Small Business Management

An ordinary leader is someone who leads a small organization or team that is doing great things. They manage the majority of the world's workforce, but they don't lead large corporations or big government agencies. Ordinary leaders are rarely written about in books or quoted in magazines. They are, however, important. Maybe not globally, but in their own realm of influence, their leadership makes a difference.

If your company has lost the focus it once had, here are clear solutions for moving your organization back to its key service and discarding everything else. Ries, coauthor of The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing, gives clear examples from a variety of industries and demonstrates how crucial focus can be.

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.

Entrepreneur and best-selling author of The Lean Startup Eric Ries reveals how entrepreneurial principles can be used by businesses ranging from established companies to early stage startups to grow revenues, drive innovation, and emerge as truly modern organizations poised to take advantage of the enormous opportunities of the 21st century.

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.

How do you develop products that people will actually use and buy? This practical guide shows you how to validate product and company ideas through customer development research - before you waste months and millions on a product or service that no one needs or wants. With a combination of open-ended interviewing and fast and flexible research techniques, you’ll learn how your prospective customers behave, the problems they need to solve, and what frustrates and delights them

The Cofounder’s Handbook brings business partnerships into the spotlight where they belong. Most people don’t realize how much their partnership affects the strength of their business. The right cofounder multiplies your success. But the wrong partner divides your attention and effort, hinders your business’s progress, and potentially destroys it from within.

Using stories from his time at Netscape, Apple, and Slack, Michael Lopp presents a series of small but compelling practices to help you build leadership skills. You’ll learn how to create teams that are highly productive, highly respected, and highly trusted. The essays in this book examine the practical skills Lopp learned from exceptional leaders - as a manager at Netscape, a senior manager and director at Apple, and an executive at Slack. You’ll learn how to apply these lessons to your own experience.

A comprehensive guide for entrepreneurs from one of the most successful business creators in recent years, The Reluctant Entrepreneur: Turning Dreams into Profits addresses the fears and misconceptions that many people have about starting their own businesses, walking prospective owners through the necessary decisions they need to make before even putting a business plan in place.

Exploring and explaining more than 80 of the world's most important theories and big ideas about trade, commerce, and management, this audiobook offers a fascinating look at the world of business past and present. A perfect primer on the fundamental tenets of the subject, The Business Book sheds light on some of history's most important milestone developments and the key business strategies used by leading thinkers and gurus from Henry Ford to Steve Jobs.

The Business of Expertise, David’s previous book, set the stage by suggesting a narrow focus and then capitalizing on the patterns that emerge from repeated application of your expertise. This book builds on that work by suggesting how to craft a consulting practice with those insights.

It has never been harder to find good employees. Government handouts and programs, publicly traded behemoths with an insatiable appetite for front-line staff, and a burgeoning gig-economy has made hiring extremely hard for small business owners. The golden question is how do we attract good talent and then retain them long-term? How do I determine rates of compensation for my highest performers that are always demanding raises? How do I scale my business without having to constantly micro-manage my Team when they are in the field working? The answer is Pay-For-Performance (P4P).

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".

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.

Hopping Over the Rabbit Hole chronicles the rise, fall, and resurgence of SkyBridge Capital founder Anthony Scaramucci, giving you a primer on how to thrive in an unpredictable business environment. The sheer number of American success stories has created a false impression that becoming an entrepreneur is a can't-miss endeavor - but nothing could be further from the truth. Hopping Over the Rabbit Hole gives you the skills, insight, and mindset you need to be one of the winners.

Marc Andreesen once said that "markets that don't exist don't care how smart you are." Whether you're a startup founder trying to disrupt an industry, or an intrapreneur trying to provoke change from within, your biggest risk is building something nobody wants. Lean Analytics can help. By measuring and analyzing as you grow, you can validate whether a problem is real, find the right customers, and decide what to build, how to monetize it, and how to spread the word.

You and a partner go into business together and split the equity 50/50. You do all the work and your partner slacks off. He owns half your business - now what? Slicing Pie outlines a process for calculating exactly the right number of shares each founder or employee in an early stage company deserves.

You will learn: How to value the time and resources an individual brings to the company relative to the contributions of others.

In this revised and expanded edition of his groundbreaking Thinkertoys, creativity expert Michael Michalko reveals life-changing tools that will help you think like a genius. From the linear to the intuitive, this comprehensive handbook details ingenious creative-thinking techniques for approaching problems in unconventional ways. Through fun and thought-provoking exercises, you'll learn how to create original ideas that will improve your personal life and your business life.

Tech entrepreneurs, make your startup dreams come true by utilizing this invaluable, founder-to-founder guide to successfully navigating all phases of the tech startup journey. With the advent of the internet, mobile computing, and now AI/Machine learning and cloud computing, the number of new startups has accelerated over the last decade across tech centers in Silicon Valley, Israel, India, and China.

Scrum is the most successful framework for agile product development, and much has been written about how to follow the Scrum process, but the key to success is in the leadership skills of the product owner. Product Mastery explores the traits of the best product owners, offering an insight into the difference between good and great product ownership and explaining how the best product owners are driven to be successful.