Small Learning

This is the remarkable story of one of our nation’s luckiest business leaders of the 20th and 21st centuries. Its topics include sports, military history, and, of course, business principles that are sure to entertain and add value to listeners of business books and memoirs.

Bennie Pollard has spent his entire adult life working his butt off. After a very challenging childhood, Pollard followed in his mother’s and aunt’s footsteps who were both hairdressers. Pollard started cosmetology school in the early 1980s. He went on to open his own salon in 1992, and by the early 2000s he added “manufacturer” to his resume. Motivated by some of the world’s most influential speakers, Pollard began to make plans to expand his mark on the beauty industry.

Gone are the days when education was something that happened only at the start of your career. The name of today's game, both personally and professionally, is to be constantly learning: just enough, just in time, and never stopping. But where can knowledge workers, professionals, and lifelong learners go to find the training and education they need to stay current and thrive?

Do you want to make a living with your writing? Do you want to turn your words into multiple streams of income? I’m Joanna Penn and I left my corporate job a decade ago to become a full-time author entrepreneur. In this completely updated third edition, I’ll explain how I make a living with my writing and share tips from other writers on how you can do it too with practical, actionable advice that you can implement for yourself.

Each year, the nation's top business schools are flooded with applications from people eager to pursue their MBA dreams. But those aspirations come at a steep price. The average debt load for graduates of top business schools exceeds $100,000. Like most, author Laurie Pickard couldn't shoulder that. But she faced a dilemma: despite two degrees and a Peace Corps stint, she needed a business education to land her dream job in international development. She decided to take her education into her own hands.

Whether we know it or not, we are disconnected and searching more than ever. Learning to Unlearn traverses observations and perspectives regarding the human condition; how culture, technology, and conventional norms are feeding the dis-integration of who we have become, and who we actually are.

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.

This wedding needs to be the event of the season. Unfortunately, the best man is doing everything he can to derail it . . . Wedding planner Beth Shipley has seen it all: bridezillas, monster-in-laws, and last-minute jitters at the altar. But this wedding is different—and the stakes are much...

The reasons to start a small garden are truly endless.... And the best part? It isn’t some kind of complex task that demands tremendous time or energy. It doesn't matter if you have zero experience with gardening, everybody starts somewhere.

This is a FlashBooks audio summary of Don’t Sweat The Small Stuff...and It’s All Small Stuff.

How you create a legendary school starting tomorrow. Have you ever wondered, why didn’t they teach me about this in school?

The Complete Book of Grant Writing is the ultimate grant book that shows you how to write a grant proposal if you're seeking funding through government grants, foundation grants, and specialty grants. Grant proposal writing is an intricate process where any bits of misinformation or formatting errors can mean the difference between securing funding or not. Professional grant writer Nancy Burke Smith and philanthropy consultant and grant maker E. Gabriel Works unveil the secrets behind how to find and successfully apply for grants.

For decades, college has been the only respectable way to access the world of work, despite paralyzing tuition and a dire lack of practical skills that has left 40 percent of college graduates underemployed, unfulfilled, and struggling to repay student-loan debt. Fortunately, college is not America’s only option. In Apprentice Nation, education and workforce expert Ryan Craig explores how a modern apprenticeship system will allow students and job seekers to jumpstart their careers by learning while they earn.

Colleges and universities have become increasingly costly and - except for a handful of highly selective, elite institutions - unresponsive to 21st century needs. But for the past few years, technology-fueled innovation has begun to transform higher education, introducing new ways to disseminate knowledge and better ways to learn - all at lower cost. In this impassioned account, Richard DeMillo tells the behind-the-scenes story of these pioneering efforts and offers a road map for transforming higher education.

Dr. Gary S. Goodman's Inch by Inch It's a Cinch: How to Accomplish Anything One Small Step at a Time will show you to how to get more done in less time with fewer setbacks by reining in your runaway ambition, going instead for small victories that add up fast.

Imagine you can have the knowledge you want to stitch together your business and live the hassle free all-American lifestyle of independence, prosperity, and peace of mind.

Once he received a spark in the form of some key "ah-ha moments", Snow decided to step outside his comfort zone, making many pivotal choices along the way to find his hidden potential. Learning to Choose highlights seven of these choices and the learning lessons that followed on his path to arts advocacy, community building, and creative entrepreneurship. The goal with sharing the stories within this book is to help inspire others to change their life, their community, and maybe even the world as a result of discovering the higher calling buried within all of us.

Small business owners are struggling to stand out in authority-driven fields. They’re losing deals to the competition, getting ignored by the media, and missing out on partnerships that could change the trajectory of their business. Increasingly, entrepreneurs realize that authorship can help by building authority, generating quality leads, and providing IP that lets them efficiently scale their business.

The often hilarious and sometimes poignant story behind Dal LaMagna's attempts to create a successful business. By the time LaMagna graduated from the Harvard Business School, his numerous entrepreneurial activities - including operating discotheques in drive-in movie theaters, working with the 1960s musical teen sensations the Cowsills, and opening an ice cream parlor on the Venice Beach boardwalk - had landed him $150,000 in debt. Raising Eyebrows tells the story of how he finally succeeded. After years of failures and living pennilessly, LaMagna finally succeed with tweezers. He started Tweezerman, one of the world's most respected, innovative and successful beauty tool manufacturers with only $500. Not only was Tweezerman a financial success but is became a model of how to operate a company responsibly.

It isn't just the startups that see the value in the lean way of business. Alaskan Airlines, General Electric, 3M, Telefonica, and other companies have implemented many of the elements that lean start-ups use. Because start-ups are meant to be fast-growing, the lean start-up idea was thought to only work well for those businesses that revolved around the online world. Technology has made it easier to start a business in less time, which is why many entrepreneurs are drawn to technology-driven businesses.