Small Business Management

In this revised and expanded edition of his groundbreaking Thinkertoys, creativity expert Michael Michalko reveals life-changing tools that will help you think like a genius. From the linear to the intuitive, this comprehensive handbook details ingenious creative-thinking techniques for approaching problems in unconventional ways. Through fun and thought-provoking exercises, you'll learn how to create original ideas that will improve your personal life and your business life.

The best products can still lose in the marketplace. Why? They are beaten by stronger product marketing. Yet, product marketing is widely misunderstood. It includes segmenting and targeting customers, positioning products vs. alternatives, creating product collateral, and supporting sales teams. But great product marketing achieves much more: it identifies the best way to bring your product to market, accelerates your product's ability to penetrate markets over time, shapes what the world thinks about your product and your category, and inspires customers to tell your product's story.

Do you feel like your pay check just passes through your account each payday, all spent up before you even get a chance to look at your account? Do you always find yourself scraping money together just to pay your bills? Do you often wonder where all your money goes, even if you’re making a decent income? If you do, then let’s face it - you need a budget. No matter how much money you have coming in, without a consistent way to keep track of it, that money is bound to vanish as soon as it goes into your pocket.

Blue Ocean Shift is the essential follow-up to Blue Ocean Strategy, the classic 3.6 million copy global best seller by world-renowned professors W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne. Drawing on more than a decade of new work, Kim and Mauborgne show you how to move beyond competing, inspire your people's confidence, and seize new growth, guiding you step by step through how to take your organization from a red ocean crowded with competition to a blue ocean of uncontested market space.

How can you take your skills and expertise and package it to become a successful consultant? There are proven time-tested principles, strategies, tactics, and best practices the most successful consultants use to start, run, and grow their consulting business. Consulting Success teaches you what they are.

The Blue Square Method is a philosophy and process for the enlightened fee-for-service professional who is striving to grow on their own terms. Panoramic success requires continual refinement and optimization both personally and professionally. This actionable playbook is designed to put you on a predictable trajectory and ensure you never plateau.

The Cofounder’s Handbook brings business partnerships into the spotlight where they belong. Most people don’t realize how much their partnership affects the strength of their business. The right cofounder multiplies your success. But the wrong partner divides your attention and effort, hinders your business’s progress, and potentially destroys it from within.

Whether you're imagining your new business to be the next big thing in Silicon Valley, a pivotal B2B provider, or an anchor in your local community, the Harvard Business Review Entrepreneur's Handbook is your essential resource for getting your company off the ground. Starting an independent new business is rife with both opportunity and risk. And as an entrepreneur, you're the one in charge: Your actions can make or break your business. You need to know the tried-and-true fundamentals - from writing a business plan to getting your first loan.

From living on Jess's wages as a makeup counter sales clerk, to achieving dramatic success as network marketing partners, to running a multi-million-dollar coaching and training company today, Ray and Jessica Higdon have built their lives on a shared desire for freedom and balance. With 10 simple rules for redefining what's possible in your life, this book will help you build confidence, shift your mind-set, and learn the tools to take control of your life and start on a path toward your own definition of freedom.

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.

Explore the universe of potential buyers. Learn how to assemble a team of expert advisors to prepare your business for sale. Walk step by step through a typical investment-banker-led midmarket sale process from start to finish. Adam Coffey has spent the last 20 years as CEO of three private-equity-backed national service companies. Through his experience executing a buy-and-build strategy, he has bought and sold more than 100 companies ranging in size from $1 million to $1 billion. Selling your business is an art.

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.

The subject of “design thinking” is the rage at business schools, throughout corporations, and increasingly in the popular press - due in large part to work of IDEO, a leading design firm, and its celebrated CEO, Tim Brown, who uses this audiobook to reveal how the techniques and strategies of design belong at every level of business. Change by Design is an audiobook for creative leaders seeking to infuse design thinking into every level of an organization, product, or service to drive new alternatives for business and society.

In Startup Life, Brad Feld - a Boulder, Colorado-based entrepreneur turned-venture capitalist - shares his own personal experiences with his wife, Amy, offering a series of rich insights into successfully leading a balanced life as a human being who wants to play as hard as he works and who wants to be as fulfilled in life and in work. With this book, Feld distills his 20 years of experience in this field to addresses how the village of startup people can put aside their workaholic ways and lead rewarding lives in all respects.

Murphy's Law tells us that if something can go wrong, it will. Nonsense! says Al Casey, who maintains: If things can go right, they should. But you've got to make them go right, he adds, by hard work, focusing on key problems, and believing in the people around you. One of the most successful - and original - American businessmen of our time, Al Casey is a no-nonsense turnaround specialist who loves nothing more than the big challenges, whether in the private or the public sector.

Under the aegis of machine learning in our data-driven machine age, computers are programming themselves and learning about - and solving - an extraordinary range of problems, from the mundane to the most daunting. Today it is machine learning programs that enable Amazon and Netflix to predict what users will like, Apple to power Siri's ability to understand voices, and Google to pilot cars.

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?

McKinsey & Company is the most respected and most secretive consulting firm in the world, and business readers just can't seem to get enough of all things McKinsey. Now, hot on the heels of his acclaimed international best seller The McKinsey Way, Ethan Rasiel brings listeners a powerful new guide to putting McKinsey concepts and skills into action­­: The McKinsey Mind. It explains, step-by-step, how to use McKinsey tools, techniques, and strategies to solve an array of core business problems and to make any business venture more successful.

This amazing book is jam-packed with the best, most profitable business ideas and ways to earn extra cash. Every one of these businesses is generating profits for other ambitious people. Now it's your turn to start your own business and prosper in the years to come. Whether you'd like an opportunity to earn a little extra money or you are looking for a way to make a full-time income, you'll achieve your own success with one of the 235 profitable businesses described in this book.

Hundreds of thousands of business leaders and aspiring professionals have profited from the wisdom and savvy of Lead the Field! Now you can, too. Lead the Field has often been referred to as the "Program of Presidents" because so many top executives and business leaders have incorporated Earl Nightingale's insight and guidance into their management philosophies. This landmark book is a practical guide on how to think and act like a success. The timeless stories Nightingale uses to make his points are as profound as they are accessible.