Small Business Leadership

Based on in-depth interviews with more than 200 leading entrepreneurs, a business executive and senior fellow at Harvard's Center for Public Leadership identifies the six essential disciplines needed to transform your ideas into real-world successes, whether you're an innovative manager or an aspiring entrepreneur.

If you're a business executive, owner, or manager, you'll appreciate Terry's clear insights into how to deal with the kinds of challenges you face when trying to run and grow your business to higher levels. If you think coaching is anything like consulting, think again...because Terry's methods are very different and yield extraordinary results. Each of the 32 chapters is filled with insights, examples, and concrete direction to take potential coaches and turn them into highly successful coaches.

It has never been harder to find good employees. Government handouts and programs, publicly traded behemoths with an insatiable appetite for front-line staff, and a burgeoning gig-economy has made hiring extremely hard for small business owners. The golden question is how do we attract good talent and then retain them long-term? How do I determine rates of compensation for my highest performers that are always demanding raises? How do I scale my business without having to constantly micro-manage my Team when they are in the field working? The answer is Pay-For-Performance (P4P).

No one knows leadership like Jack Welch, former chairman and CEO of General Electric. Along with his wife and best-selling co-author, Suzy Welch, he explores with Daniel Goleman what it means to be a great leader, and what elements must be present for any leader to be successful. Key elements of emotional intelligence, from self-awareness to the ability to instill core values in a team, are part of that success.

Positive leaders are able to dramatically expand their people’s - and their own - capacity for excellence. And they accomplish this without enormous expenditures or huge heroic gestures. The authors show that, like the butterfly in Brazil whose flapping wings create a typhoon in Texas, you can create profound positive change in your organization through simple actions and attitude shifts.

How does a suburban pizza joint end up profiled on national magazine covers and network TV news? (Hint: The secret is not in the sauce.) When Nick Sarillo decided to open a family-friendly pizza restaurant in the suburbs of Chicago, people thought he was nuts. Having worked as a carpenter for much of his adult life, he lacked any formal experience in restaurants or in managing a small business. Everyone told him no one else would ever care about his place the way he did.

Hardly anyone gets it right the first time, but many of us are crippled by indecision and fear of failure. The desire to get it right can inhibit us from getting started. In this book Rob Moore, the best-selling author of Money, shows that the quickest way to perfect is starting right now and improving as you go. This book will show you how to launch your business or idea, begin the next phase of your career and overcome self-doubt - right away. Get perfect later; get started now.

A definitive audiobook for any CEO - first time or otherwise - of a high-growth company. While big company CEOs are usually groomed for the job for years, startup CEOs aren't - and they're often young and relatively inexperienced in business in general.

In Leading Through Disruption, Andrew Liveris provides a new leadership paradigm for resilience and agility in a rapidly changing world. This book is a must-listen guide for leaders in various sectors who are keen on not only ensuring current success, but protecting the planet’s future for everyone.

A successful optometry practice is a juggling act. You need to know your field of optometry, as well as how to run a small business. Your education has prepared you for the technical ins and outs of optometry practice. But what has prepared you to run a business? The E-Myth Optometrist fills this knowledge gap, giving you a complete toolkit for starting a successful practice from scratch or maximizing an existing practice’s performance.

Americans are generous with their pocketbooks, but trying to make a difference and actually making a difference are two different things. Where Am I Giving? by New York Times best-selling author Kelsey Timmerman takes you on a journey to meet people who will inspire you to live a purpose-filled, generous life and make the greatest impact you can through your career, time, consumer dollars, and donations.

Ram Charan, Stephen Drotter, and James Noel are three eminent business consultants on the cutting edge of the knowledge economy. They have coached managers at many world-class organizations; now their combined expertise on the subject of leadership is condensed in this fascinating audiobook.

The nearly three billion people living on two dollars a day are not just the world’s greatest challenge - they represent an extraordinary market opportunity. The key is what Paul Polak and Mal Warwick call Zero-Based Design: starting from scratch to create innovative products and services tailored for the very poor, armed with a thorough understanding of what they really want and need, and driven by what Polak and Warwick call "the ruthless pursuit of affordability". Polak has been doing this work for years, and Warwick has extensive experience in both business and philanthropy.

Many smart entrepreneurs prefer to buy an existing business instead of beginning a new one. Buying a business that is already operational will bring many benefits, including an already established product or service, well-trained staff who know the business, and enough success to have kept the company afloat for a period of time. Not having any money to purchase the business will not necessarily keep you from buying it.

While playing hooky from a conference in Boston a few years back, three former colleagues from Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management hopped in a car and headed on a road trip. They pulled into a shoe store in Maine and noticed that the sales help was unusually pushy. After a few questions, they discovered the store had a "secret shopper" program, in which employees would be marked down if they were not sufficiently aggressive with customers. A lightbulb went off.

“What would Jeff do?” Since leaving Amazon to advise start-ups and corporations, John Rossman has been asked this question countless times by executives who want to know “the secret” behind Amazon’s historic success. In this step-by-step guide, he provides 50½ answers drawn from his experience as an Amazon executive - and shows today’s business leaders how to think like Amazon, strategize like Bezos, and beat the competition like nobody’s business.

Por que algumas pessoas e organizações são mais inovadoras, admiradas e lucrativas do que outras? Por que algumas despertam grande lealdade por parte de clientes e funcionários? Para Simon Sinek, a resposta está no forte senso de propósito que as inspira a darem o melhor de si para uma causa expressiva - o porquê. Ilustrando suas ideias com as histórias de Martin Luther King, Steve Jobs e os irmãos Wright, Simon mostra que as pessoas só irão se dedicar de corpo e alma a um movimento, ideia, produto ou serviço se compreenderem o verdadeiro propósito por trás deles.

Your brand is the stories people share about you when you're not in the room, and it's these brand stories that determine if people buy from you, employ you, work for you, or invest in you. When the stakes are that high, wouldn't you want to take control of it? In Magnetic Stories, business storytelling expert Gabrielle Dolan reveals how you, too, can create and share stories that stick.

Ask better questions, and you will get better results. Top business coach Mark Moses has identified four critical questions every business leader should explore on their journey to business and life success.

Traditionally, an entrepreneur develops a detailed plan, finds money to fund it, and then pursues it to its conclusion. But conditions can change drastically at any point - you can end up locked into a process based on now-obsolete assumptions. The lean startup is all about agility and flexibility. Its mantra is "build, measure, learn": create small, experimental initiatives, get real-world feedback on them quickly, and use that data to identify what works and discard what doesn't. And then test some more.