Small Leadership

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.

On the 10th night of co-owning the first restaurant, Cliff thought they would run out of money. Eight days later, there was a line at the front door, and for the next five years, the restaurant hit sales and record profits. Next, Cliff co-founded one of the best wine bars in Atlanta and then one of the best steakhouses in the United States. From there, he opened one of the best seafood restaurants in the county. Over the next 14 years, he helped make the restaurants more profitable than the average independent restaurants.

Imagine if you could start your dream business, work from home, and make a real difference in people's lives. When you become a life coach, all of this is possible. The authors of Make Money as a Life Coach get it. They know what it’s like to navigate the world of online business and coaching. After considerable learning and several wrong turns, they’ve both gone on to create successful coaching businesses.

Unlock the power of Six Sigma with this essential guide to streamlining success! Have you ever struggled with inefficiencies in your business processes that lead to poor quality, wasted time, and decreased profits? Are you looking for a way to enhance your organization's performance and exceed customer expectations? If so, you're not alone, and you've come to the right place! Many businesses face these challenges every day. From inefficient processes to a lack of customer satisfaction, these issues can hinder a company's growth and success.

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.

Many factors shape the success or failure of a new business, whether it's a stand-alone start-up or a venture inside a larger corporation. But the most important and least understood of these factors is the personality of the entrepreneur - the particular combination of beliefs and preferences that drives his or her motivation, decision making, and leadership style. And your builder personality is the one resource you can directly control in growing a business that wins. Simply put, who you are shapes how you build for growth.

Unorthodox success principles from a billionaire entrepreneur and philanthropist.

Eli Broad's embrace of "unreasonable thinking" has helped him build two Fortune 500 companies, amass personal billions, and use his wealth to create a new approach to philanthropy. He has helped to fund scientific research institutes, K-12 education reform, and some of the world's greatest contemporary art museums. By contrast, "reasonable" people come up with all the reasons something new and different can't be done, because, after all, no one else has done it that way.

What if you learned that to lead well, you’d need to live like a drug addict? During treatment for drug addiction, Michael Brody-Waite learned three principles that became the difference between life and death: Practice rigorous authenticity, surrender the outcome, and do uncomfortable work. Leaving rehab, Michael entered the workplace where he was shocked to see most business leaders doing what he had been taught would kill him. He began to see striking similarities between drug addiction and what he calls “mask addiction”.

The Making of a Well-Designed Business is the insiders' guide to helping others overcome the challenges of owning a business. The strategies it provides to ensure success include: The importance of establishing your company mission and core values, how to assemble a team of experts and mentors, where and how to find (and attract) the ideal client, the significance of making customer service your top priority, and why owning your worth is the key to profitable selling.

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.

Throughout history, there are some events that stand out as so groundbreaking that they completely change life as we know it. The Apollo moon landing of 1969 was one of those events - the invention of the Apple personal computer was another. In this book, John Sculley - former CEO of both Pepsi and Apple - claims we are in an era that is giving birth to numerous groundbreaking events and inventions - moonshots - that will change the way we live and work for generations to come.

"The Ultimate Career Survival Master Course" is designed to transform you into an irreplaceable asset in your field. More than a mere guide, this book equips you with the strategies and mindset required to become the most valued individual in your career. Amid a shifting work landscape and rapidly advancing technology, equip yourself with the tools to not just survive but thrive. It's time to future-proof your career and shine in any circumstance.

In Brad Hart’s new book, The 8-Minute Mastermind, Brad introduces us to a new business paradigm which is fun, lucrative, scalable, and truly helps people. Further, it’s easily one of the best ways to improve your own expertise on any subject you choose. After being involved in a long list of masterminds himself, and creating many of his own, Brad shares the benefits along with the hard-won best practices for starting your own, no matter who you are, so you can truly travel anywhere for free, solve any problem, and add $100k+ to your business in five to 10 hours a month.

Around the world, a new generation is looking beyond greater profits, for meaningful purpose. But, unlike business, few social interventions have achieved significant impact at scale. Inspired by the modern innovation practices popularized by best seller The Lean Startup that have fueled technology breakthroughs touching every aspect of our lives, Lean Impact turns our attention to a new goal-achieving radically greater social good.

Dirty Little Secrets of Family Business comes clean with much-needed info on nitty-gritty issues such as entitlement; letting employees go when they just aren’t working out; compensation; including your kids in the business; shareholder agreements; selecting the next leader; deciding whether to keep the business or sell it; exit strategies for outgoing leaders; money matters; succession planning; communication; conflict resolution; establishing an effective board; and transitioning to the next generation.

Attorney and CPA Mark J. Kohler targets the leading tax and business issues among small business owners, across all stages of business, and delivers a practical guide to the fundamental tax and legal conflicts faced by new and established entrepreneurs. Coached by Kohler, business owners are armed to seek out the right professionals relevant to their concerns, confidently ask the right questions, and ultimately, save time, money, and in many cases, potential heartache.

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.

The myth of innovation is that brilliant ideas leap fully formed from the minds of geniuses. The reality is that most innovations come from a process of rigorous examination through which great ideas are identified and developed before being realized as new offerings and capabilities. This is not a book by designers for designers; this is a book for creative leaders seeking to infuse design thinking into every level of an organization's products or service to drive new alternatives for business and society.

Vous vous apprêtez à commencer votre carrière ou vous souhaitez vous réorienter? Vous aimeriez disposer de l’autonomie d’un(e) entrepreneur(e) sans partir de zéro? Et si vous considériez l’entreprise familiale comme option de carrière? Travailler en famille vise à vous apporter le soutien nécessaire dans votre long processus de réflexion. Cet ouvrage vous permettra d’en apprendre davantage sur les particularités d’une entreprise familiale en explorant les 3 sphères qui la composent : l’entreprise, la propriété et la famille.

The most important document for any business is the business plan. It is the strategy for bringing your product or service to the market. So, your business plan outlines what you see as an opportunity and how you plan to take advantage of that opportunity. The best business plans are concise, clear, and easy to understand. If a business plan is too complicated, it will not be taken seriously. If it is too simple, it will not be helpful. This is a step-by-step guide on how to write a simple and successful business plan.