Small Business Leadership

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.

A behind-the-scenes, revelatory history of McKinsey & Company, America's most influential and controversial business consulting firm, told by one of the nation's leading financial journalists. In The Firm, Duff McDonald uncovers how these high-powered, high-priced business savants have ushered in waves of structural, financial, and technological shifts. With unrivaled access to company documents and current and former employees, McDonald reveals the inner workings of what just might be the most influential private organization in America.

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

In Scale or Fail, author Allison Maslan shares her revolutionary SCALEit Method for successfully growing, replicating, and expanding your business. She also shares pivotal mindset strategies she's used to break the fear barrier as a trapeze artist so you can move past any obstacle, take strategic big-picture risks, and fulfill your dreams of business expansion and skyrocketing profit.

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.

In the new edition of this fascinating book, a book that has appeared on MSNBC, CNBC, Slashdot.org, Lifehacker.com and in the New York Times, best-selling author Scott Berkun pulls the best lessons from the history of innovation, including the recent software and web age, to reveal powerful and surprising truths about how ideas become successful innovations - truths people can easily apply to the challenges of today.

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.

Most startups fail. But many of those failures are preventable. The Lean Startup is a new approach being adopted across the globe, changing the way companies are built and new products are launched.

This is a book about work choices and life choices, and the critical points, or defining moments, at which the two become one. A refreshing antidote to traditional feel-good, inspirational business ethics, it examines the right-versus-right conflicts that every business manager faces and presents an unorthodox yet practical way for you to think about and resolve them.

Whether you are moving up, moving on, or just starting out, America's top career coach, Robin Ryan, offers proven, easy-to-learn techniques for mastering the job interview and landing the job of your dreams. This brief, compact book, newly updated in 2008, is packed with useful tips such as: how to establish a career identity or personal brand in the opening minutes of an interview using the 60 Second Sell¿, answers to more than 100 of the toughest interview questions.

How well does your organization respond to changing market conditions, customer needs, and emerging technologies when building software-based products? This practical guide presents Lean and Agile principles and patterns to help you move fast at scale - and demonstrates why and how to apply these methodologies throughout your organization. Through case studies, you'll learn how successful enterprises have rethought everything from governance and financial management to systems architecture and organizational culture in the pursuit of radically improved performance.

You have the ability, right now, to accomplish more than you ever have before. In this powerful, practical program, Brian Tracy shows you how to plot your course to greater success and achievement. Life, Tracy says, is a journey. And as with any other journey, you have to do more than just think happy thoughts about where you want to go. You need clear goals, plans, and schedules to get from wherever you are today to wherever you want to be in the future.

In this hands-on successor to the popular book The Trusted Advisor, you'll find answers to pervasive questions about trust and leadership - such as how to develop business with trust, nurture trust-based relationships, build and run a trustworthy organization, and develop your trust skill set. This pragmatic workbook delivers everyday tools, exercises, resources, and actionable to-do lists for the wide range of situations a trusted advisor inevitably encounters.

Trevor Blake built three successful startups and sold them for more than $300 million. Now he's written a complete instruction manual that covers everything the budding entrepreneur or existing business owner needs to know to build the career or business of their dreams. Unlike the many theoretical guides out there, this is a practical handbook based on Blake's wildly successful in-the-trenches experience.

Mark Siebert, franchise expert and author of Franchise Your Business, flips his script from franchising your existing business to offer entrepreneurs a comprehensive guide to succeeding as franchisees. The Franchisee Handbook tells listeners how to take a systematic approach to assess and invest in franchise opportunities, so they end up with the right fit for their entrepreneurial style. Sharing tales from the trenches and real-world anecdotes from successful franchises, Siebert lays out everything you need to know before signing with well-known franchises.

Attorney and CPA Mark J. Kohler targets the leading tax and business issues among small business owners, across all stages of business, and delivers a practical guide to the fundamental tax and legal conflicts faced by new and established entrepreneurs. Coached by Kohler, business owners are armed to seek out the right professionals relevant to their concerns, confidently ask the right questions, and ultimately, save time, money, and in many cases, potential heartache.

Behind every entrepreneur's success story, there's a never-ending list of gut-wrenching failures, missed opportunities, and jaw-dropping setbacks. Real estate mogul and serial entrepreneur Manny Khoshbin is one of those entrepreneurs with a story of perseverance that will make you believe in the American Dream all over again. Driven: The Never-Give-Up Roadmap to Massive Success goes beyond Manny's personal ride through the entrepreneurial journey to deliver the habits, mindset, and insights aspiring entrepreneurs need to turn dreams into reality.

Young, ambitious, and overwhelmed, Andrew O'Brien personifies a part of every leader as he wanders in search of the elusive silver bullet that will propel him to success. He happens upon an unlikely guide who distills the seemingly infinite list of leadership perils into the five temptations of a CEO. In an intense and often combative exchange, the two debate fundamental issues faced by all leaders, issues involving personal integrity and effectiveness in the ongoing struggle for success.

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.

In this offbeat approach to leadership, college president Steven B. Sample - the man who turned the University of Southern California into one of the most respected and highly rated universities in the country - challenges many conventional teachings on the subject. Here, Sample outlines an iconoclastic style of leadership that flies in the face of current leadership thought, but a style that unquestionably works, nevertheless.