Small Leadership

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.

Although it may not seem like it, cleaning is big business. A residential cleaning business can earn you substantial amounts of money (to the tune of $50,000+ per year). However, many people intent on starting this business tend to underestimate the amount of preparation and effort that goes into establishing such a business. After all, we all clean, right? Right, but cleaning another person's home for monetary gain is infinitely different from cleaning your residence.

If you're like most driven entrepreneurs and business leaders, you are either starting or running a company that is barely scratching the surface of its growth and profit potential. How do you find the hidden "cash in the walls" and make the leap from ordinary business outcomes to retire-tomorrow, profit-rich results?

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.

In April of 2000, Gary Erickson turned down a $120 million offer to buy his thriving company. Today, instead of taking it easy for the rest of his life and enjoying a luxurious retirement, he's working harder than ever. Why would any sane person pass up the financial opportunity of a lifetime?

The Experience is a unique guide to mastering the art of customer service and service relationships, based on the principles employed at the renowned leader in customer experience - the Walt Disney Company. Co-author Bruce Loeffler spent 10 years at Disney World overseeing service excellence. He has partnered with Brian T. Church to show you how to bring that same level of care and value to your own organization.

Featuring a foreword by Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn, this fascinating handbook inspires potential founders and provides essential guidance and advice for people who want to create their own start-up and build a successful company. This audiobook answers the question “how do I get started?” It takes the listener from making the decision to plunge into entrepreneurship, through the process of choosing and developing an idea and team, all the way to raising capital and working with VCs and angel investors.

With up to date legislation and incredible industry insight, this audiobook is the only recruitment audiobook you'll need to start and run your own agency successfully. Josh Wellman's new audiobook The Recruitment Startup Success Plan is the perfect training manual for anyone interested in starting their own agency, whether you're new to the industry or a seasoned professional. After mentoring many new business owners since 2016, Wellman had put his teaching material together to create this easy, methodical listen for everyone to enjoy.

Whether you're a novice entrepreneur or a seasoned pro, The Small Business Bible is a comprehensive A-to-Z library of everything you might need to know. Not only does it teach new entrepreneurs what works and what doesn't, with scores of tips, hints, insider information, and secrets of success, but it's also a reliable, valuable, and insightful resource for established business owners who want to help their businesses to grow and succeed.

The ultimate guide to managing your career - at every level, through every transition - The McKinsey Edge culls the best practices of an exclusive group of executives and consultants from McKinsey & Company, the legendary consulting firm that services eighty percent of the world's largest corporations. Drawing on his time as an engagement manager with McKinsey, Hattori presents rigorously selected, battle-tested tips that will give you the edge you need to up your game, raise your profile, and take your career to the next level-using a proven four-step program:

Fraser Doherty's 48-Hour Start-Up is your handy and essential cheat sheet to starting your own business, giving the key steps for developing an idea and getting it to market quickly. Almost everyone dreams of starting their own business, but very few do it. What if it had to be only a decision of a weekend, and it didn't cost a fortune?

Discover how to create exceptional customer service and a superior customer experience, learning from the greatest companies of our time.

Unorthodox success principles from a billionaire entrepreneur and philanthropist.

Eli Broad's embrace of "unreasonable thinking" has helped him build two Fortune 500 companies, amass personal billions, and use his wealth to create a new approach to philanthropy. He has helped to fund scientific research institutes, K-12 education reform, and some of the world's greatest contemporary art museums. By contrast, "reasonable" people come up with all the reasons something new and different can't be done, because, after all, no one else has done it that way.

Inside Pinnacle, best-selling author, entrepreneur, and leadership team coach Steve Preda, and Pinnacle Business Guides founder Gregory Cleary, will walk you through these principles. Filled with real-life anecdotes and practical approaches, you'll learn how to grow your business, make your team more efficient and productive, and free some time from your schedule.

Based on a large-scale research study of small group pastors, leaders, and members, Leading Small Groups That Thrive gives church leaders both what they want - practical, straightforward, actual small group member voices and experiences, and compelling guidance on how to build transformational groups complemented with real-life examples and data of successful small groups - and what they need - substantial, challenging insights and a data-driven model grounded in the latest research on church small groups.

In this offbeat approach to leadership, college president Steven B. Sample - the man who turned the University of Southern California into one of the most respected and highly rated universities in the country - challenges many conventional teachings on the subject. Here, Sample outlines an iconoclastic style of leadership that flies in the face of current leadership thought, but a style that unquestionably works, nevertheless.

In the current digital age, it is becoming increasingly more difficult to stay focused. Smartphones, tablets, smart watches, and other devices constantly vie for our attention. In both business and life, we are constantly bombarded with tweets, likes, mentions, and a constant stream of information. The inability to pay attention impacts learning, parenting, prioritizing, and leading. Noise: Living and Leading When Nobody Can Focus teaches managers and leaders how to help themselves and others sharpen their focusing skills.

Former consultant Dr. Paul Friga distills the guiding principles first presented in the best-selling The McKinsey Way and the tested-in-the-trenches methodologies outlined in The McKinsey Mind, and combines them with many of the principles and procedures implemented by the military and other organizations. The result is nothing less than the business equivalent of a Special Forces Field Manual.

This book reveals what it takes for consultants of all types, as well as organizational leaders, to be really helpful in dealing with the complex, systemic, constantly changing organizational problems of today. They need to rapidly create a relationship of trust and openness that enables clients, subordinates, and team members to reveal what is really on their minds and to jointly develop a sense of what is the problem and what kind of adaptive response could best deal with it.

Imagine if you could start your dream business, work from home, and make a real difference in people's lives. When you become a life coach, all of this is possible. The authors of Make Money as a Life Coach get it. They know what it’s like to navigate the world of online business and coaching. After considerable learning and several wrong turns, they’ve both gone on to create successful coaching businesses.