Small Leadership

Around the world, a new generation is looking beyond greater profits, for meaningful purpose. But, unlike business, few social interventions have achieved significant impact at scale. Inspired by the modern innovation practices popularized by best seller The Lean Startup that have fueled technology breakthroughs touching every aspect of our lives, Lean Impact turns our attention to a new goal-achieving radically greater social good.

Maynard Webb has helped found, fund, and grow dozens of successful companies. Webb now shares his lessons with the rest of America’s aspiring entrepreneurs in Dear Founder. Dear Founder is rich with sound advice on an array of business topics, from turning your idea into a reality to building a culture, to reaching key financial goals. This audiobook is an indispensable guide to navigating the realities, risks, and rewards of being your own boss - and founding the company of your dreams.

People power your business - and success can hinge on your hiring, inspiring, and keeping the right ones. As a manager, are you cultivating this vital resource? Is there more you could be doing? Are you just winging it? Every HR executive has a laundry list of things they wish managers knew: best practices that would enable the entire organization to operate more effectively, transforming those managers into exceptional - and highly promotable - leaders.

Big data - the enormous amount of data that is created as virtually every movement, transaction, and choice we make becomes digitized - is revolutionizing business. Offering real-world insight and explanations, this audiobook provides a roadmap for organizations looking to develop a profitable big data strategy...and reveals why it's not something they can leave to the I.T. department. Think Bigger is an essential resource for anyone who wants to ensure that their company isn't left in the dust.

A game-changing audiobook that outlines the ways in which technology has transformed how brands and businesses innovate and connect with consumers. The DNA of business has changed. Forever. You can blame technology, smartphones, social media, online shopping, and everything else, but nothing changes this reality: We are in a moment of business purgatory. Mitch Joel, one of the world's leading experts in new media, warns that the time has come to "Ctrl Alt Delete". To reboot and to start re-building your business model.

Are you a leader who struggles with self-doubt or a CEO who sometimes feels like a fraud? If so, you are not alone. With Chasing Perfection, CEO and business coach Sue Hawkes provides actionable practices to conquer self-doubt while maximizing your success. You'll learn to stop chasing the illusion of perfection and eliminate the barriers to your full leadership potential.

In his much-anticipated memoir, The Company I Keep: My Life in Beauty, Chairman Emeritus and former CEO of The Estée Lauder Companies Leonard A. Lauder shares the business and life lessons he learned as well as the adventures he had while helping transform the mom-and-pop business his mother founded in 1946 in the family kitchen into the beloved brand and ultimately into the iconic global prestige beauty company it is today.

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.

“What would Jeff do?” Since leaving Amazon to advise start-ups and corporations, John Rossman has been asked this question countless times by executives who want to know “the secret” behind Amazon’s historic success. In this step-by-step guide, he provides 50½ answers drawn from his experience as an Amazon executive - and shows today’s business leaders how to think like Amazon, strategize like Bezos, and beat the competition like nobody’s business.

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.

In an impatient world of infobesity, people don't want more information - they want to be intrigued and they want to be intrigued fast. After all, goldfish have longer attention spans than humans - nine seconds to our eight. So, right now, people want to know, "How is this relevant and useful to me? Why are you worth my valuable time, mind, and dime?" Bestselling author and ace communication strategist Sam Horn reveals her "secret sauce" for truly connecting with people - whether it's one or one million.

My name is Susan Kilmer, and I am the author of this starting-a-business planning guide. Over the course of my business and entrepreneurship background, I have taught hundreds of aspiring entrepreneurs how to start a business and business owners how to keep their businesses going. One of the things they have all said at one time or another is, "I wish there was some manual or guide that would walk me through the business planning steps - through what I need to know to start, operate, or grow my business." I listened, and I did it.

With so many choices available to them today's customers are smarter and more demanding than ever before, putting repeat business at risk. In order to keep them coming back, you can't just give them good, or even great, customer service...you have to knock their socks off!

Each of us has our own set of dangers (things we’re afraid of losing), opportunities (the possibility of gaining something), and strengths (our unique skills and experience). I call these our “D.O.S.” issues, and I’ll show you how to use them every day as your key to never-ending growth. This also gives you a repeatable way to gain insight into what matters most to your clients and prospects and cultivate a growth-focused relationship with them.

If any of the following behaviors sound like you or someone you work with, beware! In Why CEOs Fail, David L. Dotlich and Peter C. Cairo describe the most common characteristics of derailed top executives and how you can avoid them.

What really sets the best managers above the rest? It's their power to build a cadre of employees who have great inner work lives—consistently positive emotions; strong motivation; and favorable perceptions of the organization, their work, and their colleagues. The worst managers undermine inner work life, often unwittingly.

If you’re an innovator or entrepreneur, you challenge precedent and disrupt the status quo. You trust that the result is worth the struggle and embrace change because it could equal progress. You have blind faith. You know that success isn’t reserved for the superstars, but you remain humble because failure is always a possibility This journey of entrepreneurship and innovation shouldn’t be a solo trip. If you’re missing something, struggling to begin, or have reached a plateau, fellow entrepreneur and innovator Bob Moesta knows your next steps because he’s been there himself.

In Silicon Valley slang, a "bozo explosion" is what causes a lean, mean, fighting machine of a company to slide into mediocrity. As Guy Kawasaki puts it, "If the two most popular words in your company are partner and strategic, and partner has become a verb, and strategic is used to describe decisions and activities that don't make sense"...then it's time for a reality check.

Don't get stuck on a career path you have no passion for. Don't waste your intelligence on something that doesn't really mean anything more to you than a paycheck. Let Isaiah Hankel help you define a focus so powerful that everything in your life will be pulled towards it. Create your purpose and change your life. Be focused. Be fulfilled. Be successful. Black Hole Focus has been endorsed by top names in business, entrepreneurship, and academia, including four times New York Times best seller AJ Jacobs and Harvard Medical School Postdoc Director Dr. Jim Gould. The book is broken up into three different sections; the first section shows you why you need a purpose in life, the second section shows you how to find your new purpose, and the third section shows you how to achieve your goals when facing adversity.

No one knows leadership like Jack Welch, former chairman and CEO of General Electric. Along with his wife and best-selling co-author, Suzy Welch, he explores with Daniel Goleman what it means to be a great leader, and what elements must be present for any leader to be successful. Key elements of emotional intelligence, from self-awareness to the ability to instill core values in a team, are part of that success.