Small Business Leadership

How do you develop products that people will actually use and buy? This practical guide shows you how to validate product and company ideas through customer development research - before you waste months and millions on a product or service that no one needs or wants. With a combination of open-ended interviewing and fast and flexible research techniques, you’ll learn how your prospective customers behave, the problems they need to solve, and what frustrates and delights them

Paul Jarvis left the corporate world when he realized that working in a high-pressure, high profile world was not his idea of success. In Company of One, Jarvis explains how you can find the right pathway to do the same, including planning how to set up your shop, determining your desired revenues, dealing with unexpected crises, keeping your key clients happy, and of course, doing all of this on your own. Company of One is a refreshingly new approach centered on staying small and avoiding growth, for any size business.

Using stories from his time at Netscape, Apple, and Slack, Michael Lopp presents a series of small but compelling practices to help you build leadership skills. You’ll learn how to create teams that are highly productive, highly respected, and highly trusted. The essays in this book examine the practical skills Lopp learned from exceptional leaders - as a manager at Netscape, a senior manager and director at Apple, and an executive at Slack. You’ll learn how to apply these lessons to your own experience.

Leadership Hacks is the business leader's guide to getting things done. Over the years, the leader's role has expanded to encompass more duties, more responsibility, and more accountability - yet we're still stuck with the same 24 hours in every day. The evolving business environment leaves many of us struggling to achieve against constantly shifting priorities, competitors, and deadlines, and we are forever expected to do more with less. Is it even possible to make a real impact? Yes! This book shows you how to sort through the madness and get back to getting results.

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.

Listen to this book at your own risk. It contains ideas that may lead to a profound self-awakening. An introspective journey for those in the trenches of today's modern organizations, Deep Change is a survival manual for finding our own internal leadership power. By helping us learn new ways of thinking and behaving, it shows how we can transform ourselves from victims to powerful agents of change. And for anyone who yearns to be an internally driven leader, to motivate the people around them, and return to a satisfying work life, Deep Change holds the key.

They say you shouldn't ask your mom whether your business is a good idea, because she loves you and will lie to you. This is technically true, but it misses the point. You shouldn't ask anyone if your business is a good idea. It's a bad question, and everyone will lie to you at least a little. As a matter of fact, it's not their responsibility to tell you the truth. It's your responsibility to find it, and it's worth doing right.

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.

Are you a business owner who has little experience with accounting notions? Do you want to optimize resources and lower the costs of managing your business? Learn to easily manage the accounting by using the software QuickBooks. If you want to manage your business well, optimizing accounting processes and financial planning, saving time and money to invest in the growth of your business, this audiobook will become your best partner.

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.

As CEO, most everything that Rich O'Connor did had something to do with at least one of the four disciplines on his famed "yellow sheet." Rich never suspected that it would become the blueprint of an employee's plan to destroy the firm. Best selling author Lencioni brings us a fable that focuses on a leader's crucial role in building a healthy organization.

Author Bedros Keuilian, founder and CEO of Fit Body Boot Camp and known as the "hidden genius" behind many of the most successful brands and businesses throughout multiple industries, will teach you how to break out of the sea of mediocrity, get singularly focused on your purpose, and do what it takes - not only to achieve but dominate your goals.

What entrepreneur or founder doesn't aspire to build the next Amazon, Facebook, or Airbnb? Yet those who actually manage to do so are exceedingly rare. So what separates the start-ups that get disrupted and disappear from the ones who grow to become global giants? The secret is blitzscaling: a set of techniques for scaling up at a dizzying pace that blows competitors out of the water.

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.

In this accessible guide, franchise expert Rick Grossmann and franchise attorney Michael J. Katz impart decades-worth of insight and advice on what it takes to make your franchise operation successful. Grossmann and Katz share expert tutorials, tricks of the trade, and access to sample franchise documents, checklists, and questionnaires designed to get you organized, support you through the process, and get your new franchise off the ground.

In his long-awaited memoir, Yvon Chouinard - legendary climber, businessman, environmentalist, and founder of Patagonia, Inc. - shares the persistence and courage that have gone into being head of one of the most respected and environmentally responsible companies on earth. From his youth as the son of a French Canadian blacksmith to the thrilling, ambitious climbing expeditions that inspired his innovative designs for the sport's equipment.

Are you among the thousands of retailers frustrated by market challenges and looking for ways to take control of your business? Are you looking for the advice of an expert consultant, but unable to spend the money? Then The Retail Doctor's Guide to Growing Your Business is for you.

Over more than 20 years in business, Bronwyn Reid has seen time and time again how winning one initial contract with a “big name” can be the spark that lets a small company realize its potential growth. But as Bronwyn knows from firsthand experience, becoming a supplier to a large company isn’t easy - and there’s a lot to know and do. But almost everything that has been written about the small business/big business relationship is from the big company point of view.

Working Backwards is a practical guidebook and a corporate narrative, filled with the authors’ in-the-room recollections of what “Being Amazonian” is like and how it has affected their personal and professional lives. They demonstrate that success on Amazon’s scale is not achieved by the genius of any single leader, but rather through commitment to and execution of a set of well-defined, rigorously executed principles and practices - shared here for the very first time.

The pressures on organizations to change will only increase over the next decades. Yet the methods managers have used to strengthen their companies—total quality management, reengineering, right sizing, restructuring, cultural change, and turnarounds—routinely fall short. In Leading Change, Kotter identifies an eight-step process that every company must go through to achieve its goal, and shows where and how people—good people—often derail.