Small Leadership

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

A definitive audiobook for any CEO - first time or otherwise - of a high-growth company. While big company CEOs are usually groomed for the job for years, startup CEOs aren't - and they're often young and relatively inexperienced in business in general.

As an associate of the Gambino family, Ferrante relied on his instincts to pull off some of the biggest heists in US history. By the age of 21, he had netted millions of dollars for his employers. His natural talent for management led Mafia bosses to rely on him. After being arrested and serving an eight-and-a-half-year prison sentence, Ferrante went straight. He realized that the Mob's most valuable business lessons would allow him to survive and thrive in the real world.

Stratis Morfogen has been one of the most innovative names in New York City's hospitality scene for decades. From bringing the famed Fulton Fish Market online in 1997 to pioneering the automat movement with Brooklyn Dumpling Shop to opening a 25,000 square foot venue in Times Square during the pandemic, Morfogen continues to disrupt the status quo. In Be a Disruptor, Morfogen provides an unconventional, real-world education for any entrepreneur by sharing how he beat the odds in the cutthroat, mob-influenced New York City restaurant world.

With The Strategy Activation Playbook, author Aric Wood, CEO of XPLANE, teaches you how to do what he's helped organizations around the world accomplish: align and activate the people in your organization to execute your strategy and realize your vision.

Have you ever imagined what it would be like to earn millions while you sit on the beach and enjoy your life? In The Unemployed Millionaire, you'll learn why it's no longer a pipe dream but a real possibility. The lowering of trade barriers and the emergence of the Internet have made it possible for almost anyone to set up a business from anywhere.

“Everyone wants everyone else to change.” That is the fundamental reason why most organizational transformations fail. Leaders want their people to exhibit behaviors that they don’t exhibit themselves. Team members feel powerless to make significant change just because of where they are situated on the organization chart. Improvement Starts with I provides you with a framework to change this through a simple plan that, when followed, will deliver outstanding engagement, improvement, and results, helping you avoid the potholes into which countless companies have fallen.

Negotiation has always been at the heart of solving problems at work. Yet today, when people in organizations are asked to do more with less, be responsive 24/7, and manage in rapidly changing environments, negotiation is more essential than ever. What has been missed in much of the literature of the past 30 years is that negotiations in organizations always take place within a context - of organizational culture, of prior negotiations, of power relationships - that dictates which issues are negotiable and by whom.

Become a digital-first organization. If you read (or listen) to nothing else on leading digital transformation, listen to these 10 articles. We've combed through hundreds of Harvard Business Review articles and selected the most important ones to help revitalize your offerings and processes, stay ahead of disruptors and technology shifts, and manage the necessary cultural change.

The standard text on innovation advises would-be innovators to conduct creative brainstorming sessions and seek input from outsiders - users or communities. This kind of innovating can be effective at improving products but not at capturing bigger opportunities in the marketplace. In this book, Roberto Verganti offers a new approach - one that does not set out to solve existing problems, but to find breakthrough experiences. There is no brainstorming - which produces too many ideas, unfiltered - but a vision, subject to criticism.

Gorilla in the Cockpit offers a revolutionary way to understand megaproject failures. It opens the black box to reveal the hidden drivers of project crashes. The root causes cannot be found in traditional project management books. They are neither technical nor financial. They are human.

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.

It is time to stop the busy work of constantly putting out fires. It’s time to Let Your Business Burn. Scott Beebe has helped liberate business owners around the world from the chaos of constantly putting out hundreds of petty fires and has equipped them to let their business burn. In Let Your Business Burn, Scott guides you through a story-filled, template-packed, step-by-step discovery of the foundational elements that every business needs to stop putting out fires and instead build a business that matters.

Demographics not only define who we are, where we live, and how our numbers change. For those who can read beyond the raw figures, they open up hidden business opportunities that lie ahead. What will happen when retiring Boomers free up jobs? How will Generation Y alter supermarkets? Which states will have the most dynamic workforces? Will American manufacturing rebound as Asia's population declines? Upside puts this powerful yet little-understood science to work finding answers.

Faced with the choice of starting a company or joining a large corporation, Steve Jobs believed that it was "more fun to be a pirate than to join the navy". But for innovators inside established companies, making a distinction between being a pirate and joining the navy is a fallacy. We have to figure out a way to become pirates in the navy! This is a step-by-step guide to getting continuous innovation done in companies and reshaping them in the process. It is for anyone involved in corporate innovation and driving company change.

In the book Email Marketing for Coaches: How to Build Your Email List and Grow Your Coaching Business, you will learn how to build a powerful email list, from the creation of your coaching freebie to the delivery of your email follow-up series. Plus you’ll discover how to use a simple email marketing plan to get your first (or next) email list up and running in 90 days or less.

The Hiring Handbook for Pet Sitters and Dog Walkers will take you through every aspect of the hiring process - from finding the right people, to effectively managing them, to knowing what to do if it’s time to let them go. Plus, you’ll receive expert instruction on exactly what you need to make a great hire NOW. This book has all the information you need to succeed with pet business hiring! Over the course of nearly two decades running her pet business, author and pet business coach Kristin Morrison hired over 250 people.

Every year, managers at companies large and small are finding it harder to compete with the likes of Google and Amazon, who are stealing their customers and cornering every conceivable market and service. There is, however, a way for companies to survive - and win - in this era of digital behemoths. Choose Your Customer is a powerful customer-targeted guide that can help managers level the playing field against their biggest competitors.

Centered on the building and construction industry, The Tokens offer business lessons to help to build a foundation of success that is so vital for sustaining growth and overcoming challenges. It outlines the eleven points for developing and maintaining a successful building or construction business with many of the lessons applicable to any business.

After founding or co-founding over 15 start-ups and investing in another 50 early stage ventures as an angel investor, author Howard Love came to understand that a start-up unfolds in a predictable pattern. The more aware entrepreneurs are of this pattern, the better able they will be to capitalize on it.