dividends. They'd made many millions of dollars, created hundreds of jobs and left their mark on the world. The Intelligent Entrepreneur tells the compelling and instructive story of how these three young founders did it.

The Art of Influence will make you think twice about everything you've ever learned about influence. As Chris Widener's inspiring story reveals, it's not something you "do" to other people but rather something that starts with how you shape and transform your own life.

Robert Rosenberg took over as CEO of Dunkin’ Donuts in 1963, 13 years after the first restaurant was founded by his father William. In his remarkable 35-year run, he grew the company from $10 million in sales to over $2 billion with more than 3,000 outlets. Through his tenure, Robert learned important lessons on running and scaling a family business. Rosenberg shares his insider perspective on all the dramatic highs and lows that are part of the Dunkin’ Donuts story to guide you to your own success story.

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.

You and a partner go into business together and split the equity 50/50. You do all the work and your partner slacks off. He owns half your business - now what? Slicing Pie outlines a process for calculating exactly the right number of shares each founder or employee in an early stage company deserves.

You will learn: How to value the time and resources an individual brings to the company relative to the contributions of others.

In 1965, John Brink left the Netherlands for Canada equipped with only a single suitcase and $25.47 in cash. He had no connections, he didn’t speak the language, and he’d never finished elementary school, yet he was convinced he could make his dream to build his own sawmill come true. With a tenacity bordering on obsession, John achieved his dreams...and then some. In this lively autobiography, John distills a half-century’s hard work to share 10 simple takeaways.

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.

The first thing Sophia Amoruso sold online wasn’t fashion - it was a stolen book. She spent her teens hitchhiking, committing petty theft, and dumpster diving. By twenty-two, she had resigned herself to employment, but was still broke, directionless, and working a mediocre day job she’d taken for the health insurance. It was there that Sophia decided to start selling vintage clothes on eBay. Eight years later, she is the founder, CEO, and creative director of Nasty Gal, a $100 million plus online fashion retailer with more than 350 employees.

It is time to stop the busy work of constantly putting out fires. It’s time to Let Your Business Burn. Scott Beebe has helped liberate business owners around the world from the chaos of constantly putting out hundreds of petty fires and has equipped them to let their business burn. In Let Your Business Burn, Scott guides you through a story-filled, template-packed, step-by-step discovery of the foundational elements that every business needs to stop putting out fires and instead build a business that matters.