Small Business Management

Creating something from nothing is an unpredictable journey. The first mile births a new idea into existence, and the final mile is all about letting go. We love talking about starts and finishes, even though the middle stretch is the most important and often the most ignored and misunderstood. Broken into three sections with 100-plus insights, this no-nonsense audiobook will help you find your way through the hardest parts of any bold project or new venture.

The subject of “design thinking” is the rage at business schools, throughout corporations, and increasingly in the popular press - due in large part to work of IDEO, a leading design firm, and its celebrated CEO, Tim Brown, who uses this audiobook to reveal how the techniques and strategies of design belong at every level of business. Change by Design is an audiobook for creative leaders seeking to infuse design thinking into every level of an organization, product, or service to drive new alternatives for business and society.

Rand Fishkin, the founder and former CEO of Moz, reveals how traditional Silicon Valley "wisdom" leads far too many startups astray, with the transparency and humor that his hundreds of thousands of blog readers have come to love. Everyone knows how a startup story is supposed to go: A young, brilliant entrepreneur has a cool idea, drops out of college, defies the doubters, overcomes all odds, makes billions, and becomes the envy of the technology world. This is not that story. It's not that things went badly for Rand Fishkin; they just weren't quite so Zuckerberg-esque.

Patagonia, named by Fortune in 2007 as the coolest company on the planet, has earned a reputation as much for its ground-breaking environmental and social practices as for the quality of its clothes. In this exceptionally frank account, Chouinard and Stanley recount how the company and its culture gained the confidence, by step and misstep, to make its work progressively more responsible, and to ultimately share its discoveries with companies as large as Wal-Mart or as small as the corner bakery.

Strong leaders at all levels within an organization are a requisite for business success. Yet the leadership pipeline—the internal architecture for growing leaders—is often broken or non-existent. This updated edition of the best-selling The Leadership Pipeline has been revised to help address the challenges of today’s business environment. Anchored in experience, it offers a tested model for planning leadership succession and development that has proven to get results.

"Never started a company before? Struggling with little or no cash? Have no experience, no baseline to judge your progress against? Thank God! You've got a shot at making this work." So says Mike Michalowicz, author of The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur, a business book that is so uniquely useful, so raw and entertaining, it reads like the brainchild of Steve Jobs and Chris Rock.

Ken Blanchard and Sheldon Bowles, co-authors of the New York Times business best seller Raving Fans, are back with Gung Ho! Here is an invaluable management tool that outlines foolproof ways to increase productivity by fostering excellent morale in the workplace. It is a must-read for everyone who wants to stay on top in today's ultra-competitive business world.

Negotiation is a skill people need to use every day. In this audio exclusive, learn the negotiation skills required to navigate difficult situations that arise in everyday life. From buying a car to purchasing a home, one needs to know how to effectively negotiate, especially when the other party is a seasoned professional. Harvard professor, Joshua N. Weiss, Ph.D., gives us to tools to negotiate when we have a major stake in the game or when we're perceived as the "weak consumer."

How can you take your skills and expertise and package it to become a successful consultant? There are proven time-tested principles, strategies, tactics, and best practices the most successful consultants use to start, run, and grow their consulting business. Consulting Success teaches you what they are.

UTV founder and pioneer of the media industry Ronnie Screwvala is one of India’s most successful first-generation entrepreneurs. An avid philanthropist, he has penned Dream with Your Eyes Open: An Entrepreneurial Journey as one of the most inspiring entrepreneurial self-help books.

In this lesson, learn about acquisitions and mergers, the role they play in business and how to use them successfully. Advice for entrepreneurs who want to rapidly expand their business and safely buy a functioning company or companies.

In this book, Melissa Perri explains how laying the foundation for great product management can help companies solve real customer problems while achieving business goals. By understanding how to communicate and collaborate within a company structure, you can create a product culture that benefits both the business and the customer. You'll learn product management principles that can be applied to any organization, big or small.

In 2010, Tommy Mello became the sole owner/operator of a single garage door service business with $50,000 in debt. Today, A1Garage generates over $30 million in annual revenue, with over 250 employees in 12 states. He shows home service business owners how he did it, and they, too, can in Home Service Millionaire. If you’re like most home service business owners, you are probably just scraping by. You can’t grow your business because there aren’t any more hours in a day.

Dig Your Well Before You're Thirsty is Harvey Mackay's last word on how to get what you want from the world through networking. For everyone from the sales rep facing a career-making deal to the entrepreneur in search of capital, Dig Your Well explains how meeting these needs should be no more than a few calls away.

Your business might be humming along fine, or it might be struggling to stay afloat. Either way, you know that your company has a lot more potential than the results show. What if you had a quick, effective way to ramp up productivity, morale, and your bottom line - a process you could begin right now, a strategy that would immediately start to improve broken functions without disrupting the parts of your business that don't need fixing?

Whether you're an entrepreneur, an intrapreneur, or a not-for-profit leader, there's no shortage of advice on such topics as writing a business plan, recruiting, raising capital, and branding. In fact there are so many books, articles, and websites that many startups get bogged down to the point of paralysis, or they focus on the wrong priorities and go broke before they discover their mistakes.

Koch shows how to maximize success in your career and life by using the proven principle that 80 percent of changes in the world result from the most powerful 20 percent of actions and ideas. He'll show how to use your own powerful "20 percent spike" - your most creative ideas and unique skills - to measure the amount of value you bring to your employer, clients, or customers. For most people, there is a huge disparity between their intrinsic value and the compensation they receive for their efforts.

We experience change in four phases. The first is panic. Then we adapt. Then we find a new normal. And then, finally, we reach the phase we could not have imagined in the beginning, the moment when we realize that we wouldn’t go back. Build for Tomorrow is designed to accelerate that process—to help you lessen your panic, adapt faster, define the new normal, and thrive going forward. And it arrives as we all, in some way, have felt a shift in our lives.

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.

What’s the secret to business growth and innovation and a purpose-driven career in a world that is becoming vastly more complicated by the day? According to Marc Benioff, the answer is embracing a culture in which your values permeate everything you do. In Trailblazer, Benioff gives listeners a rare behind-the-scenes look at the inner workings of one of the world’s most admired companies. He reveals how Salesforce’s core values - trust, customer success, innovation, and equality - and commitment to giving back have become the company’s greatest competitive advantage.