Small Business Development

Competition is moving beyond industry to ecosystem. Are you ready? In the shift from pipeline to platform, value is no longer created by your company's product or process alone - it's created through interactions. And the strategy you used to become an industry leader won't help you compete in an evolving and complex ecosystem. If you listen to nothing else on platforms and ecosystems, listen to these 10 articles by experts in the field.

Faced with uncontrollable circumstances, from a change in market demand to a global pandemic, being self-employed can sometimes feel less like you're running the show, and more like the show is running you. But it doesn't need to be that way. Small business consultant, entrepreneur coach, and acclaimed portrait photographer Jeffrey Shaw - TEDx speaker and host of the popular The Self-Employed Life podcast - offers the essential manual on everything you need to be successful as a self-employed business owner.

An Insider's Perspective on the Chief of Staff explores every aspect of the Chief of Staff role in a straightforward and engaging way. Author Emily Sander provides one-of-a-kind insights, combining her own experience as a Chief of Staff with perspectives gained from colleagues and her coaching clients. Sander offers her unique perspective on how the role fits into the organizational big picture, with real-life examples to drive home her points.

Sara Bliss (yes, that’s her real name) tracked down more than 65 people who transformed their lives to learn how they did it so you can, too. Take the Leap is packed with inspiring profiles, quotes, and other pieces of creative advice from game changers, rule breakers, and side hustlers, including successful entrepreneurs like Barbara Corcoran, Bobbi Brown, writer turned actress (at 40) Jill Kargman, Black Crowes drummer turned sports radio host Steve Gorman, writer Simon Doonan, and NFL player turned artist/activist Aaron Maybin, and many more.

You have the ability, right now, to accomplish more than you ever have before. In this powerful, practical program, Brian Tracy shows you how to plot your course to greater success and achievement. Life, Tracy says, is a journey. And as with any other journey, you have to do more than just think happy thoughts about where you want to go. You need clear goals, plans, and schedules to get from wherever you are today to wherever you want to be in the future.

The market is changing, and more requirements are coming. How do I meet them? What do ESG, TCFD, NZ, CN, ISO mean? How do they help me? How will acting on the climate bring opportunities to my organization? The Planet is facing a climate crisis and the 6th great extinction at the same time. People are facing the biggest transformation since the Internet and smartphones—a Phase Change—in this decade. How can my organization ensure its Profits? This book describes strategies—smart climate moves—to address these challenges.

What happens when you consciously chart a course for your life, a course guided by your ethics and values? What happens when you truly recognize and embrace community? So often business books tell us about how to earn more, how to make our businesses more remunerative, and how to become more influential. Seldom do they address the small business and its impact on the life of its owners and those they employ. There are almost 30 million small businesses in the United States, employing over 56 million people or 57 percent of people who work in the private sector.

Organizational Muscle is a business operating system developed to organize knowledge and leverage activity to its maximum value. It’s all the stuff needed to build, grow, and improve a thriving organization that endures for the long haul! This system offers owners, leaders, and entrepreneurs the freedom to enjoy their lives, employees, and businesses.

You’re a maker, a creator, an expert at your craft. Building a profitable jewelry business doesn't have to be a dream any longer if you know how to connect with your audience and create desire for your brand. Whether you want to grow a six-figure lifestyle business or a multi-seven-figure empire, now more than ever, consumers want to support emerging talent and small businesses like yours. They just need to find you.

Think about your five closest friends. Are they happy? Do they live their lives with purpose? Do you? We put on a fake front for what we want people to see and think about us, but the reality is most people aren’t happy. We’re lost. We settle. We aren’t happy with where we are. You can’t be happy if you don’t know your purpose. It’s not possible. You want more but you don’t even know where to start. You know there is more out there. You see others having success and you want it, too; there is nothing wrong with that. You just need help finding your purpose.

It's easy for scale-ups, giddy from early startup success, to get ahead of themselves and stumble. It's even easier to be slowed down by the many forces of resistance working against them: drag, inertia, friction, and waste. Drawing on a mastery of lean-based methods for achieving maximum effect with minimum means, private equity operators Matthew E. May and Pablo Dominguez provide listeners with a powerful framework of universally applicable principles that enable any company to effectively accelerate its ability to scale and grow.

Brave is a handbook for being more courageous. For busy people on the go, its short, focused chapters provide practical tools and empowering perspectives to help you build your "courage muscles" in your work, relationships, and life. Drawing on her background in business, psychology and coaching, author Margie Warrell will guide you in moving past the fears, doubts, and beliefs that keep you from making the changes, and taking the chances, you need to enjoy the fulfillment and success you desire.

An inspiring personal story of redemption, second chances, and the transformative power within us all, from the founder and CEO of the nonprofit charity: water. In the tradition of such best-selling books as Shoe Dog and Mountains Beyond Mountains, Thirst is a riveting account of how to build a better charity, a better business, a better life - and a gritty tale that proves it’s never too late to make a change.

A faculty member at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, Budak created and teaches the wildly popular course “Becoming a Changemaker,” which has quickly grown into one of the most highly rated courses anywhere on campus. It’s regularly heralded by students as “transformative” and “life changing” but to date has only been accessible to students attending UC Berkeley. Budak is driven by the belief that anyone—regardless of title, personality, race, gender, age, or class—can be a changemaker.

Many of the greatest accomplishments can be reached only by two people working together. Tenzing and Hillary were the first to scale Mt. Everest. Malone and Stockton were the key to each other's success on the basketball court. Eisner was never as effective at Disney without Wells.But while some partnerships reach great heights, others fall short. Why do some people click while others clash? What do great pairs have in common?

People are prone to be limited by their resources and available means, as well as the problems and situations in which they live. This general problem keeps people's dreams on the launch pad throughout their lives. A lot of people on our planet live in constant expectation of more resources or some form of miraculous breakthrough. In this audiobook, you will find other stories of people known to all of us who have risen from the very bottom and have achieved outstanding success. As soon as you understand the golden rule of achieving a dream, nothing will be impossible for you.

In this revolutionary guide, Stanford University professor and international best-selling author of inGenius adapts her popular course material to teach everyone how to make imaginative ideas into realities.

Start with a plan. One of the biggest reasons goals fail is that we often don’t put enough thought into what we really want before diving in. Your Goal Guide by Debra Eckerling starts with that first, crucial step: figuring out your goals and putting a plan in place. As a professional writer, communications specialist, and project catalyst with more than 20 years of experience, Eckerling is prepared to help you achieve success.

Space is a place of unparalleled possibility for humanity, and it's undergoing a revolution. A wave of companies led by gutsy entrepreneurs are unlocking opportunities that fire the imagination. No, it's not hotels on Mars or day trips to orbit (yet), but it's an awe-inspiring transformation driven by innovative technologies, creative approaches, hard work, and—for the first time—market forces.

In his previous book, The Elusive Quest for Growth, William Easterly criticized the utter ineffectiveness of Western organizations to mitigate global poverty, and he was promptly fired by his then-employer, the World Bank. The White Man's Burden is his widely anticipated counterpunch - a brilliant and blistering indictment of the West's economic policies for the world's poor.