Small Leadership

We've combed through the ideas, insights, and best practices from the past year of Harvard Business Review to help you get up to speed fast on the relevant concepts driving business today. Discover new ideas and sample the latest thinking of our vast array of management experts. Revisit these topics now to make sure your organization is incorporating the best, most up-to-date practices, or keep this book as a reference so you can turn to these memorable pieces when you need them the most.

Starting a creative company needn't cost you everything. If you agree, then you'll find wit and wisdom in this book for creative entrepreneurs. Author, artist, and graphic designer Patricia Arnold presents her best tips for starting a handmade business with this initial volume in her Creative Entrepreneur series. After starting a decade-old business with a shoestring budget and then founding a second business six years later, Patricia Arnold has a lot to say about building creative businesses from scratch.

For more than 40 years, The Boston Consulting Group has been shaping strategic thinking in business. The Boston Consulting Group on Strategy offers a broad and up-to-date selection of the firm's best ideas on strategy with fresh ideas, insights, and practical lessons for managers, executives, and entrepreneurs in every industry. Here's a sampling of the provocative thinking you'll find inside.

Make achieving your goals and finding success possible with this one-of-a-kind guide by Robert Irvine, popular host of Food Network’s Restaurant: Impossible.

Featuring a foreword by Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn, this fascinating handbook inspires potential founders and provides essential guidance and advice for people who want to create their own start-up and build a successful company. This audiobook answers the question “how do I get started?” It takes the listener from making the decision to plunge into entrepreneurship, through the process of choosing and developing an idea and team, all the way to raising capital and working with VCs and angel investors.

In The No B.S. Small Business Book, you will learn how to get ruthlessly honest about yourself, your business, and what you really want from both — and how to get it.

Startup Weekend - the organization behind 54-hour events where developers, designers, marketers, and startup enthusiasts come together to share ideas, form teams, build products, and create startups - has spawned both a global initiative in entrepreneurship as well as numerous successful startups. Startup Weekend the book, contains best practices, lessons learned, and empowering examples derived from the organization's experiences for individuals and small organizations to follow as they launch businesses.

In addition to his work as an entrepreneur, corporate executive, and consultant, for the last 16 years August Turak worked alongside the Trappist monks of Mepkin Abbey, watching firsthand as they undertook new enterprises and sustained an incredibly successful business practice. Service and selflessness are at the heart of this 1,500-year-old monastic tradition’s remarkable business success, an ancient though immensely relevant economic model that preserves what is positive and productive about capitalism while transcending its ethical limitations and internal contradictions.

A lot of businesspeople talk about innovation, but few companies have achieved the level of truly transformative innovation as brilliantly - or as famously - as the legendary Mayo Clinic. Introducing Think Big, Start Small, Move Fast, the first innovation guide based on the proven, decade-long program that's made Mayo Clinic one of the most respected and successful organizations in the world.

Once more the "unconventional" Peters stimulates corporate thought processes. Along with the best of his columns, Peters includes questions and rebuttals that come from readers and listeners, as well as his own candid responses. A "must" hear for every business person.

In the early stages of a tech startup's life, it's hard to decipher the meaningful metrics from the distractions. How do you know if your product is working? Is it the number of new signups? Average amount of time spent on the site? Revenue, even if you don't have a revenue model yet? In Scaling Lean, serial entrepreneur and author of the startup cult classic Running Lean Ash Maurya offers a tactical handbook for measuring and scaling a tech startup with maximum efficiency and efficacy.

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.

Tech entrepreneurs, make your startup dreams come true by utilizing this invaluable, founder-to-founder guide to successfully navigating all phases of the tech startup journey. With the advent of the internet, mobile computing, and now AI/Machine learning and cloud computing, the number of new startups has accelerated over the last decade across tech centers in Silicon Valley, Israel, India, and China.

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.

The iconic Sydney to Hobart Race, a 723-mile deepwater challenge - often called the “Everest” of offshore ocean racing - is considered one of the toughest in the world. Unpredictable weather and seas make each race demanding, but in 1998, an unexpected “weather bomb” hit the fleet, creating 80-foot waves and 100-mile-per-hour winds. Many bigger, better-equipped boats tried to maneuver around the storm, but the crew of the AFR Midnight Rambler chose to head directly into its path.

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.

The road to licensing a profitable, innovative product or technology is riddled with curves, holes, and rocky cliffs. The President of the United Inventors Association shows inventors, innovators, and makers a better path toward monetizing your creations and how to avoid the get-rich-quick scammers. Inventor Confidential will show them where to best spend their hard-earned money to maximize their odds for success.

Do you wish you knew how to manage your team better, and get them to commit to your bold vision? The truth is...the majority of managers are simply not very good at goal-setting. (Because they were never taught how to do it properly.) Most corporate goals are never completed on time, and even your highly-educated employees are (usually) not working on essential tasks during the workday. This can be damaging to your career, and can destroy your productivity.

We typically work most directly with a small group of no more than 10 people, and in that team, we have a high degree of influence. Charlie Gilkey, an internationally known thought leader on productivity, planning, strategy, and leadership for creative people, explains how changing our team's habits can change our company's culture since that culture is always just an aggregation of its various teams' work habits.

In this book, you'll discover the road map to financial salvation with proven steps to make your business more proficient, productive, and profitable. You'll learn how to unlock the proper mindset for success, practice compounding habits, and set authentic goals. You'll also gain insight into building a positive workplace culture, deciphering core values, and recruiting a team of high-achievers. Plus, you'll learn how to set up systems and processes for increased efficiency, establish consistent cash flow, and create a raving fan base.