Small Leadership

With over $500 million a year in sales, the Bassett Furniture Company was once the world's biggest wood furniture manufacturer. But beginning in the 1980s, the Bassett company suffered from an influx of cheap Chinese furniture as the first waves of Asian competition hit, and ultimately was forced to send its production offshore to Asia. Only one man fought back. That man is John Bassett III, a descendant of the Bassetts who is now chairman of Vaughan-Bassett Furniture Co, which employs more than 700 Virginians and has sales of over $90 million.

In 1965, John Brink left the Netherlands for Canada equipped with only a single suitcase and $25.47 in cash. He had no connections, he didn’t speak the language, and he’d never finished elementary school, yet he was convinced he could make his dream to build his own sawmill come true. With a tenacity bordering on obsession, John achieved his dreams...and then some. In this lively autobiography, John distills a half-century’s hard work to share 10 simple takeaways.

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.

Business schools teach that the most important prerequisite for starting a business is a business plan. Nonsense, says Carl Schramm in Burn the Business Plan, who for a decade headed the most important foundation devoted to entrepreneurship in this country. Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, and Google are just a few of the companies that began without one.

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.

People often spend years on working on startup ideas that fail - and they could have known long before, had they asked the hard questions earlier. Five-time tech founder Dave Parker has been there, and in Trajectory: Startup he offers a path to get you from ideation to launch and revenue in just six months. Parker shares advice on: what makes a good idea that makes money; recruiting and working with cofounders; asking customers what product they want (customer development); how to build a tech product even as a non-tech founder; and more.

His favorite personality was a “free spirit”: an obsessed individual with a vision of the future and the will to make it so, a rebel who creates the future with childlike enthusiasm. Now, serial entrepreneur Dave Jilk and venture capitalist Brad Feld extract from Nietzsche a modern Art of War, connecting the dots to our high-tech business environment. Each quick, digestible chapter expands on a quote from Nietzsche to stimulate your thinking about a vital aspect of entrepreneurship, and stories from entrepreneurs help make the ideas concrete.

Don Wenner is a master of scaling high-growth, high-profit entrepreneurial companies. In ​Building an Elite Organization​, he walks you through the Elite Execution System his company and other highly successful organizations use to drive growth and improve profitability.

Dominate your market through an inside and out business structure: Martin Pettigrew's proven concept with over $40 million in yearly gross roofing sales. In The Roofing Machine, Martin shares a unique business structure that can enable you to grow your sales revenue to over $40 million per year. It is based on the obsession with customers to provide them with what they deserve...the best.

Running with My Head Down is the inspirational story of one man’s search for purpose and meaning, a quest without limitation that ultimately leads to unique business success and personal fulfillment. A native of Queens, New York, Frank was born into a working-class family, surrounded by the unified love of his parents. But in the mid-1970s, the 9-year-old was deeply impacted by his parents’ divorce. Emotional and financial turmoil follow, fueling Frank’s burning passion to discover his direction in life, and with it, certainty and security.

"What do I need to do?" It's almost always the wrong question that an entrepreneur asks when creativity seems to have been lost. When you're stuck and the journals and books you've been reading and going to the masterminds and conventions and seminars you've been attending haven't led to any breakthroughs. When your notepads full of "proven best practices" should have brought you to the next level but haven't. In this paradigm-shifting work, serial entrepreneur Patrick Gentempo explains why the primary question you need to ask as a business leader is "Who should we be?"

Running a successful architectural firm is a juggling act. You need expertise in your area of architecture to provide services to clients. You also need the know-how to run a small business. You've probably been well prepared by your education and experience for the technical ins and outs of an architecture firm. Yet what training has prepared you to run a business? The E-Myth Architect fills this knowledge gap, giving you a complete toolkit for either starting a successful firm from scratch or maximizing an existing firm's performance.

If you want to succeed in your career, or make more room in your life for the nonwork stuff, then you need to free up some time. And what's the key to finding time? Delegation. Let Gail Thomas teach you to art of delegation. Stop wasting your time on tasks you're overqualified for and see how you actually can focus on the important stuff. And you won't just learn how to delegate 'down' - Gail will also help you master upwards delegation.

In Leading Through Disruption, Andrew Liveris provides a new leadership paradigm for resilience and agility in a rapidly changing world. This book is a must-listen guide for leaders in various sectors who are keen on not only ensuring current success, but protecting the planet’s future for everyone.

Make a lasting impact by launching new initiatives, inspiring others, and championing innovative approaches with this from-the-trenches guide by trusted executive mentor, entrepreneur, and leadership expert Joel Peterson.

Companies everywhere face two major challenges today: getting noticed and getting paid. To confront these obstacles, Bharat Anand examines a range of businesses around the world, from The New York Times to The Economist, from Chinese Internet giant Tencent to Scandinavian digital trailblazer Schibsted, and from talent management to the future of education.

In this lesson, learn about acquisitions and mergers, the role they play in business and how to use them successfully. Advice for entrepreneurs who want to rapidly expand their business and safely buy a functioning company or companies.

Jeff Hayzlett is a big, boisterous guy who has the guts to get in your face and tell you exactly why your business isn't doing well. In short, he asks the questions that most business managers are afraid to ask. And as Jeff points out, if you aren't willing to look at what's working and what isn't - and then take the necessary steps to fix them -- well, you and your colleagues and employees are in for a tough ride.

Regardless of the type of business you are in, you can use the principles of the Lean system to improve the value you are providing to your customers, while at the same time ensuring they know that you respect and value their business. Everyone knows that in today's market, the customer is king, and Lean Bible: How to Speed up Your Business through the Leading Companies' Method has all of the information you need to ensure your business remains profitable.

Target Funding is a strategic guide to funding opportunities aimed at specific types of businesses and business owners. You'll learn about all the options available to you - including conventional, alternative, and diversity funding - and how to access them based on your needs and your demographic, industry, location, and other variables.