Small Business Leadership

Entrepreneurs and leaders face big questions every day: What’s the most important place to focus your effort, and how do you start? What will your idea look like in real life? How many meetings and discussions does it take before you can be sure you have the right solution? Now there’s a surefire way to answer these important questions: the Design Sprint, created at Google by Jake Knapp. This method is like fast-forwarding into the future, so you can see how customers react before you invest all the time and expense of creating your new product, service, or campaign.

What's holding you back? Marshall Goldsmith is an expert at helping global leaders overcome their (sometimes unconscious) annoying habits and attaining a higher level of success. His one-on-one coaching comes with a six-figure price tag. But with this audiobook, you'll get Marshall's great advice without the hefty fee!

Why is profitable growth so hard to achieve and sustain? Most executives manage their companies as if the solution to that problem lies in the external environment: find an attractive market, formulate the right strategy, win new customers. But when Bain & Company's Chris Zook and James Allen researched this question, they found that when companies fail to achieve their growth targets, 90 percent of the time the root causes are internal, not external.

The Antiracist Business Book: An Equity Centered Approach to Work, Wealth, and Leadership is the business book for the modern world. Trudi Lebrón has spent the last decade working as a DEI and impact coach for businesses, nonprofits, and entrepreneurs. And what she learned over that time was that making a lasting change wasn't about fixing old systems; it was about building a new one. In this seminal work, Trudi lays out a plan for all businesses, leaders, entrepreneurs, and coaches to remix business, so that equity and impact become synonymous with profit and power.

Get the real guidance you need to create and build your first start-up company from founders who have been there many times before.

What really sets the best managers above the rest? It's their power to build a cadre of employees who have great inner work lives—consistently positive emotions; strong motivation; and favorable perceptions of the organization, their work, and their colleagues. The worst managers undermine inner work life, often unwittingly.

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.

For us to thrive - not simply survive - in this accelerating economy, we need to adopt small, intentional behaviors and practice them each day. From simply taking care of our rest and exercise to building our self-confidence and embracing challenges, author Shawn Hunter's latest book Small Acts of Leadership will guide you through a series of incremental steps you can take to build a stronger version of yourself and make a broader impact in the world.

Entrepreneur and best-selling author of The Lean Startup Eric Ries reveals how entrepreneurial principles can be used by businesses ranging from established companies to early stage startups to grow revenues, drive innovation, and emerge as truly modern organizations poised to take advantage of the enormous opportunities of the 21st century.

Land the deals you want and develop your instincts with million-dollar negotiation techniques. After selling over $3 billion in real estate, including the most expensive one-bedroom house in history, Josh Altman, costar of the hit show Million-Dollar Listing Los Angeles, wants to teach you the real estate sales and negotiation tactics that have made him one of America's top agents. Buying or selling a house, whether for a client or yourself, is one of the most important and stressful deals anyone can make, demanding emotional intelligence and a solid set of negotiating skills.

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.

In The Business Playbook, serial entrepreneur Chris Ronzio walks you through his proven framework for building a playbook: the profile of your business, the people who work in it, the policies that guide it, and the processes that operate it. He shows you how to codify your culture and create a living document that allows you to let go of day-to-day responsibilities and empower your team to run the business without you. If you want to build a company that doesn’t rely on you putting in more hours, this book will show you the way.

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.

Under the aegis of machine learning in our data-driven machine age, computers are programming themselves and learning about - and solving - an extraordinary range of problems, from the mundane to the most daunting. Today it is machine learning programs that enable Amazon and Netflix to predict what users will like, Apple to power Siri's ability to understand voices, and Google to pilot cars.

Tech entrepreneurs, make your startup dreams come true by utilizing this invaluable, founder-to-founder guide to successfully navigating all phases of the tech startup journey. With the advent of the internet, mobile computing, and now AI/Machine learning and cloud computing, the number of new startups has accelerated over the last decade across tech centers in Silicon Valley, Israel, India, and China.

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.

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.

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.

The Customer Success Manager has become a critical asset to organizations across the business landscape. As the subscription model has spread from the cloud and SaaS to more sectors of the economy, that pivotal role will only grow in importance. That's because if you want to compete and thrive in this new environment, you need to put the customer at the center of your strategy. You need to recognize you're no longer selling just a product. You're selling an outcome.

Beyond the E-Myth embraces the fundamental premise of that first book - that a small business only succeeds to the degree its owner goes to work on the business rather than just in it, creating the systemic operating system that makes that business unique in the marketplace.