Small Leadership

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.

Did you know that women only currently make up around 25 percent of the C-Suite? And they lead less than 10 percent of Fortune 500 companies? Hard to believe right? But things are slowly starting to change, and people are starting to realize that women can bring qualities to the table that men simply can’t.

How does a suburban pizza joint end up profiled on national magazine covers and network TV news? (Hint: The secret is not in the sauce.) When Nick Sarillo decided to open a family-friendly pizza restaurant in the suburbs of Chicago, people thought he was nuts. Having worked as a carpenter for much of his adult life, he lacked any formal experience in restaurants or in managing a small business. Everyone told him no one else would ever care about his place the way he did.

Richard Branson, one of the world's most famous and admired business leaders, argues that it's time to turn capitalism upside down - to shift our values from an exclusive focus on profit to also caring for people, communities, and the planet as he writes: "People often associate me with challenges, with trying to break records while sailing the Atlantic or flying in a jet stream in a balloon or going into space with Virgin Galactic. But this audiobook isn't just about fun and adventure and exceeding one's wildest dreams."

In the early stages of a tech startup's life, it's hard to decipher the meaningful metrics from the distractions. How do you know if your product is working? Is it the number of new signups? Average amount of time spent on the site? Revenue, even if you don't have a revenue model yet? In Scaling Lean, serial entrepreneur and author of the startup cult classic Running Lean Ash Maurya offers a tactical handbook for measuring and scaling a tech startup with maximum efficiency and efficacy.

If you want to develop your skills in project management and human resource management, then pay attention...Two manuscripts in one audiobook: Project Management and Human Resource Management. Some of the topics covered in this audiobook include: Project management: Before you start, Agile and Scrum, Lean Six Sigma, discover amazing recruitment and onboarding strategies for your company, learn the best approach for your human resource management, find out how you can enhance your relationship with your employees to maximize productivity, and much more.

In tough markets and with more people working remotely, creating a quality sales pipeline in traditional ways is more challenging than ever. As sales technologies continue to evolve and advance, developing technical quotient (TQ) is an essential element of sales success. Record-setting sales expert Justin Michael and bestselling sales leadership author Tony Hughes combine to provide practical guidance on how professional sellers can maximize results with an effective sales tech-stack to increase sales effectiveness for outstanding results.

“What would Jeff do?” Since leaving Amazon to advise start-ups and corporations, John Rossman has been asked this question countless times by executives who want to know “the secret” behind Amazon’s historic success. In this step-by-step guide, he provides 50½ answers drawn from his experience as an Amazon executive - and shows today’s business leaders how to think like Amazon, strategize like Bezos, and beat the competition like nobody’s business.

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.

How do people come up with truly original ideas? The answer is to think outside the box - way outside. For the past decade, Cyril Bouquet, Jean-Louis Barsoux, and Michael Wade, professors of innovation and strategy at IMD Business School, have studied inventors, scientists, doctors, entrepreneurs, and artists. These people, or “aliens,” as the authors call them, are able to make leaps of creativity, and use five patterns of thinking that distinguish them from the rest of us.

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.

In Secrets of Silicon Valley, entrepreneur and media commentator Deborah Perry Piscione takes us inside this vibrant ecosystem where meritocracy rules the day. She explores Silicon Valley's exceptionally risk-tolerant culture, and why it thrives despite the many laws that make California one of the worst states in the union for business.

What do Google, Snapchat, Tinder, Amazon, and Uber have in common, besides soaring market share? They're platforms - a new business model that has quietly become the only game in town. A platform, by definition, creates value by facilitating an exchange between two or more interdependent groups. So, rather than making things, they simply connect people. The advent of mobile computing and its ubiquitous connectivity have forever altered how we interact with each other. Yet, few people truly grasp the radical structural shifts of the last 10 years.

You already know the Starbucks story. Since 1992, its stock has risen a staggering 5,000 percent! The genius of Starbucks success lies in its ability to create personalized customer experiences, stimulate business growth, generate profits, energize employees, and secure customer loyalty - all at the same time. The Starbucks Experience contains a robust blend of home-brewed ingenuity and people-driven philosophies that have made Starbucks one of the world's "most admired" companies, according to Fortune magazine.

Every iconic tech company was once a startup. And while these companies like to paint an origin story full of surefooted confidence, the truth is usually something different: the early life of most startups is pure chaos. This chaos comes from the vastly different motivations and incentives between those with the vision and those with the money. From fundraising paranoia to boardroom coups, Zalman and Neumann train their inimitable voices on the gulf between what founders and investors promise to do and what they end up actually doing.

Many factors shape the success or failure of a new business, whether it's a stand-alone start-up or a venture inside a larger corporation. But the most important and least understood of these factors is the personality of the entrepreneur - the particular combination of beliefs and preferences that drives his or her motivation, decision making, and leadership style. And your builder personality is the one resource you can directly control in growing a business that wins. Simply put, who you are shapes how you build for growth.

Say "goodbye" to stress-induced headaches, wasted time, wasted energy, and unhappiness. Stress is not a necessary evil. It is not a badge of honor. It is not a way of life. In fact, it's probably leading you to your death, and making people around you miserable. Take control of the pressures at work and at home with actionable strategies and real-world solutions and unlock your potential with Stress-Less Leadership.

Why do so many entrepreneurs found innovative enterprises, only to find themselves failing as leaders once the business gets off the ground? Because, according to Derek Lidow, being an entrepreneur is fundamentally different from being a business leader. In Startup Leadership: How Savvy Entrepreneurs Turn Their Ideas into Successful Enterprises, Lidow shows how to avoid the mistakes that confounded thousands of "geniuses" - even Steve Jobs - and become an Entrepreneurial Leader who combines the opposing natures of the entrepreneur and the leader.

Murphy's Law tells us that if something can go wrong, it will. Nonsense! says Al Casey, who maintains: If things can go right, they should. But you've got to make them go right, he adds, by hard work, focusing on key problems, and believing in the people around you. One of the most successful - and original - American businessmen of our time, Al Casey is a no-nonsense turnaround specialist who loves nothing more than the big challenges, whether in the private or the public sector.

Coaching Up! is about inspiring those who matter to you to achieve peak performance. Whether you are a coach, a business leader, a civic activist, a teacher, a counselor, or a parent, this book will offer you a powerful, highly effective way to connect to the people you care about and move them forward toward their best selves. In sports, coaches have developed ways of connecting with their players quickly in the "heat of the battle", inspiring them to perform to their fullest potential and "leave it all on the field".