Small Business Leadership

As anyone in business knows, strategic planning is critical to achieving long-term success. In How to Be a Power Connector, super-networker Judy Robinett argues that strategic relationship planning should be your top priority.

Finding the right venture capitalist to back your start-up is a challenge. Even if you manage to get backing, you want your VC to be a partner, not some dictator who will undermine your vision and take control of your life's work. Jeffrey Bussgang is one of a very few people who have played on both sides of this high-stakes game. Now he draws on his unique perspective to offer high-level insights, colorful stories, and practical advice. He reveals how to get noticed, perfect a pitch, and negotiate a partnership that works for everyone.

If you want your business or organization to run well, this leadership book, adapted from the Official Army Leadership Manual, is the book for you. There are three keys to being a leader: be, know, do. Who a leader is (including values, such as loyalty and integrity), what a leader knows (about the world, about herself or himself), and what a leader does (actions) are all vitally important.

Coach Mike Krzyzewski reveals his personal principles for leadership, from dealing with adversity in life or on the basketball court, to taking responsibility for your actions and learning how to trust your heartfelt instincts in times of trouble. Leading with the Heart is about bringing out the best and demanding the best, from ourselves, from those around us, and from any organization that is playing to win.

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".

In The Perfect 10, Dave Liniger, cofounder of RE/MAX, the company that revolutionized real estate for agents and home buyers everywhere, shares fifty-plus years of business insights to help guide future generations of entrepreneurs as they pursue their professional dreams. Beyond being a real estate magnate, Liniger is a major philanthropist, a serial investor in new ventures, a franchising expert, an educator, a former NASCAR team owner and driver, and the proprietor of one of the world’s most successful Arabian horse breeding operations.

Like financial classics The Latte Factor and The Richest Man in Babylon, The Money Tree uses a compelling story with captivating characters to share its core insight: You are never at the mercy of fortune as long as you have an appetite for hard work and a willingness to step outside your comfort zone.

From entrepreneur and celebrity hairstylist Jen Atkin comes a smart and spirited guide to finding your voice and creating the life and career you deserve - along with a behind-the-scenes look into Jen’s own wild and wonderful road to success.

Drawing upon their experience founding more than 30 companies, authors Lars Tvede and Mads Faurholt share their entrepreneurial wisdom and reveal the real-world techniques that lead to success. A simple step-by-step process will help you translate your ideas into effective business plans, raise the capital needed to start and grow your business, build a winning team, and leave the competition behind.

This book triggers you to think and act strategically, shows what you can learn from business models inside and outside your industry, and urges you to apply those learnings to make your own shift.

Our world's challenges are too great and too complex for any one organization or government to address on its own. But solutions to these challenges do exist - and will be found through new partnerships bringing together the public, private, and philanthropic sectors. In Social Value Investing, Howard W. Buffett and William B. Eimicke present a new management framework for developing and measuring the success of such partnerships and provide tools to help maximize collaborative efficiency and positive social impact.

In the last 10 years, the number of nonprofits and social sector organizations has grown by almost 25 percent, while charitable giving declined 30 percent over the same period. As a result, many organizations are chasing grants, tweaking and adding to their core activities to match what they think funders are looking for. Almost half of nonprofits surveyed nationally in 2014 said they added additional programs in the last year. The result is colloquially known as "mission creep" - organizations trying to be everything to everyone.

Trampled by Unicorns: Big Tech's Empathy Problem and How to Fix It explores how technology has progressed humanity's most noble pursuits, while also grappling with the origins of the industry's destructive empathy deficit and the practical measures Big Tech can take to self-regulate and make it right again. Author Maëlle Gavet examines the tendency for many of Big Tech's stars to stray from their user-first ideals and make products that actually profoundly damage their customers and ultimately society.

DEFCON is the US military acronym for "Defense Readiness Condition." DEFCON 1 is reserved only for imminent catastrophic events, like a nuclear war. Luckily, you don't have to fend off missile attacks in direct selling, but you will face some extremely difficult challenges and urgent crises leading your MLM team. It takes much more than a positive attitude and motivational words to be a successful field leader. True leadership requires you to deal with messy, complicated scenarios when there is not always a clear-cut solution.

The one book you need to navigate the complex decisions and critical relationships necessary to create and sustain a healthy family business - and business family.

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.

You subscribe to the basic idea that business can do more than make money, but you're not sure how to act on that conviction or how to share it with the rest of your organization. The Conscious Capitalism Field Guide - the authoritative follow-up to the best-selling book Conscious Capitalism, by John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods Market, and leadership expert Raj Sisodia - gives you the tools for sharing and implementing the principles of higher purpose and conscious business throughout your organization.

Kym Gold's mantra - "never settle for a no, always look for a yes" - is what led her to co-create True Religion Brand Jeans, a major retail clothing company that she sold for close to a billion dollars in 2013. In Gold Standard, she finally gives her side of the story of how the once fledgling jeans company that nobody wanted,went on to become a giant, revolutionizing player in the fashion industry.

Engaging and informative, this book skillfully examines what usually goes wrong on the road to entrepreneurship, revealing what business owners regret and what you can do to address these issues. Along the way, it provides an overview of the personality traits and qualities that make success in entrepreneurship more likely, and also explores how the weight of wearing the entrepreneurial hat can affect you.

The step-by-step guide to building your gym. Tactical, actionable advice from the founder of the world's largest gym mentorship practice. Your business has two parts: your operations and your audience. Each of those two parts can be built according to a recipe. And this is your recipe audiobook.