Small Business Leadership

The traditional attitude toward creativity in the American business world is to "think outside the box": to brainstorm without restraint in hopes of coming up with a breakthrough idea, often in moments of crisis. Sometimes it works, but it’s a problem-specific solution that does nothing to engender creative thinking more generally. Inside the Box demonstrates Systematic Inventive Thinking (SIT), a method that systemizes creativity as part of the corporate culture. SIT requires thinking "inside the box", working in one’s familiar world to create new ideas independent of specific problems.

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.

This book is the first-ever explanation of McKinsey’s step-by-step approach to transforming leaders both professionally and personally, including revealing lessons from its legendary CEO leadership program, The Bower Forum, which has counseled more than five hundred global CEOs over the past decade. It is a journey that helps leaders hone the psychological, emotional, and, ultimately, human attributes that result in success in today’s most demanding top job.

Eileen Sharp and Vic Hightower were frustrated. After years of profitable, predictable growth, Swan Services was in a rut. Meetings were called and discussions held, but few decisions were made and even less got done. People were pointing fingers and assigning blame, but nothing happened to solve Swan’s mounting problems. It felt as though they were working harder than ever but with less impact. The company Eileen and Vic had founded and built for 10 years was a different place. It just wasn’t fun anymore.

At the core of this classic treatise is the message that sledgehammer approaches can backfire, and size alone does not guarantee wins. Strategy, positioning, planning, leadership - all play equally significant roles, making Sun Tzu's teachings perfect for small business owners and entrepreneurs entrenched in fierce competition for customers, market share, talent - for their very survival.

Based on thousands of interviews from John Lee Dumas’ highly acclaimed podcast, Entrepreneurs on Fire, this revolutionary step-by-step roadmap provides a proven path for entrepreneurs like you to achieve the financial freedom and lifestyle fulfillment you are capable of. Let The Common Path to Uncommon Success show you how.

Don’t trade your 40-hour workweek for an 80-hour-a-week side hustle. The promise of entrepreneurship is to create a lifestyle of freedom—but the pursuit often leads to a time-bankrupt life. If you’re an overworked employee who’s done with the 9-to-5, a serial entrepreneur who has yet to realize the American dream, or a burned-out side hustle owner who’s tired of the grind, this book was written for you.

The exact qualities that bring an individual to found a start-up company (their brilliance and expertise) are what prevent them from achieving the success they are looking for - this is the paradox that is entrepreneurship. What starts out as freedom and financial independence turns into grueling hours and added stress and bills. But successful five-time entrepreneur Curtis Morley is here to help. He shares that every entrepreneur is typically doing the same 15 things wrong or just not doing them at all - regardless of industry or business type.

What’s missing in most small businesses and why is it that most fail? In Zen and the Art of Small Business, Michael Gerber, not only answers that question, but provides a deep understanding of the process for transforming any small business into a “sacred space.”

Each year, Americans start one million new businesses, nearly 80 percent of which fail within the first five years. Under such pressure to stay alive—let alone grow—it’s easy for entrepreneurs to get caught up in a never-ending cycle of "sell it—do it, sell it—do it" that leaves them exhausted, frustrated, and unable to get ahead no matter how hard they try. Full of stories of other successful entrepreneurs, The Pumpkin Plan guides you through unconven­tional strategies to help you build a truly profitable blue-ribbon company that is the best in its field.

If you’re at all responsible for your company’s success, you can’t just be a hard-charging entrepreneur or a motivating, encouraging leader. You have to be both! If you’re at all responsible for your company’s success, you can’t just be a hard-charging entrepreneur or a motivating, encouraging leader. You have to be both! This book presents Dave’s playbook for creating work that matters; building an incredible group of passionate, empowered team members; and winning the race with steady momentum that will roll over any obstacle.

This amazing book is jam-packed with the best, most profitable business ideas and ways to earn extra cash. Every one of these businesses is generating profits for other ambitious people. Now it's your turn to start your own business and prosper in the years to come. Whether you'd like an opportunity to earn a little extra money or you are looking for a way to make a full-time income, you'll achieve your own success with one of the 235 profitable businesses described in this book.

In How to Be a Great Boss, Gino Wickman and René Boer present a straightforward, practical approach to help bosses at all levels of an organization get the most from their people. They share time-tested tools that have worked for more than 30,000 bosses in every industry. You can learn to be a great boss - and dramatically improve both your organization's performance and your team's excitement about their work.

Seth Godin, one of today's most influential business thinkers, writes best-selling books like Purple Cow and All Marketers Are Liars. And in between those annual books, he delivers a daily stream of ideas on one of the world's most popular blogs.

In 2008, Howard Schultz, the president and chairman of Starbucks, made the unprecedented decision to return as CEO, eight years after he stepped down from daily oversight of the company to become chairman. Concerned that Starbucks had lost its way, Schultz was determined to help it return to its core values and restore not only its financial health, but also its soul.

In this new book, Frederick Chavalit Tsao and Chris Laszlo argue that current approaches to leadership fail to produce positive outcomes for either businesses or the communities they serve. Employee disengagement and customer fickleness remain high, resulting in a lack of creativity and collaboration at all levels of entrepreneurial activity. Investor demand for Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) continues to be poorly integrated into profit strategies.

The new question: Ten years after the worldwide bestseller Good to Great, Jim Collins returns to ask: Why do some companies thrive in uncertainty, even chaos, and others do not? In Great by Choice, Collins and his colleague, Morten T. Hansen, enumerate the principles for building a truly great enterprise in unpredictable, tumultuous, and fast-moving times. The new study: Great by Choice distinguishes itself from Collins’s prior work by its focus on the type of unstable environments faced by leaders today.

Do you have trouble keeping your team focused, motivated, and committed to the pursuit of their assigned goals? The truth is, the majority of bosses fail to inspire their employees to be engaged and productive at work. And they're often frustrated by their inability to incite their team to action.

In the tradition of Phil Knight's Shoe Dog comes the incredible untold story of how Netflix went from concept to company—all revealed by cofounder and first CEO Marc Randolph. From idea generation to team building to knowing when it's time to let go, That Will Never Work is not only the ultimate follow-your-dreams parable, but also one of the most dramatic and insightful entrepreneurial stories of our time.

Visionaries have groundbreaking ideas. Integrators make those ideas realities. This explosive combination is the key to getting everything you want out of your business. It worked for Disney. It worked for McDonald's. It worked for Ford. It can work for you. From the author of the best-selling Traction, Rocket Fuel details the integral roles of the visionary and integrator and explains how an effective relationship between the two can help your business thrive.