Small Leadership

When it comes to how to succeed as an entrepreneur, we are besotted with advice. According to best-selling author Alan Weiss, success is a combination of opportunism, very disciplined work, luck, timing, and ignoring most advice. In other words, it means striking out on your own original path to success. In Million Dollar Maverick, he explains that entrepreneurs don't take advice; they create value and then monetize it. They do what they love and are great at and find a way to sell it to people.

As CEO, most everything that Rich O'Connor did had something to do with at least one of the four disciplines on his famed "yellow sheet." Rich never suspected that it would become the blueprint of an employee's plan to destroy the firm. Best selling author Lencioni brings us a fable that focuses on a leader's crucial role in building a healthy organization.

In 2008, Howard Schultz, the president and chairman of Starbucks, made the unprecedented decision to return as CEO, eight years after he stepped down from daily oversight of the company to become chairman. Concerned that Starbucks had lost its way, Schultz was determined to help it return to its core values and restore not only its financial health, but also its soul.

A rags-to-$9-billion-riches story. A crash course in Burger King history and fast food in America, The Burger King is McLamore's candid and conversational memoir. Written before his death in 1996, he talks of his life, the birth of the Whopper, and the rise of Burger King. McLamore's account of Burger King offers an instructive and inspiring tale to young entrepreneurs. Here's a story of entrepreneurship development from one of the top entrepreneurs of fast food chains.

The new question: Ten years after the worldwide bestseller Good to Great, Jim Collins returns to ask: Why do some companies thrive in uncertainty, even chaos, and others do not? In Great by Choice, Collins and his colleague, Morten T. Hansen, enumerate the principles for building a truly great enterprise in unpredictable, tumultuous, and fast-moving times. The new study: Great by Choice distinguishes itself from Collins’s prior work by its focus on the type of unstable environments faced by leaders today.

In his sixth business book, best-selling author, entrepreneur, and investor Gary Vaynerchuk explores the 12 essential emotional skills that are integral to his life - and business - success and provides today’s (and tomorrow’s) leaders with critical tools to acquire and develop these traits.

Geoff Smart and Randy Street offer a simple, four-step method for hiring with confidence, designed for everyone from the CEO on down. Who shows you how to avoid the most common pitfalls of hiring, how to identify "A Players" - people who can perform their job better than 90 percent of the candidates in their field - and how to make sure the best candidate will be excited to join your organization.

Eileen Sharp and Vic Hightower were frustrated. After years of profitable, predictable growth, Swan Services was in a rut. Meetings were called and discussions held, but few decisions were made and even less got done. People were pointing fingers and assigning blame, but nothing happened to solve Swan’s mounting problems. It felt as though they were working harder than ever but with less impact. The company Eileen and Vic had founded and built for 10 years was a different place. It just wasn’t fun anymore.

"Never started a company before? Struggling with little or no cash? Have no experience, no baseline to judge your progress against? Thank God! You've got a shot at making this work." So says Mike Michalowicz, author of The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur, a business book that is so uniquely useful, so raw and entertaining, it reads like the brainchild of Steve Jobs and Chris Rock.

Strong leaders at all levels within an organization are a requisite for business success. Yet the leadership pipeline—the internal architecture for growing leaders—is often broken or non-existent. This updated edition of the best-selling The Leadership Pipeline has been revised to help address the challenges of today’s business environment. Anchored in experience, it offers a tested model for planning leadership succession and development that has proven to get results.

As the cofounder of Waze—the world's leading commuting and navigation app with more than 700 million users to date, and which Google acquired in 2013 for $1.15 billion—Levine is committed to spreading entrepreneurial thinking so that other founders, managers, and employees in the tech space can build their own highly valued companies. Levine offers an inside look at the creation and sale of Waze and his second unicorn, Moovit, revealing the formula that drove those companies to compete with industry veterans and giants alike.

From the time we learn to speak, we're told that if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all. When you become a manager, it’s your job to say it--and your obligation. Author Kim Scott was an executive at Google and then at Apple, where she developed a class on how to be a good boss. She has earned growing fame in recent years with her vital new approach to effective management, Radical Candor. Radical Candor is a simple idea: to be a good boss, you have to Care Personally at the same time that you Challenge Directly.

Martha Stewart is an undeniable force in the business world. One of the world's greatest entrepreneurs, she turned her personal passion into Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, a billion dollar business. This fall she's breaking new ground with two television shows from NBC -- her reality show The Apprentice: Martha Stewart and her daytime syndicated show Martha -- as well as a radio program on Sirius satellite radio which will provide daily round-the-clock how-to content. What's her secret for success?

In his long-awaited memoir, Yvon Chouinard - legendary climber, businessman, environmentalist, and founder of Patagonia, Inc. - shares the persistence and courage that have gone into being head of one of the most respected and environmentally responsible companies on earth. From his youth as the son of a French Canadian blacksmith to the thrilling, ambitious climbing expeditions that inspired his innovative designs for the sport's equipment.

In this, his first audiobook, Tony Hsieh - the widely admired CEO of Zappos, the online shoe retailer -explains how he created a unique culture and commitment to service that aims to improve the lives of its employees, customers, vendors, and backers. Using anecdotes and stories from his own life experiences, and from other companies, Hsieh provides concrete ways that companies can achieve unprecedented success.

Famously, over a four-year period, James Dyson made 5,127 prototypes of the cyclonic vacuum cleaner that would transform the way houses are cleaned around the world. In devoting all his resources to iteratively developing the technology, he risked it all, but out of many failures and setbacks came hard-fought success. In Invention: A Life, Dyson reveals how he came to set up his own company and led it to become one of the most inventive technology companies in the world. It is a compelling and dramatic tale, with many obstacles overcome.

Based on thousands of interviews from John Lee Dumas’ highly acclaimed podcast, Entrepreneurs on Fire, this revolutionary step-by-step roadmap provides a proven path for entrepreneurs like you to achieve the financial freedom and lifestyle fulfillment you are capable of. Let The Common Path to Uncommon Success show you how.

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.

ALL IN is the pinnacle book in Mike Michalowicz's Entrepreneurship Simplified series, setting the standard for building high-performing teams in today’s challenging work environment. Whether dealing with remote work, flex schedules, or generational divides, ALL IN provides a proven framework for recruiting top talent, transforming underperformers into superstars, and cultivating a culture where every employee is as dedicated as an owner.

In the weird glow of the dying millennium, Michael Lewis sets out on a safari through Silicon Valley to find the world's most important technology entrepreneur, the man who embodies the spirit of the coming age. He finds him in Jim Clark, who is about to create his third, separate, billion-dollar company: first Silicon Graphics, then Netscape - which launched the Information Age - and now Healtheon, a startup that may turn the $1 trillion healthcare industry on its head.