Small Business Management

Addressing diverse issues depends on improving your soft skills - such as time management, team-building, communication and listening, creative-thinking, and problem-solving. But this isn’t as easy as it may seem. Sue Ashford has the solution. In this timely book, she introduces Flexing - a technique individuals, teams, and entire organizations can use to learn, grow, and develop their skills and knowledge with every new project, work assignment, and problem. Flexing empowers you to embrace any challenge and adapt to any change, yielding valuable takeaways that ensure growth.

A personal brand is an association that occurs in the head of people when they mention the name of a business person. By whom do they represent him, how could they describe the strengths, weaknesses of a person, character, and everything else. A personal brand helps to stand out from competitors.

While Erik Z. Severinghaus has been to the top of the physical world (literally climbing Everest) and the business world (exiting companies for hundreds of millions of dollars), what has defined his journey is not the successes...but rather, the hard times of loneliness and self-doubt that nearly cost him his accomplishments and his life. This guidebook passes along the lessons needed in those dark times, with the hope that it will help every entrepreneur who is going through this struggle understand their journey and build the mental resiliency to succeed.

In The Naming Book, Bullhorn Creative founder and partner Brad Flowers presents a clear framework for crafting and choosing the name that sticks. With a five-step blueprint that takes you from brainstorming to trademarking, this book is the ultimate guidebook to naming anything. You'll learn how to: set clear goals for your name and brand before you start, craft a brainstorming list based on your business mission, build a brand unique to you by creating your own word, find the balance between "cool" and clear, and narrow down your list of names with five easy tests.

This book is a practical guide that explores how startup entrepreneurs and business leaders, who hold no design degrees, can integrate service design into their development cycles to create sustainable, desirable, and profitable new services.

The pressure to generate big ideas can feel overwhelming. We know that bold innovations are critical in these disruptive and competitive times, but when it comes to breakthrough thinking, we often freeze up. Instead of shooting for a $10-billion payday or a Nobel Prize, the most prolific innovators focus on Big Little Breakthroughs - small creative acts that unlock massive rewards over time. By cultivating daily micro-innovations, individuals and organizations are better equipped to tackle tough challenges and seize transformational opportunities.

Dirty Little Secrets of Family Business comes clean with much-needed info on nitty-gritty issues such as entitlement; letting employees go when they just aren’t working out; compensation; including your kids in the business; shareholder agreements; selecting the next leader; deciding whether to keep the business or sell it; exit strategies for outgoing leaders; money matters; succession planning; communication; conflict resolution; establishing an effective board; and transitioning to the next generation.

Running a successful architectural firm is a juggling act. You need expertise in your area of architecture to provide services to clients. You also need the know-how to run a small business. You've probably been well prepared by your education and experience for the technical ins and outs of an architecture firm. Yet what training has prepared you to run a business? The E-Myth Architect fills this knowledge gap, giving you a complete toolkit for either starting a successful firm from scratch or maximizing an existing firm's performance.

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.

Back in 1904, some of the richest guys took over the education system. They formed what is known as the General Education Board or GEB. Some of the very wealthy that made initial commitment to the organization were guys like John D. Rockefeller, S.R., and J.P. Morgan. The problem is that financial education was taken out of the school system back in 1904. Can you guess why? The very wealthy understood the mechanism of money and how they can rip off the people. In this audiobook, I would like to introduce financial education.

So many HR professionals crave the freedom and flexibility of being an independent HR consultant, and then the fear kicks in about whether they can make the transition from corporate to consulting and maintain their income whilst learning how to be a consultant. This audiobook guides you through not only the knowledge but also the mindset needed to be successful as well as building your confidence so that you too can make this move.

Founder of The Boston Beer Company, brewer of Samuel Adams Boston Lager, and a key catalyst of the American craft beer revolution, Jim Koch offers his unique perspective when it comes to business, beer, and turning your passion into a successful company or career.

Make achieving your goals and finding success possible with this one-of-a-kind guide by Robert Irvine, popular host of Food Network’s Restaurant: Impossible.

Acting on values—doing good for the benefit of all—can substantially benefit the bottom line, but many business leaders mistakenly believe that doing the right thing lowers profits. This belief is the greatest barrier holding businesses back from being more financially and competitively successful—and delivering more good for the world. Not only can it be a winning business strategy to act on values, as Daniel Aronson suggests in The Value of Values, but it is also a savvy choice, increasing a company’s power, profit, and competitive advantage.

In this essential audiobook, leading business growth strategist David Meerman Scott and fandom expert Reiko Scott explore the neuroscience of fandom and interview young entrepreneurs, veteran business owners, startup founders, nonprofits, and companies big and small to pinpoint which practices separate organizations that flourish from those stuck in stagnation. They lay out a road map for converting customers’ ardor into buying power, pulling one-of-a-kind examples from a wide range of organizations.

In this best-selling book, Kouzes and Posner (authors of The Leadership Challenge), explain why leadership is above all a relationship, with credibility as the cornerstone. They provide rich examples of real managers in action and reveal the six key disciplines and related practices that strengthen a leader's capacity for developing and sustaining credibility.

How did Apple rebound from a decade-long slump? By creating a product, the iPod, that transformed not just the company, but the entire music industry. How did Whole Foods turn itself into a supermarket empire? By challenging the sacred cows of the food business. And how did Dove differentiate its line of beauty products? By creating the concept of "real beauty". In Big Think Strategy, Bernd Schmitt shows you how to "think big" by sourcing and implementing bold ideas that change markets.

Small Business Launch and Management is a definitive guide for entrepreneurs to help them build a rock-solid foundation to see long-term success, sustainable growth, and profitability. Throughout the book, you will be given the tools you need to succeed and begin your journey to becoming a successful entrepreneur. Each chapter will bring a unique aspect for you to think about as it pushes you toward your goals.

Around the world, a new generation is looking beyond greater profits, for meaningful purpose. But, unlike business, few social interventions have achieved significant impact at scale. Inspired by the modern innovation practices popularized by best seller The Lean Startup that have fueled technology breakthroughs touching every aspect of our lives, Lean Impact turns our attention to a new goal-achieving radically greater social good.

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.