Small Leadership

From living on Jess's wages as a makeup counter sales clerk, to achieving dramatic success as network marketing partners, to running a multi-million-dollar coaching and training company today, Ray and Jessica Higdon have built their lives on a shared desire for freedom and balance. With 10 simple rules for redefining what's possible in your life, this book will help you build confidence, shift your mind-set, and learn the tools to take control of your life and start on a path toward your own definition of freedom.

Best-selling author and creativity expert Jeff Goins dismantles the myth that being creative is a hindrance to success by revealing how an artistic temperament is in fact a competitive advantage in the marketplace.

Kym Gold's mantra - "never settle for a no, always look for a yes" - is what led her to co-create True Religion Brand Jeans, a major retail clothing company that she sold for close to a billion dollars in 2013. In Gold Standard, she finally gives her side of the story of how the once fledgling jeans company that nobody wanted,went on to become a giant, revolutionizing player in the fashion industry.

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?

Startup Weekend - the organization behind 54-hour events where developers, designers, marketers, and startup enthusiasts come together to share ideas, form teams, build products, and create startups - has spawned both a global initiative in entrepreneurship as well as numerous successful startups. Startup Weekend the book, contains best practices, lessons learned, and empowering examples derived from the organization's experiences for individuals and small organizations to follow as they launch businesses.

The book covers numerous tech entrepreneurial founders and software developers, and the exciting brands or products that they created. It goes deep on a handful of them, narrowly divulging exactly how a few software developers and startup founders created breakthrough tech products like Gmail, Dropbox, Ring, Snapchat, Bitcoin, Groupon, and more. It highlights and unpacks the general hero-worship that the media and our own minds practice about tech founders and tech entrepreneurs.

Smart Teams will help your team to go beyond personal productivity to enhance team productivity. Building on the concepts presented in Smart Work, which focuses on personal productivity, this audiobook shows you how to turn unproductive team behaviors that create friction into "superproductive" behaviors that promote flow. Productivity is, at its core, a leadership issue - and this audiobook provides practical guidelines that help you build a culture where productivity thrives.

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.

The inspiring, unlikely, laugh-out-loud story of how one woman learned to lead - and how she ultimately succeeded, not despite her many mistakes, but because of them. This is the story of how Kristen Hadeed built Student Maid, a cleaning company where people are happy, loyal, productive, and empowered, even while they're mopping floors and scrubbing toilets.

Brand Renegades shows listeners how to develop a nontraditional success formula to disrupt and innovate their industry. Club Tattoo founders and industry disruptors Sean and Thora Dowdell share their experience as a woman-run company in the male-dominated world of tattoos and piercings. The lessons taught in this book are about learning to admit failure and learning to fail forward.

At the heart of this comprehensive resource is a practical approach to innovation based on specific timetables, compensation structures, and financial investments. Respected thought leaders in lean startup methodologies, the authors cover successful enterprise development, development innovation labs, corporate venture arms, and acquisition and integration of startups.

The bar business continues to grow; however, securing running capital and having knowledge about the business are cited as the two biggest reasons new bars fail. Running a Bar for Dummies, 2nd Edition shines a light on these issues to help bar owners prepare properly. The book helps you find your way through the maze of licensing and permits, developing a business plan, and preparing for your grand opening, plus offers clear, no-nonsense guidance on dealing with tough customers. Every step of the way, Running a Bar for Dummies, 2nd Edition is a reference you can count on.

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.

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).

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.

In Startup Life, Brad Feld - a Boulder, Colorado-based entrepreneur turned-venture capitalist - shares his own personal experiences with his wife, Amy, offering a series of rich insights into successfully leading a balanced life as a human being who wants to play as hard as he works and who wants to be as fulfilled in life and in work. With this book, Feld distills his 20 years of experience in this field to addresses how the village of startup people can put aside their workaholic ways and lead rewarding lives in all respects.

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.

Today's most successful businesses are storydoers. They create products and services that, from the very beginning, are manifestations of an authentic and meaningful story - one told primarily through action, not advertising. In True Story, creative executive Ty Montague argues that any business, regardless of size or industry, can embrace the principles of storydoing. Indeed, our best-run companie - from small start-ups to global conglomerates - organize around a coherent narrative that is then broadcast through every action they take (from product design to customer service to marketing).

Whether you're facing funding sharks or angel investors, we've got the keys to crafting that perfect pitch to help you secure the funds you need to launch your startup, build your business, and achieve your entrepreneurial dreams. In this new edition of the Entrepreneur Voices series, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and experts from both sides of the board room present the game-winning strategies and deal-closing tactics you need to succeed.

Your success depends on how you think. "The main difficulty of thinking is confusion," writes Edward de Bono, long recognized as an international authority on conceptual thinking and on the teaching of thinking as a skill. "We try to do too much at once. Emotions, information, logic, hope, and creativity all crowd in on us. It is like juggling with too many balls." The solution? De Bono unscrambles the thinking process with his "six thinking hats":