Small Leadership

Faced with the choice of starting a company or joining a large corporation, Steve Jobs believed that it was "more fun to be a pirate than to join the navy". But for innovators inside established companies, making a distinction between being a pirate and joining the navy is a fallacy. We have to figure out a way to become pirates in the navy! This is a step-by-step guide to getting continuous innovation done in companies and reshaping them in the process. It is for anyone involved in corporate innovation and driving company change.

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.

Kathleen Kelly Janus, a lecturer at the Stanford University Program on Social Entrepreneurship and the founder of the successful social enterprise Spark, set out to investigate what makes a startup succeed or fail. She surveyed more than 200 high-performing social entrepreneurs and interviewed dozens of founders. Social Startup Success shares her findings for the legions of entrepreneurs working for social good, revealing how the best organizations get over the revenue hump.

A personal brand is an association that occurs in the head of people when they mention the name of a business person. By whom do they represent him, how could they describe the strengths, weaknesses of a person, character, and everything else. A personal brand helps to stand out from competitors.

Art Ciocca orchestrated the creation of the largest wine brand that has dominated the industry for over twenty years. It is an achievement that even the best entrepreneurs can only dream of, yet perhaps you've never even heard his name. Inspired by Art, Andreas Widmer crafts a practical model of principled entrepreneurship that anyone can adopt in their work. Widmer outlines five pillars that form the foundation of an entrepreneurial mindset that places the human person at the center of work.

When Martin Kihn joined a powerhouse New York consulting firm, he thought his job was to help organizations. In reality, the consultants spent precious work hours prowling for new clients, and offered little or no useful information. From power breakfasts with mind games to the screaming indignity of “Feedback Camp” in New Jersey, House of Lies reveals the truth about a “profession” that could threaten your job, your career, and your life...and even throws you some lifelines should the suits start circling your company.

The light, humorous tone in Streetsmart Financial Basics for Nonprofit Managers makes it an accessible resource for nonprofit executives, board members, students, and those new to the field. This book forgoes useless, pretentious verbiage in order to outline real-world strategies that work. This edition includes: new insights, updates, vignettes, case studies, and examples to deal with the implications of nonprofit financial management; an examination of nonprofit business models in relation to growing demands from the government and other funders; and more.

Most small business owners never achieve their goals because they do not know what to do or do not understand why they need to do it and/or cannot figure out how to do it. Running Your Small Business like a Pro is a commonsense guide for learning how to run your business as a professional enterprise. It provides you with a fundamental understanding of the challenges small businesses face with real-world solutions that drive results.

With so many choices available to them today's customers are smarter and more demanding than ever before, putting repeat business at risk. In order to keep them coming back, you can't just give them good, or even great, customer service...you have to knock their socks off!

The history-making development of the Chinese economy has entered a new phase: China is moving aggressively from a strategy of imitation to one of innovation. Driven both by domestic needs and by global ambition, China is establishing itself at the forefront of technological innovation. Western businesses need to prepare for a tidal wave of innovation from China that is about to hit Western markets, and Chinese businesses need to understand the critical importance of innovation in their future.

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.

Developed for business professionals, The First Two Hours teaches you how to design your day, rather than be at the mercy of it. Using research on neuroscience, energy flow, and the body's natural rhythms, it divides the workday into manageable blocks and helps you determine when you are most resourceful, and therefore when you should complete your most demanding tasks.

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.

Innovation is the subject of countless books and courses, but there's very little out there about how you actually innovate. Innovation and entrepreneurship are not one and the same, although aspiring innovators often think of them that way. They are told to get an idea and a team and to build a show-and-tell for potential investors. In Innovating, Luis Perez-Breva describes another approach.

Unlock the transformative power of outsourcing and elevate your small business with "How to Use Outsourcing to Grow Your Small Business—SCALE!" Dive into the journey of an entrepreneur who turned a small venture into a thriving empire through strategic outsourcing. This guide is filled with actionable tips and insights on leveraging outsourcing for growth and personal freedom.

Scott Wozniak leverages his decades of brand-building experience within some of America’s most-loved companies to show you how to create world-class customer experience. After years of battle-tested work, Scott realized that there was a set of systems that all the great brands used to create raving fans. He captured these practices in an engine diagram, a simple tool to help leaders become legends. If you use this approach, you can build a Customer Experience Engine that will create those same kinds of raving fans that always seem to dominate dinner-party conversations and water-cooler chats.

“What would Jeff do?” Since leaving Amazon to advise start-ups and corporations, John Rossman has been asked this question countless times by executives who want to know “the secret” behind Amazon’s historic success. In this step-by-step guide, he provides 50½ answers drawn from his experience as an Amazon executive - and shows today’s business leaders how to think like Amazon, strategize like Bezos, and beat the competition like nobody’s business.

Start a successful business mid-life When you think of someone launching a start-up, the image of a twenty-something techie probably springs to mind. However, Gen Xers and Baby Boomers are just as likely to start businesses and reinvent themselves later in life. Never Too Old to Get Rich is an exciting road map for anyone age 50-plus looking to be their own boss and launch their dream business.

The Art of Strategic Partnering is a how-to guide for creating and managing successful strategic partnerships. Made for entrepreneurial leaders and executives, this audiobook shows you how to grow a company and achieve game-changing results. Learn tried-and-true lessons from a Silicon Valley industry expert who has successfully negotiated and managed more than 150 strategic partnerships.

Make your breakthrough with the secrets that fueled 10 of today's greatest entrepreneurial successes!

The time is to act is now! The opportunities for wealth, success, and personal freedom are greater today than ever before. The only question that may be holding you back is: "How?"