Small Leadership

In this book, Melissa Perri explains how laying the foundation for great product management can help companies solve real customer problems while achieving business goals. By understanding how to communicate and collaborate within a company structure, you can create a product culture that benefits both the business and the customer. You'll learn product management principles that can be applied to any organization, big or small.

Why is profitable growth so hard to achieve and sustain? Most executives manage their companies as if the solution to that problem lies in the external environment: find an attractive market, formulate the right strategy, win new customers. But when Bain & Company's Chris Zook and James Allen researched this question, they found that when companies fail to achieve their growth targets, 90 percent of the time the root causes are internal, not external.

In the newly revised third edition of Value-Based Fees: How to Charge What You're Worth and Get What You Charge, best-selling author, speaker, and renowned consultant Dr. Alan Weiss delivers a thoroughly updated guide to proposing, and receiving, consistently high fees that are based on the value you deliver to each client you serve. The author walks you through the many reasons that time-and-materials pricing models are outdated and inadequate and how to convert existing clients to your new value-based fee model.

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.

In Homeless to Billionaire, Andres Pira presents 18 principles for attracting wealth, creating opportunity, and celebrating self-discovery. Inspired by his own massive life changes, Pira details his business journey from telemarketer to one of Thailand’s best-known billionaires. Using his mentors like Bryan Tracy, Jack Canfield, and Bob Proctor, Pira puts proven knowledge into action, innovating along the way, using his own employees and clients; through failure and success, the 18 Principles are forged.

In this leadership book, renowned industry analyst Josh Bersin introduces a new way to think about organizational design, employee engagement, and employee development. Distilled from decades of research and management theory into seven practical yet profound management principles, Bersin outlines how business leaders can create enduring companies that thrive with improved customer satisfaction, employee retention, and business agility.

Finding the right venture capitalist to back your start-up is a challenge. Even if you manage to get backing, you want your VC to be a partner, not some dictator who will undermine your vision and take control of your life's work. Jeffrey Bussgang is one of a very few people who have played on both sides of this high-stakes game. Now he draws on his unique perspective to offer high-level insights, colorful stories, and practical advice. He reveals how to get noticed, perfect a pitch, and negotiate a partnership that works for everyone.

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.

What are the underlying handful of fundamentals that haven't changed for over a hundred years? From Harnish's famous "One-Page Strategic Plan" to his concise outline of eight practical actions you can take to strengthen your culture, this book is a compilation of best practices adapted from some of the best-run firms on the planet. Included is an instructive chapter co-authored by Rich Russakoff, revealing winning tactics to get banks to finance your business.

Paul Jarvis left the corporate world when he realized that working in a high-pressure, high profile world was not his idea of success. In Company of One, Jarvis explains how you can find the right pathway to do the same, including planning how to set up your shop, determining your desired revenues, dealing with unexpected crises, keeping your key clients happy, and of course, doing all of this on your own. Company of One is a refreshingly new approach centered on staying small and avoiding growth, for any size business.

In 2010, Tommy Mello became the sole owner/operator of a single garage door service business with $50,000 in debt. Today, A1Garage generates over $30 million in annual revenue, with over 250 employees in 12 states. He shows home service business owners how he did it, and they, too, can in Home Service Millionaire. If you’re like most home service business owners, you are probably just scraping by. You can’t grow your business because there aren’t any more hours in a day.

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.

A one-stop start-up guide from an accountant-turned-restaurateur. Ninety percent of all restaurants fail, and those that succeed happened upon that mysterious X factor, right? Wrong! A man of many hats - money-guy, restaurant owner, and restaurant consultant - Roger Fields shows how a restaurant can survive its first year and keep diners coming back for years. Featuring real-life start-up stories (including many of the author's own), this comprehensive how-to walks listeners through the logistics of opening a restaurant: concept, location, menu, staff, and, most important, profit.

This is a book about work choices and life choices, and the critical points, or defining moments, at which the two become one. A refreshing antidote to traditional feel-good, inspirational business ethics, it examines the right-versus-right conflicts that every business manager faces and presents an unorthodox yet practical way for you to think about and resolve them.

What is the difference between a startup that makes it, and one that crashes and burns? Behind every story of success is an unfair advantage. But an Unfair Advantage is not just about your parents' wealth or who you know: Anyone can have one. An Unfair Advantage is the element that gives you an edge over your competition.

Like financial classics The Latte Factor and The Richest Man in Babylon, The Money Tree uses a compelling story with captivating characters to share its core insight: You are never at the mercy of fortune as long as you have an appetite for hard work and a willingness to step outside your comfort zone.

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 Scale or Fail, author Allison Maslan shares her revolutionary SCALEit Method for successfully growing, replicating, and expanding your business. She also shares pivotal mindset strategies she's used to break the fear barrier as a trapeze artist so you can move past any obstacle, take strategic big-picture risks, and fulfill your dreams of business expansion and skyrocketing profit.

Land the deals you want and develop your instincts with million-dollar negotiation techniques. After selling over $3 billion in real estate, including the most expensive one-bedroom house in history, Josh Altman, costar of the hit show Million-Dollar Listing Los Angeles, wants to teach you the real estate sales and negotiation tactics that have made him one of America's top agents. Buying or selling a house, whether for a client or yourself, is one of the most important and stressful deals anyone can make, demanding emotional intelligence and a solid set of negotiating skills.

In this collection of Jeff Bezos' writings - his unique and strikingly original annual shareholder letters, plus numerous speeches and interviews that provide insight into his background, his work, and the evolution of his ideas - you'll gain an insider's view of the why and how of his success. Spanning a range of topics across business and public policy, from innovation and customer obsession to climate change and outer space, this book provides a rare glimpse into how Bezos thinks about the world and where the future might take us.