Small Business Management

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.

Are you among the thousands of retailers frustrated by market challenges and looking for ways to take control of your business? Are you looking for the advice of an expert consultant, but unable to spend the money? Then The Retail Doctor's Guide to Growing Your Business is for you.

This book teaches you the vital skills you need to confront others, communicate effectively, and live a more conflict-free life. In this updated edition, communications expert Barbara Pachter shares a practical, step-by-step guide to tackling conflicts in any situation, including a new section on navigating sticky situations online.

Over his four deployments as a Navy SEAL sniper, Brandon Webb learned all about performing while experiencing heart-pounding stress. After returning to civilian life, he started his first business venture - and failed miserably. He realized that his big mistake was neglecting to apply what he already knew about focus under pressure. By drawing on the lessons of his SEAL training and early business struggles, Webb went on to build a second business, a media network called Hurricane.

Scrum is the most successful framework for agile product development, and much has been written about how to follow the Scrum process, but the key to success is in the leadership skills of the product owner. Product Mastery explores the traits of the best product owners, offering an insight into the difference between good and great product ownership and explaining how the best product owners are driven to be successful.

In The Billionaire Mindset, Daniel Strauss, the Strauss in the investment firm Stocks & Strauss, and a highly successful venture capitalist, explains how to adopt this life-changing new mindset. He shares his secrets of success, including how to access capital, where to find the right people to help you reach your goals, and explains how to free your mind from self-imposed limitations, so that you can also think like a billionaire.

In The 10% Entrepreneur, Patrick McGinnis shows you how, by investing just 10% of your time and resources, you can become an entrepreneur without losing a steady paycheck. McGinnis details a step-by-step plan that takes you from identifying your first entrepreneurial project to figuring out the smartest way to commit resources to it. He shows you how to select and engage in projects that will provide you with upside outside the office while making you better at your day job.

In his much-anticipated memoir, The Company I Keep: My Life in Beauty, Chairman Emeritus and former CEO of The Estée Lauder Companies Leonard A. Lauder shares the business and life lessons he learned as well as the adventures he had while helping transform the mom-and-pop business his mother founded in 1946 in the family kitchen into the beloved brand and ultimately into the iconic global prestige beauty company it is today.

Salespeople, consultants, managers, executives, entrepreneurs... Influence is a crucial tool for absolutely anyone seeking success and prosperity. But how can everyday people actually become more influential? Maximum Influence unlocks the secrets of the master influencers. Now in an all-new edition, the audiobook combines scientific research with real-world studies, presenting the most authoritative and effective arsenal of persuasion techniques ever.

Entrepreneur’s Guide to Consumer Packaged Goods: The Winning Growth Strategy for a Food & Beverage CPG Startup is a high-level resource for getting started in the consumer packaged goods (CPG) industry. The book analyzes the strategies needed to scale and grow a CPG business. It covers the strategic blunders to avoid and all other relevant topics needed to launch a CPG company.

In Beer School, authors and entrepreneurs Steve Hindy and Tom Potter share the improbable saga of Brooklyn Brewery, the company they grew from a home-brew hobby into a multimillion-dollar business - all in the most competitive beer market in the United States. If you have a thirst for entrepreneurial success, drink up. If you are a business manager or owner and want fresh ideas and insight, tap in. You'll learn entrepreneurial basics, plus some things textbooks don't teach you, as you follow the company's successes (and a few failures).

Baseline Selling: How to Become a Sales Superstar by Using What You Already Know About the Game of Baseball will dramatically change the way we approach the sales process, replacing the gratuitous complexity advocated by today's sales "experts" with an elegant and very effective simplicity. Studies have shown that the selling techniques of the last two decades have had very little impact on most of the sales population. Why?

Patagonia, named by Fortune in 2007 as the coolest company on the planet, has earned a reputation as much for its ground-breaking environmental and social practices as for the quality of its clothes. In this exceptionally frank account, Chouinard and Stanley recount how the company and its culture gained the confidence, by step and misstep, to make its work progressively more responsible, and to ultimately share its discoveries with companies as large as Wal-Mart or as small as the corner bakery.

Do you love the idea of Appreciative Inquiry, but you’re not sure how you would put it into practice? This book is the step-by-step guide to get you started using it confidently with teams and small groups. Author Andy Smith has over 15 years’ experience of facilitating Appreciative Inquiry processes. He has trained hundreds of people in how to put the theory of Appreciative Inquiry into practice – now let him share with you practical tips and formats for implementing each stage of the process.

Stephen Lynch takes you through the proven strategic planning and business execution processes you need to drive better business results. This is not just theory. Stephen works in the trenches. As Chief Operating Officer of Results.com - the Business Execution Experts - he knows what it's like to run and grow a business.

So many HR professionals crave the freedom and flexibility of being an independent HR consultant, and then the fear kicks in about whether they can make the transition from corporate to consulting and maintain their income whilst learning how to be a consultant. This audiobook guides you through not only the knowledge but also the mindset needed to be successful as well as building your confidence so that you too can make this move.

Longtime Dollar General CEO Cal Turner, Jr. shares his extraordinary life as heir to the company founded by his father Cal Turner, Sr. and his grandfather, a dirt farmer turned Depression-era entrepreneur. Cal's narrative is at its heart a father-son story, from his childhood in Scottsville, Kentucky, where business and family were one, to the triumph of reaching the Fortune 300 - at the cost of risking that very father/son relationship. Cal shares how the small-town values with which he was raised helped him guide Dollar General from family enterprise to national powerhouse.

Beyond the E-Myth embraces the fundamental premise of that first book - that a small business only succeeds to the degree its owner goes to work on the business rather than just in it, creating the systemic operating system that makes that business unique in the marketplace.

How have Japanese companies become world leaders in the automotive and electronics industries, among others? What is the secret of their success? Two leading Japanese business experts, Ikujiro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi, are the first to tie the success of Japanese companies to their ability to create new knowledge and use it to produce successful products and technologies.

Through her global consulting projects, keynote speeches, and work with thousands of leaders, Karen has seen first-hand how a pervasive lack of clarity strangles business performance and erodes employee engagement. Ambiguity is the corporate default state, a condition so prevalent that “tolerance for ambiguity” has become a clichéd job requirement. It doesn’t have to be this way.