Small Leadership

Why do startups fail? That question caught Harvard Business School professor Tom Eisenmann by surprise when he realized he couldn’t answer it. So he launched a multiyear research project to find out. In Why Startups Fail, Eisenmann reveals his findings: six distinct patterns that account for the vast majority of startup failures.

Bending Reality is Victoria Song's innovative process used by billionaires, tech founders, and the world's most successful leaders to make the impossible probable. After achieving success without fulfillment at Yale University, Harvard Business School, and then as a Forbes 30 Under 30 Venture Capitalist, Victoria set off on an unusual quest to study with over 24 of the world's best coaches, therapists, and healers.

In Amplifiers, entrepreneur and expert management and technology consultant Tom Finegan delivers an insightful new way to think about human behavior in the execution of corporate transformations. Through an exploration of the career journeys of several leaders and analyses of "True Amplifiers" in action, the book demonstrates how to deliver strategic and transformative change by relying on the efforts of key, exemplary followers. This important book:

Today's leaders need to engage, connect with, listen to, and include their employees and customers in the conversation surrounding the business. The Hero Factor discusses the importance of a strong company culture as the backbone of any successful business. Listeners will learn how to implement the traits that will help them become a hero entrepreneur, change their organization, live their values, and create a winning culture.

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.

Explore the universe of potential buyers. Learn how to assemble a team of expert advisors to prepare your business for sale. Walk step by step through a typical investment-banker-led midmarket sale process from start to finish. Adam Coffey has spent the last 20 years as CEO of three private-equity-backed national service companies. Through his experience executing a buy-and-build strategy, he has bought and sold more than 100 companies ranging in size from $1 million to $1 billion. Selling your business is an art.

Entrepreneurs and leaders face big questions every day: What’s the most important place to focus your effort, and how do you start? What will your idea look like in real life? How many meetings and discussions does it take before you can be sure you have the right solution? Now there’s a surefire way to answer these important questions: the Design Sprint, created at Google by Jake Knapp. This method is like fast-forwarding into the future, so you can see how customers react before you invest all the time and expense of creating your new product, service, or campaign.

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.

Hundreds of thousands of business leaders and aspiring professionals have profited from the wisdom and savvy of Lead the Field! Now you can, too. Lead the Field has often been referred to as the "Program of Presidents" because so many top executives and business leaders have incorporated Earl Nightingale's insight and guidance into their management philosophies. This landmark book is a practical guide on how to think and act like a success. The timeless stories Nightingale uses to make his points are as profound as they are accessible.

Whether you're an entrepreneur, an intrapreneur, or a not-for-profit leader, there's no shortage of advice on such topics as writing a business plan, recruiting, raising capital, and branding. In fact there are so many books, articles, and websites that many startups get bogged down to the point of paralysis, or they focus on the wrong priorities and go broke before they discover their mistakes.

If you are the owner of a home-improvement company of any kind and you want to make quantum leaps in the results you get from your life and your business - this book is for you. Inside this book, entrepreneur, marketing strategist, and host of The Wealthy Contractor podcast Brian Kaskavalciyan will share with you the seven “secrets” that drive the results of every wealthy contractor.

The exact qualities that bring an individual to found a start-up company (their brilliance and expertise) are what prevent them from achieving the success they are looking for - this is the paradox that is entrepreneurship. What starts out as freedom and financial independence turns into grueling hours and added stress and bills. But successful five-time entrepreneur Curtis Morley is here to help. He shares that every entrepreneur is typically doing the same 15 things wrong or just not doing them at all - regardless of industry or business type.

All too often, simple acts of human kindness are often overlooked and under utilized by people in leadership roles. Advising mutual respect and recognition of accomplishments, Encouraging the Heart shows us how true leaders encourage and motivate those they work with by helping them find their voice and making them feel like heroes.

Do you have trouble keeping your team focused, motivated, and committed to the pursuit of their assigned goals? The truth is, the majority of bosses fail to inspire their employees to be engaged and productive at work. And they're often frustrated by their inability to incite their team to action.

The Fieldbook is an intensely pragmatic guide. It shows how to create an organization of learners where memories are brought to life, where collaboration is the lifeblood of every endeavor, and where the tough questions are fearlessly asked. The stories here show that companies, businesses, schools, agencies, and even communities can undo their “learning issues” and achieve superior performance. If ever a work gave meaning to the phrase hands-on, this is it.

Baseline Selling: How to Become a Sales Superstar by Using What You Already Know About the Game of Baseball will dramatically change the way we approach the sales process, replacing the gratuitous complexity advocated by today's sales "experts" with an elegant and very effective simplicity. Studies have shown that the selling techniques of the last two decades have had very little impact on most of the sales population. Why?

Owning a small business can be challenging enough even in the best of times. And when times get tough - whether the challenges are brought about by pandemics, recessions, or any other volatility, you need every tool sharpened and ready to go. You'll find them all in Your Small Business Boom, with the latest in entrepreneurial thinking from USA Today small-business columnist Steve Strauss. Packed with strategies, ideas, savvy tips, and noteworthy trends, it's an indispensable guide to rebuilding in a post-pandemic world - and thriving when the next crisis hits.

Koch shows how to maximize success in your career and life by using the proven principle that 80 percent of changes in the world result from the most powerful 20 percent of actions and ideas. He'll show how to use your own powerful "20 percent spike" - your most creative ideas and unique skills - to measure the amount of value you bring to your employer, clients, or customers. For most people, there is a huge disparity between their intrinsic value and the compensation they receive for their efforts.

The Risk-Driven Business Model will help you manage risk better by showing how the key choices you make in designing your business models either increase or reduce two characteristic types of risk - information risk, when you make decisions without enough information, and incentive-alignment risk, when decision makers' incentives are at odds with the broader goals of the company. Leaders who understand how the structure of their business model affects risk have the power to create wealth, revolutionize industries, and shape a better world.

The traditional attitude toward creativity in the American business world is to "think outside the box": to brainstorm without restraint in hopes of coming up with a breakthrough idea, often in moments of crisis. Sometimes it works, but it’s a problem-specific solution that does nothing to engender creative thinking more generally. Inside the Box demonstrates Systematic Inventive Thinking (SIT), a method that systemizes creativity as part of the corporate culture. SIT requires thinking "inside the box", working in one’s familiar world to create new ideas independent of specific problems.