Small Leadership

The first thing Sophia Amoruso sold online wasn’t fashion - it was a stolen book. She spent her teens hitchhiking, committing petty theft, and dumpster diving. By twenty-two, she had resigned herself to employment, but was still broke, directionless, and working a mediocre day job she’d taken for the health insurance. It was there that Sophia decided to start selling vintage clothes on eBay. Eight years later, she is the founder, CEO, and creative director of Nasty Gal, a $100 million plus online fashion retailer with more than 350 employees.

Often downplayed in the excitement of starting up a new business venture is one of the most important decisions entrepreneurs will face: should they go it alone, or bring in cofounders, hires, and investors to help build the business? More than just financial rewards are at stake. Friendships and relationships can suffer. Bad decisions at the inception of a promising venture lay the foundations for its eventual ruin.

Just because you don’t have cash doesn’t mean you don’t want and need things. According to authors and business gurus Karen Hoffman and Shera Dalin, it’s time to get a little creative. Most people have a skill they can use—it’s just a matter of figuring out what that is and how to use it to get something else. From piano lessons in exchange for haircuts to an engine tune-up in exchange for house painting, The Art of Barter offers step-by-step instructions.

Our planet is suffering from serious environmental problems: coastal flooding due to severe storms caused in part by atmospheric pollution, diminishing natural resources such as clean water, and so on. But while these problems plague planet Earth, two-thirds of our globe is ocean. The seas can be home to pioneers, seasteaders, who are willing to homestead the Blue Frontier. Oil platforms and cruise ships already inhabit the waters; now it's time to take the next step to full-fledged ocean civilizations.

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?

This step-by-step process helps business owners like you create a profitable alternative to selling your business via half-retirement, allowing you to shift your focus and find your balance.

Famously, over a four-year period, James Dyson made 5,127 prototypes of the cyclonic vacuum cleaner that would transform the way houses are cleaned around the world. In devoting all his resources to iteratively developing the technology, he risked it all, but out of many failures and setbacks came hard-fought success. In Invention: A Life, Dyson reveals how he came to set up his own company and led it to become one of the most inventive technology companies in the world. It is a compelling and dramatic tale, with many obstacles overcome.

In my Strategic Coach® workshops, I’ll draw a circle on the white board, and in the center, I’ll write, “Self-Managing Company”. I’ll say to the group, “You don’t know exactly what I’m going to say about this, but right off the bat, how many of you want one of these”? Every hand in the room goes up. Every ambitious entrepreneur in the world wants to have their own self-managing company. This 60-minute audiobook will provide you and your Unique Ability® Team with the eight crucial entrepreneurial mindsets necessary to make this.

With this audiobook, you will begin a process and journey to a new way of thinking about personal and professional focus and accomplishment. You'll learn how to identify and focus on the tasks and priorities that matter most so that you can deliver maximum results every day.

DEFCON is the US military acronym for "Defense Readiness Condition." DEFCON 1 is reserved only for imminent catastrophic events, like a nuclear war. Luckily, you don't have to fend off missile attacks in direct selling, but you will face some extremely difficult challenges and urgent crises leading your MLM team. It takes much more than a positive attitude and motivational words to be a successful field leader. True leadership requires you to deal with messy, complicated scenarios when there is not always a clear-cut solution.

Don’t trade your 40-hour workweek for an 80-hour-a-week side hustle. The promise of entrepreneurship is to create a lifestyle of freedom—but the pursuit often leads to a time-bankrupt life. If you’re an overworked employee who’s done with the 9-to-5, a serial entrepreneur who has yet to realize the American dream, or a burned-out side hustle owner who’s tired of the grind, this book was written for you.

No matter what you want to achieve in life, the secret to doing it is passion. For people to be happy, they need to find meaning in what they do and in the roles they play in their lives, careers, and communities. But it's not always easy to find our passions. Author Keith Abraham tells you how to ignite the passion in your life, as well as in the lives of your colleagues, employees, and associates. He includes in-depth research, easy-to-understand concepts, and inspirational stories to teach you how to find out what's meaningful to you and pursue it with passion and energy.

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.

Like financial classics The Latte Factor and The Richest Man in Babylon, The Money Tree uses a compelling story with captivating characters to share its core insight: You are never at the mercy of fortune as long as you have an appetite for hard work and a willingness to step outside your comfort zone.

Jerry Colonna helps start-up CEOs make peace with their demons, the psychological habits and behavioral patterns that have helped them to succeed - molding them into highly accomplished individuals - yet have been detrimental to their relationships and ultimate well-being. Now, this venture capitalist turned executive coach shares his unusual yet highly effective blend of Buddhism, Jungian therapy, and entrepreneurial straight talk to help leaders overcome their own psychological traumas.

Great leaders of innovation know that creativity is not enough. They succeed not only on the basis of their ideas, but because they have the vision, reputation, and networks to win the backing needed to commercialize them. It turns out that this quality - called "innovation capital" - is measurably more important for innovation than just being creative. The authors have spent decades studying how people get great ideas (the subject of The Innovator's DNA) and how people test and develop those ideas (explored in The Innovator's Method).

Cara Alwill Leyba's riveting voice and kinship with her audience drove the self-published success of Girl Code, a book that encouraged women to support each other in the business community. Now her many fans are ready to take the next step: building sustainable confidence from the ground up. Most women who are insecure look for the equivalent of a sugar rush, such as telling themselves they're better than other people or changing the way they look. But those tricks won't protect them from losing confidence in the future.

The Mushin Way teaches tools and techniques to help you reach peak performance and transform your business and personal life. Regardless of what we want to achieve in business or in life, transformation can be difficult and we tend to be our own worst enemies. We hold ourselves back without even realizing what we are capable of. In this audiobook, you'll learn how to break through the cycle of stress and setbacks to act with clarity, purpose, and direction - achieving peak performance and transformation along the way.

Few would argue with the fact that on many fronts, we are a world in crisis. And there are two sides to every crisis, be it a leadership crisis, an economic crisis, an education crisis, or a moral crisis. The two sides to crisis are danger and opportunity. Robert Kiyosaki's new book, Second Chance: for Your Money and Your Life, uses the lessons from the past and a brutal assessment of the present to prepare listeners to see - and seize - the future.

Whether you're in the trenches struggling to make consistent sales or dreaming of turning your art into a full-time living, this groundbreaking guide provides the inspiration and the practical steps you need to become your own art boss. There's never been a better time to turn your creative ideas into a successful business. The internet is pushing aside art world “gatekeepers” who used to decide what was "worthy”—now anyone with a laptop and a dream can make a thriving living from their creativity.