Small Business Management

In 1962, Stephanie 'Steve' Shirley created a software company when the concept of software barely existed. Freelance Programmers employed women to work on complex projects such as Concorde's black box recorder from the comfort of their own homes. Shirley empowered a generation of women in technology, giving them unheard of freedom to choose their own hours and manage their own workloads. The business thrived, and Shirley gradually transferred ownership to her staff, creating 70 millionaires in the process.

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.

How have Japanese companies become world leaders in the automotive and electronics industries, among others? What is the secret of their success? Two leading Japanese business experts, Ikujiro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi, are the first to tie the success of Japanese companies to their ability to create new knowledge and use it to produce successful products and technologies.

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.

If today’s brands want to succeed, they have to be in the conversation, and influencers make that happen. The Age of Influence is an essential guide for marketing professionals and business owners who want to create and implement a highly effective and sustainable influencer marketing plan.

Competition is moving beyond industry to ecosystem. Are you ready? In the shift from pipeline to platform, value is no longer created by your company's product or process alone - it's created through interactions. And the strategy you used to become an industry leader won't help you compete in an evolving and complex ecosystem. If you listen to nothing else on platforms and ecosystems, listen to these 10 articles by experts in the field.

The ultimate do-it-now guide to getting started in managed services. Now includes chapters on cloud services, bundling, and more. Whether you're a new computer consultant or an experienced technician making the move to managed services, this is the perfect audiobook for you! The audiobook includes step-by-step instructions for creating service offerings, reformulating your business, creating service agreements, and more!

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.

Are you ready to transform your small business into an unstoppable empire? Dive into "Scaling Your Business: Strategies for Building, Scaling up, and Sustaining Your Small Business Empire Beyond Entrepreneurship", a compelling guide crafted for ambitious entrepreneurs like you who are determined to break through the glass ceiling and achieve extraordinary growth.

The lean entrepreneurship movement has captivated Silicon Valley and entrepreneurs across the country. It provided an agile framework to develop the right product solution for a given target market and is now used by almost every fledgling company to do just that. The next challenge is growth - to achieve the financial returns and, more importantly, the impact they dreamed of when starting off on their adventure.

In my book, I will show you exactly how to go about starting and running your own pre-loved clothing business. You gain not only the monetary benefits of selling a high-demand product, but you will also be saving the world’s landfills from unnecessary waste. In 2012 alone, an estimated 14.3 million tons of textiles were discarded to the landfill as reported by the Environmental Protection Agency - an alarming number for something seemingly harmless as discarding old clothes.

Jenny Blake, author of the award-winning book Pivot and co-creator of Google’s acclaimed Career Guru coaching program, is back with her signature blend of heart-based operating principles and practical tools. This book will teach you how to move from friction to flow through smarter systems and the three-stage Free Time Framework.™ Free Time is a playbook to free your mind, time, and team for your best work. This book will teach you and your team to operate efficiently and intuitively.

When Elizabeth ascended the throne in 1558, England was the laughing stock of Europe. Economic, political, and religious calamities were numerous, and Elizabeth endured constant criticism. But by the end of her 45-year reign, England was one of the world's mightiest nations. Axelrod uses the legendary Queen's life as a model for modern leadership, and a powerful example of how one person can make an extraordinary difference. Elizabeth I CEO is an indispensable guide for today's business managers and leaders. It is also an inspiring listen for those taking their first steps up the corporate ladder, or those who simply love history. Nelson Runger's narration gives a renewed energy to Elizabeth's lessons, which are as relevant today as they were four centuries ago.

What does an executive director actually do? And how can you lead your organization to a stronger place? Nonprofit expert Erik Hanberg wrote The Little Book of Nonprofit Leadership to speak directly to executive directors of small (and very small) nonprofits who are asking these questions. EDs, especially at small nonprofits, tend to be dropped into the deep end of the pool with the expectation that they know how to swim. The Little Book of Nonprofit Leadership will be a welcome rescue line.

Few business topics have aroused more skepticism in recent years than the notion of corporate purpose, and for good reason. Too many companies deploy purpose, or a reason for being, as a promotional vehicle to make themselves feel virtuous and to look good to the outside world. Some have only foggy ideas about what purpose is and conflate it with strategy and other concepts like “mission,” “vision,” and “values.” Even well-intentioned leaders don’t understand purpose’s full potential and engage half-heartedly and superficially with it....

In The Billionaire Mindset, Daniel Strauss, the Strauss in the investment firm Stocks & Strauss, and a highly successful venture capitalist, explains how to adopt this life-changing new mindset. He shares his secrets of success, including how to access capital, where to find the right people to help you reach your goals, and explains how to free your mind from self-imposed limitations, so that you can also think like a billionaire.

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.

You or your company can be screwed if you are hiring consultants without a plan to manage their bid for the sale, statement of work, and overall engagement. Learn from a seasoned risk and compliance, fraud examiner, and process improvement consultant who has worked for over 12 years in three of the "Big Four" consultancies on how you and your company can mitigate corporate risk when bringing in paid advisors.

Do you wish you knew how to manage your team better, and get them to commit to your bold vision? The truth is...the majority of managers are simply not very good at goal-setting. (Because they were never taught how to do it properly.) Most corporate goals are never completed on time, and even your highly-educated employees are (usually) not working on essential tasks during the workday. This can be damaging to your career, and can destroy your productivity.

Imagine what Atari might have achieved if Steve Jobs had stayed there to develop the first massmarket personal computer. Or what Steve Case might have done for PepsiCo if he hadn't left for a gaming start-up that eventually became AOL. What if Salomon Brothers had kept Michael Bloomberg, or Bear Stearns had exploited the inventive ideas of Stephen Ross? Scores of top-tier entrepreneurs worked for established corporations before they struck out on their own and became self-made billionaires.