Small Leadership

Unsliced is the resource for elevating your pizzeria - from managing staff to mindset, marketing, and everything in between. Industry leader Mike Bausch explains how to make your restaurant unique and in demand based on his 20 years of experience. You’ll learn how to build systems that will help you boost your sales and keep your sanity. And you’ll discover time-tested protocols that will protect you and your restaurant. It’s hard not to get discouraged in this business. But with the right perspective, smart systems, and hard work, your restaurant can thrive.

Annie Hyman Pratt's family business, The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf, consisted of 7 domestic "mom and pop shops" when she took it over. In just 7 years' time she scaled it by more than 1x, turning it into an international brand of 7+ stores before leading the company through a highly successful sale. Two decades later, Annie Pratt is a top-tier business consultant whose client list of 5+ companies and entrepreneurs includes Hay House, Jeff Walker, Gabrielle Bernstein, Susan Peirce Thompson, Erico Rocha, and Christian Mickelsen.

The modern practice intended to motivate individuals has ensured that humans no longer think for themselves. Using rewards, punishment, and feedback undermines not just our personal growth, but the very fabric of life and living systems. Award-winning author and business disruptor Carol Sanford proposes a smarter, faster, and deeper key to unlock a future of profound creativity and success. This guide allows you to challenge prevailing theories, promote a holistic understanding of education and change, and redefine the way we approach our work and the results we seek.

What do Google, Snapchat, Tinder, Amazon, and Uber have in common, besides soaring market share? They're platforms - a new business model that has quietly become the only game in town. A platform, by definition, creates value by facilitating an exchange between two or more interdependent groups. So, rather than making things, they simply connect people. The advent of mobile computing and its ubiquitous connectivity have forever altered how we interact with each other. Yet, few people truly grasp the radical structural shifts of the last 10 years.

The myth of innovation is that brilliant ideas leap fully formed from the minds of geniuses. The reality is that most innovations come from a process of rigorous examination through which great ideas are identified and developed before being realized as new offerings and capabilities. This is not a book by designers for designers; this is a book for creative leaders seeking to infuse design thinking into every level of an organization's products or service to drive new alternatives for business and society.

From a long-time Alibaba executive and former special assistant to Jack Ma, this is the first book to articulate how Alibaba's unique culture and “tai chi” management principles are providing a business and economic development model for the rest of the world.

Demographics not only define who we are, where we live, and how our numbers change. For those who can read beyond the raw figures, they open up hidden business opportunities that lie ahead. What will happen when retiring Boomers free up jobs? How will Generation Y alter supermarkets? Which states will have the most dynamic workforces? Will American manufacturing rebound as Asia's population declines? Upside puts this powerful yet little-understood science to work finding answers.

Over his four deployments as a Navy SEAL sniper, Brandon Webb learned all about performing while experiencing heart-pounding stress. After returning to civilian life, he started his first business venture - and failed miserably. He realized that his big mistake was neglecting to apply what he already knew about focus under pressure. By drawing on the lessons of his SEAL training and early business struggles, Webb went on to build a second business, a media network called Hurricane.

"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?"

Lean Six Sigma is a technique for process improvement designed to eliminate challenges, remove waste and inefficiency, and improve working conditions to better respond to customer needs. It integrates the Lean and Six Sigma techniques, processes, and concepts into one popular and powerful approach to improve the operations of your company.

Hardly anyone gets it right the first time, but many of us are crippled by indecision and fear of failure. The desire to get it right can inhibit us from getting started. In this book Rob Moore, the best-selling author of Money, shows that the quickest way to perfect is starting right now and improving as you go. This book will show you how to launch your business or idea, begin the next phase of your career and overcome self-doubt - right away. Get perfect later; get started now.

Behind every entrepreneur's success story, there's a never-ending list of gut-wrenching failures, missed opportunities, and jaw-dropping setbacks. Real estate mogul and serial entrepreneur Manny Khoshbin is one of those entrepreneurs with a story of perseverance that will make you believe in the American Dream all over again. Driven: The Never-Give-Up Roadmap to Massive Success goes beyond Manny's personal ride through the entrepreneurial journey to deliver the habits, mindset, and insights aspiring entrepreneurs need to turn dreams into reality.

This timeless text is required listening for any business person or athlete interested in strategy. It includes a soundtrack entitled "The Mysterious Sound of Wind In the Bamboo", a 43-minute collection of Zen-inspired Japanese music by the Matsu Take Ensemble.

Here are really two books in one: McNeilly's synthesis of Sun Tzu's ideas into six strategic principles for the business executive, plus the entire text of Samuel B. Griffith's popular translation of The Art of War. Within, McNeilly explains how to gain market share without inciting competitive retaliation, how to attack a competitor's weak points, and how to maximize the power of market information for competitive advantage.

Ram Charan, Stephen Drotter, and James Noel are three eminent business consultants on the cutting edge of the knowledge economy. They have coached managers at many world-class organizations; now their combined expertise on the subject of leadership is condensed in this fascinating audiobook.

Author and entrepreneur Mick Spencer offers entrepreneurs an inspiring new road map to success - one that runs against nearly everything you've ever been taught about business. In this book, Spencer presents a solid case that analysis paralysis and endless "preparation" won't get you anywhere - you have to take that leap and do what you really want to do. He challenges you to get outside your comfort zone and, although intimidating, his approach forces you to learn "on the go" and focus on what you can do rather than what you can't.

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.

Far from a dry listen, The Lean Law Firm is the first book published by the ABA to employ the novel to teach business lessons. Follow the engaging story of lawyer Carson Wright, who suddenly finds himself responsible for saving a small law firm, as his mentor Guy Chapman imparts the lean techniques that transformed his factory from the brink of bankruptcy to new heights of profitability. As you hear the The Lean Law Firm story unfold, you’ll see how your own firm is really just a system.

In 1998, three Harvard Business School graduates - two men and one woman - turned down six-figure salaries at big corporations, bet on themselves, and launched their own new companies. By their 10-year reunion, their audacity had paid huge dividends. They'd made many millions of dollars, created hundreds of jobs and left their mark on the world. The Intelligent Entrepreneur tells the compelling and instructive story of how these three young founders did 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.