Small Business Leadership

Green to Gold is an essential guide for forward-thinking business leaders who see the Green Wave coming and want to profit from it. This audio explores what every executive must know to manage the environmental challenges facing society and business. Based on the authors' years of experience and hundreds of interviews with corporate leaders around the world, Green to Gold, shows how companies generate lasting value.

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.

Trust is a basic, intuitive human reaction; it holds the fabric of our society together. Unfortunately, trust is at an all-time low in our institutions, governments, health care, and law enforcement. Losing someone’s trust is easy—building it back is much harder. Darryl Stickel, one of the world’s foremost experts on trust, moves away from the traditional approach of influencing people’s willingness to trust—the con artist’s tactic—to employing levers which leaders can “pull” to close the gap between how much they are trusted and how much they should be.

The road to launching a successful business can be long and confusing. Where do you start? Should you rent office space or work out of your garage? Should you register as a for-profit or a nonprofit business? How should you handle legal issues that come up? What does it mean to be a "Christian" entrepreneur anyway? Drawing from his work as a legal expert and business coach, Brock Shinen combines practical wisdom and a biblical worldview to help Christians turn their dreams and passions into viable businesses.

In this lesson, learn about acquisitions and mergers, the role they play in business and how to use them successfully. Advice for entrepreneurs who want to rapidly expand their business and safely buy a functioning company or companies.

Aimed at emerging as well as established social entrepreneurs, for-profit leaders who want to introduce an element of social responsibility into their companies, and nonprofit organizations who want to increase their stability by generating income, The Art of Social Enterprise is the definitive guide to doing well while doing good.

In every sector, there's an outlier. In the pharmaceutical industry, it’s Merck. In discount retail, it's Family Dollar. It used to be Wrigley in candy and Maytag in appliances. Other superstars have been hidden in plain sight, like Heartland Express in trucking or Linear Technology in semiconductors. How do these exceptional companies deliver superior perfor­mance over the long run despite facing the same constraints as competitors? What are they doing differently? What can we learn from them?

The road to success is rarely linear and never easy. But with courage, hard work, perseverance, and dedication to duty, Jim Ovia, founder and chairman of Zenith Bank, proves we can achieve the unthinkable. Jim has been called the Godfather of Banking by Forbes Africa. And this should be no surprise. In a time of tension between military and civilian regimes, periods of incredible economic instability, and a decaying infrastructure, Jim founded Zenith Bank in Nigeria.

We all know a visionary leader when we see one. They're bold and prophetic and at the same time pragmatic. They don't just promote change - they drive it, while inspiring and mobilizing others to do the same. Visionaries like Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos possess a host of innate qualities that make them extraordinary, but what truly sets them apart is their ability to turn vision into action. Here, Innosight's Mark W. Johnson and Josh Suskewicz introduce a new way of thinking and managing, called "future-back", that enables any manager to become a practical visionary.

Whether your goal is to open a neighborhood wellness business, work independently from home, or launch the next highly successful wellness brand, Building a Wellness Business That Lasts: How to Make a Great Living Doing What You Love is your definitive guide. This book will teach you how to translate your passion for wellness into a compelling business vision, weave that vision into an effective business plan, and leverage the latest technologies to accelerate your growth.

“Everyone wants everyone else to change.” That is the fundamental reason why most organizational transformations fail. Leaders want their people to exhibit behaviors that they don’t exhibit themselves. Team members feel powerless to make significant change just because of where they are situated on the organization chart. Improvement Starts with I provides you with a framework to change this through a simple plan that, when followed, will deliver outstanding engagement, improvement, and results, helping you avoid the potholes into which countless companies have fallen.

The fact is, over 90 percent of all new start-ups fail. Every entrepreneur must face this harsh reality and learn to master it if they hope to survive and wind up on top. In Surviving a Startup, Hoffman brings listeners on a wild ride, sharing with them the tumultuous journey of launching a venture-funded start-up and revealing what it takes to make it.

In Exit Rich, author and mergers and acquisitions authority Michelle Seiler Tucker joins forces with Sharon Lechter, finance expert and author of Rich Dad Poor Dad, to create a must-have guide for all business owners—whether they’re gearing up to sell a business now or just getting started building out their company into something to sell for a profit in the future. Seiler Tucker’s approach to selling your business for maximum profit combines two of the most powerful elements of her toolkit: the “ST GPS Exit Model” and the “6 P Method”.

UCLA psychologist and organizational consultant Dr. Robert Maurer provides a simple and proven effective technique for making major changes with minimal disruption. Applying the operational concept of kaizen - small, continual improvements - to common management challenges, managers can drive major improvements with a series of well-planned techniques for boosting quality, innovation, sales, and morale.

Make It Happen explodes the myth that the restaurant business is harder than other industries. It challenges the belief that you must be in your restaurant all day every day just so things get done right.

Having a clear knowledge of your business's financial life is important. No one should be in the dark about their overall financial picture. That's a disaster waiting to happen. However, with a perfunctory knowledge of basic accounting principles, including assets and liabilities, creating financial statements, budgeting, and more, you'll be on the road to healthier relationship with your money.

Behind every entrepreneur's success story, there's a never-ending list of gut-wrenching failures, missed opportunities, and jaw-dropping setbacks. Real estate mogul and serial entrepreneur Manny Khoshbin is one of those entrepreneurs with a story of perseverance that will make you believe in the American Dream all over again. Driven: The Never-Give-Up Roadmap to Massive Success goes beyond Manny's personal ride through the entrepreneurial journey to deliver the habits, mindset, and insights aspiring entrepreneurs need to turn dreams into reality.

An ordinary leader is someone who leads a small organization or team that is doing great things. They manage the majority of the world's workforce, but they don't lead large corporations or big government agencies. Ordinary leaders are rarely written about in books or quoted in magazines. They are, however, important. Maybe not globally, but in their own realm of influence, their leadership makes a difference.

In their best-selling business classic Lean Thinking, James Womack and Daniel Jones introduced the world to the principles of lean production, principles for eliminating waste during production. Now, in Lean Solutions, the authors establish the groundbreaking principles of lean consumption, showing companies how to eliminate inefficiency during consumption.

Positive Leadership shows how to reach beyond ordinary success to achieve extraordinary effectiveness, spectacular results, and what Kim Cameron calls “positively deviant performance” - performance far above the norm. Citing a wide range of research in organizational behavior, medical science, and psychology as well as real-world examples, Cameron shows that to achieve exceptional success, leaders must emphasize strengths rather than simply focus on weaknesses.