Small Leadership

This audiobook focuses on the business story of Walt Disney and the company he built. Combining a unique blend of entrepreneurship, creativity, innovation, and a relentless drive to bring out the best in his teams, Walt Disney created one of the most successful ventures in business history. Outlining the specific processes of the company, Goldsby and Mathews provide the listener with the tools they need to embrace their own entrepreneurial leadership style, to lead effectively, to be more innovative, and to build a successful organization.

What's happened to real? In a world of jargon, acronyms, and distrust, does authenticity in leadership mean anything anymore? The answer is a resounding yes. Businesses and organizations are starving for real communication and authentic leadership. But there's a lot of baggage and distrust to overcome. With real-life case studies, pointers, and guidelines, leadership consultant Gabrielle Dolan shows you how authenticity can earn trust with honest communication, and why it's well worth the effort.

The Compass and the Nail presents an unconventional perspective of how particular organizations create rabid fan bases, in turn making them more successful and more profitable. Written by Patagonia's former lead strategist for consumer marketing, and advisor to such iconic brands as Seventh Generation and Burton Snowboards, Craig Wilson outlines game-changing insights for providers of any product or service who desire fiercely loyal behavior.

Centered on the building and construction industry, The Tokens offer business lessons to help to build a foundation of success that is so vital for sustaining growth and overcoming challenges. It outlines the eleven points for developing and maintaining a successful building or construction business with many of the lessons applicable to any business.

Serial entrepreneur, business growth expert, and brand ambassador Scott Duffy weaves together stories from his own journey and those of superstar entrepreneurs along with sage advice to help listeners identify their own "aha!" moments and turn them into unique growth opportunities to help them break through and level up their entrepreneurship game.

Based on the success story of a small Seattle coffee shop, this little book is a tasty brew of sound principles and instructive anecdotes. As the coffee shop owner looks for ways to retain his customer base, a consultant helps him focus on what really matters. Authors Yerkes and Decker, renowned for their consulting and business savvy, have done their homework and turned Beans into "a business fable taken from real life".

After years of sharing her small-business tips and marketing tricks with readers of her popular blog, ChunkOfChange.com, and her column in the Long Beach Post, Olga Mizrahi has taken her message to the streets, urging business owners to focus in while reaching out. You'll be excited and motivated to state your difference clearly to the world--and your neighborhood--while confidently selling yourself and your business.

Teamwork, one of the most celebrated concepts in corporate life, is falling short on its promise. Why Teams Don't Work identifies the obstacles (most of them people-made) that prevent teams from achieving their potential, suggests methods to remove those obstacles, and explains how to take care of the team members.

Becoming a successful entrepreneur takes energy and drive. Less than 20% make it beyond the first three years. Achieving the next level, the status of business titan - the upper echelon of leadership - takes an unrelenting commitment to turn an idea into a plan, a plan into a startup venture, and a venture into a successful business. The chances of getting to the top are slim at best, relying on a particular set of skills and attributes.

Imagine a system that allowed you to make money almost effortlessly, so that you could spend your time with friends and family, follow your dreams, or pursue other goals without worrying about where your next paycheck is coming from. Now imagine if all you needed to make that happen were a computer and an Internet connection. If you can imagine it, you can achieve it - with Your Portable Empire.

The nearly three billion people living on two dollars a day are not just the world’s greatest challenge - they represent an extraordinary market opportunity. The key is what Paul Polak and Mal Warwick call Zero-Based Design: starting from scratch to create innovative products and services tailored for the very poor, armed with a thorough understanding of what they really want and need, and driven by what Polak and Warwick call "the ruthless pursuit of affordability". Polak has been doing this work for years, and Warwick has extensive experience in both business and philanthropy.

Advice about starting a business never sounded like this! Beginning with "you must be crazy", serial entrepreneur and angel investor Barry Moltz offers the true insider's scoop on new business start-ups. With doses of irreverence and humor, the return-to-basics guide focuses on what comes before the bottom line.

In Breaking Out, idea developer and adviser John Butman shows how the methods of today’s most popular “idea entrepreneurs” - including dog psychologist Cesar Millan, French lifestyle guru Mireille Guiliano ( French Women Don’t Get Fat), TOMS founder Blake Mycoskie, and many others - can help you take an idea public and build influence for it.

The growth engine of the global economy is no longer through mega-production and huge conglomerates, but rather through the proliferation of smaller enterprises. In America alone, tens of thousands of businesses crop up each year. Unfortunately, few will succeed, though not due to a lack of ingenuity, initiative, or even capital. Why, then?

The entrepreneurial revolution is in full swing, and many of your friends have started new businesses successfully. You wonder if you have what it takes. Yes, entrepreneurship requires passion, discipline, hard work, creativity, and resilience, but it is ultimately a process. Discover the Entrepreneur Within, based on Verinder Syal's award-winning classes at Northwestern University, will demystify this process. He has created a step-by-step guide that gives you the tools to launch your business.

Today when the competition, technology, and the economy are evolving faster than ever before, organizations and the people like us who work in them need a proven approach to help us adapt - and succeed. The key, according to Paul B. Brown, is to think like an entrepreneur, no matter what your position or industry. What works for the most successful entrepreneurs will work for us, Brown argues, whether we want to stay employed working for someone else or are thinking of going off on our own.

You have a great idea. Now what? That first mile - where an innovation moves from an idea on paper to the market - is often plagued by failure. In fact less than 1 percent of ideas launched by big companies end up having real impact. The ideas aren't the problem. It's the process. The First Mile focuses on the critical moment when an innovator moves from planning to reality. It is a perilous place where hidden traps snare entrepreneurs, and roadblocks slow innovators inside large companies.

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).

The Art of Opportunity offers a path toward new growth, providing the perspective and methods you need to make innovation happen. Written by a team of experts with both academic and industry experience - and a client roster composed of some of the world's leading companies - this book provides you with the necessary tools to help you capture growth instead of chasing it.

Whether you're rolling out a new product from a city-view office or rolling up your sleeves to deliver a social service in the field, learning why and how to embrace failure can help you do better faster. Smart leaders, entrepreneurs, and change agents design their innovation projects with a key idea in mind: ensure that every failure is maximally useful. In Fail Better, Anjali Sastry and Kara Penn show how to create the conditions, culture, and habits to systematically, ruthlessly, and quickly figure out what works in three steps.