Small Business Leadership

Musicians may just hold the keys to innovation in business. They don’t think like we do, and in the creative process, they don’t act like we do. It’s no coincidence that some of the world’s most respected creators are also entrepreneurs. In Two Beats Ahead, Panos A. Panay, senior vice president for strategy at Berklee College of Music, and R. Michael Hendrix, global design director at IDEO, interview some of the nation’s top musicians and business leaders about how they approach innovation differently.

For the past 10 years, Rohit Bhargava’s signature annual Non-Obvious Trend Report has helped over a million readers discover more than 100 trends changing our culture. Now for the first time, Rohit and his team of Non-Obvious trend curators reveal 10 revolutionary new megatrends that are transforming how we work, play, and live.

In this, his final work, finished only weeks before his passing, Peres offers a long-awaited examination of the crucial turning points in Israeli history through the prism of having been a decision maker and eyewitness. Told with the frankness of someone aware this would likely be his final statement, No Room for Small Dreams spans decades and events, but as much as it is about what happened, it is about why it happened.

The authors of the best-selling Competing on Internet Time (a Businessweek top-10 book) analyze the strategies, principles, and skills of three of the most successful and influential figures in business - Bill Gates, Andy Grove, and Steve Jobs - offering lessons for all managers and entrepreneurs on leadership, strategy, and execution.

The standard text on innovation advises would-be innovators to conduct creative brainstorming sessions and seek input from outsiders - users or communities. This kind of innovating can be effective at improving products but not at capturing bigger opportunities in the marketplace. In this book, Roberto Verganti offers a new approach - one that does not set out to solve existing problems, but to find breakthrough experiences. There is no brainstorming - which produces too many ideas, unfiltered - but a vision, subject to criticism.

What would you be willing to do for the rest of your life? It's a question most of us consider only hypothetically - opting instead to "do what we have to do" to earn a living. But in the critically acclaimed best seller The Monk and the Riddle, entrepreneurial sage Randy Komisar asks us to answer it for real.

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.

Does the voice in your head fill you with doubt? Are you working harder but accomplishing less? Does the life you’ve always hoped to live still elude you? If you answered "yes" to any of these questions, it’s time to unleash the beast. In The Business Beast, Brian Dyer leads you down a fulfilling—but sometimes dark and lonely—path. Entering the wild is dangerous, but it offers rewards you can only begin to imagine, and you’ll be in good hands as Brian guides you through the four primal instincts of The Business Beast.

With the horrific failure rates of restaurants, how can you ensure yours will not only survive but grow and thrive? If your restaurant sucks, it is because you suck at running it; 100 percent. Donald Burns, author of Your Restaurant Sucks has created a methodology and mindset honed from his Special Operations training in the US Air Force. As a Pararescueman, his training developed a keen sense of purposeful and fast decision making. In the military, he learned the phrase, "embrace the suck".

This timeless text is required listening for any business person or athlete interested in strategy. It includes a soundtrack entitled "The Mysterious Sound of Wind In the Bamboo", a 43-minute collection of Zen-inspired Japanese music by the Matsu Take Ensemble.

Are you ready for the mentor that every woman wishes she had in the beginning of her career? To make it in a man’s world, you need to know how to do it without losing who you are. Not just another book on business or motivation, More Than is the guide to learning from the men around us and the women who went before us. Gina Radke uses her extensive experience to share what Mansplaining, Impostor Syndrome, the Bitch Label, and even the mythical Work Life Balance really look like.

In 1998, three Harvard Business School graduates - two men and one woman - turned down six-figure salaries at big corporations, bet on themselves, and launched their own new companies. By their 10-year reunion, their audacity had paid huge dividends. They'd made many millions of dollars, created hundreds of jobs and left their mark on the world. The Intelligent Entrepreneur tells the compelling and instructive story of how these three young founders did it.

Here are really two books in one: McNeilly's synthesis of Sun Tzu's ideas into six strategic principles for the business executive, plus the entire text of Samuel B. Griffith's popular translation of The Art of War. Within, McNeilly explains how to gain market share without inciting competitive retaliation, how to attack a competitor's weak points, and how to maximize the power of market information for competitive advantage.

The myth of innovation is that brilliant ideas leap fully formed from the minds of geniuses. The reality is that most innovations come from a process of rigorous examination through which great ideas are identified and developed before being realized as new offerings and capabilities. This is not a book by designers for designers; this is a book for creative leaders seeking to infuse design thinking into every level of an organization's products or service to drive new alternatives for business and society.

Over his four deployments as a Navy SEAL sniper, Brandon Webb learned all about performing while experiencing heart-pounding stress. After returning to civilian life, he started his first business venture - and failed miserably. He realized that his big mistake was neglecting to apply what he already knew about focus under pressure. By drawing on the lessons of his SEAL training and early business struggles, Webb went on to build a second business, a media network called Hurricane.

Don Wenner is a master of scaling high-growth, high-profit entrepreneurial companies. In ​Building an Elite Organization​, he walks you through the Elite Execution System his company and other highly successful organizations use to drive growth and improve profitability.

Every day, there are multiple things vying for our attention - people, businesses, technologies, apps. But many of us don’t realize that our attention is our property. It belongs to us just like any other resource we own. And when we choose what we give our attention to, we can focus fully on our own purpose and on what’s best for us. When you take a step back and think about your thinking, you can take control of your attention, as well as your time and your purpose, rather than allowing others to be in control. It’s up to you.

Unsliced is the resource for elevating your pizzeria - from managing staff to mindset, marketing, and everything in between. Industry leader Mike Bausch explains how to make your restaurant unique and in demand based on his 20 years of experience. You’ll learn how to build systems that will help you boost your sales and keep your sanity. And you’ll discover time-tested protocols that will protect you and your restaurant. It’s hard not to get discouraged in this business. But with the right perspective, smart systems, and hard work, your restaurant can thrive.

Generating and executing great ideas is the key to staying ahead in a rapidly changing world. It seems so basic. Why is it so hard to actually get right? According to innovation expert Phil McKinney, the real problem is that we're teaching people to ask the wrong questions about their businesses - or none at all. There has to be a better way. In Beyond the Obvious, McKinney will help you use his proven FIRE (Focus, Ideation, Rank, Execution) Method to dig deeper and get back to asking the right questions - the ones all companies must ask to survive.

Adam Braun began working summers at hedge funds when he was just 16 years old, sprinting down the path to a successful Wall Street career. But while traveling as a college student, he met a young boy begging on the streets of India. When Braun asked the boy what he wanted most in the world, he simply answered, "A pencil." This small request became the inspiration for Pencils of Promise, the organization Braun would leave a prestigious job at Bain & Company to start with just $25 at the age of 24.