Small Leadership

Positive leaders are able to dramatically expand their people’s - and their own - capacity for excellence. And they accomplish this without enormous expenditures or huge heroic gestures. The authors show that, like the butterfly in Brazil whose flapping wings create a typhoon in Texas, you can create profound positive change in your organization through simple actions and attitude shifts.

Written in the same entertaining, story-driven style that made The Power of Nice the go-to book for finishing first, The Power of Small demonstrates how all of us can harness the power of small to improve and reinvent our lives. It's the ultimate guide to shrinking your outlook to broaden your horizons.

In this new book, Frederick Chavalit Tsao and Chris Laszlo argue that current approaches to leadership fail to produce positive outcomes for either businesses or the communities they serve. Employee disengagement and customer fickleness remain high, resulting in a lack of creativity and collaboration at all levels of entrepreneurial activity. Investor demand for Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) continues to be poorly integrated into profit strategies.

With over $500 million a year in sales, the Bassett Furniture Company was once the world's biggest wood furniture manufacturer. But beginning in the 1980s, the Bassett company suffered from an influx of cheap Chinese furniture as the first waves of Asian competition hit, and ultimately was forced to send its production offshore to Asia. Only one man fought back. That man is John Bassett III, a descendant of the Bassetts who is now chairman of Vaughan-Bassett Furniture Co, which employs more than 700 Virginians and has sales of over $90 million.

Author Amber Richards owned and operated a single-person home-cleaning business for three years. She shares tips and advice she wishes someone had shared with her before starting up the business. With transparency to both mistakes and successes, this audiobook is packed with useful information and strategies from someone who actually worked in the business.

The emphasis is not focused on practical cleaning tips, although there is a chapter about products in general.

Fraser Doherty's 48-Hour Start-Up is your handy and essential cheat sheet to starting your own business, giving the key steps for developing an idea and getting it to market quickly. Almost everyone dreams of starting their own business, but very few do it. What if it had to be only a decision of a weekend, and it didn't cost a fortune?

What if the smartest people in the world understand something that the rest of us don't? (They do.) What if they know that in order to achieve success, they will sometimes have to do things that others may initially perceive as stupid? The fact of the matter is that the smartest people in the world don't run from stupid, they lean into it (in a smart way). In The Power of Starting Something Stupid, Richie Norton redefines stupid as we know it, demonstrating that life-changing ideas are often tragically mislabeled stupid.

As a small to medium business owner, correctly managing your workers' compensation coverage may mean the difference between staying open another year or closing your doors for good. This is the book that you wish you had read before you hired your first team member. In it, Nancy Germond will break down the complexity of workers' compensation, why you need it, why you need to pay attention to it, and how doing it well will make your team better and help your company's bottom line.

How do you become a better manager? What are the most important things you should do to get the most from your work force? Can you operate a virtual office? What should you consider when hiring from competition? This is one of a series of eight short, easy to read books from the Small Business Success Collection, containing actionable insights from Dave Berkus, nationally recognized successful entrepreneur, angel investor and board member, serving over forty companies. Dave tells stories of successes and failures - of strategies that worked, and those that didn’t. He offers his insights ...

Are you a business owner who has little experience with accounting notions? Do you want to optimize resources and lower the costs of managing your business? Learn to easily manage the accounting by using the software QuickBooks. If you want to manage your business well, optimizing accounting processes and financial planning, saving time and money to invest in the growth of your business, this audiobook will become your best partner.

In the new edition of this fascinating book, a book that has appeared on MSNBC, CNBC, Slashdot.org, Lifehacker.com and in the New York Times, best-selling author Scott Berkun pulls the best lessons from the history of innovation, including the recent software and web age, to reveal powerful and surprising truths about how ideas become successful innovations - truths people can easily apply to the challenges of today.

In the current digital age, it is becoming increasingly more difficult to stay focused. Smartphones, tablets, smart watches, and other devices constantly vie for our attention. In both business and life, we are constantly bombarded with tweets, likes, mentions, and a constant stream of information. The inability to pay attention impacts learning, parenting, prioritizing, and leading. Noise: Living and Leading When Nobody Can Focus teaches managers and leaders how to help themselves and others sharpen their focusing skills.

The number one reason most new businesses fail is that their owner or owners did not have enough business knowledge. An established and highly successful entrepreneur himself, John cuts through the motivational pep talks and teaches you proven business-building methods that have been used by the most successful entrepreneurs of all time. He provides you with specific steps you must take to build a profitable business that lasts.

In 1998, three Harvard Business School graduates - two men and one woman - turned down six-figure salaries at big corporations, bet on themselves, and launched their own new companies. By their 10-year reunion, their audacity had paid huge dividends. They'd made many millions of dollars, created hundreds of jobs and left their mark on the world. The Intelligent Entrepreneur tells the compelling and instructive story of how these three young founders did it.

Starting with nothing more than a home-brewing kit, Sam Calagione turned his entrepreneurial dream into a foamy reality in the form of Dogfish Head Craft Brewery, one of America's best and fastest-growing craft breweries. In this newly updated second edition, Calagione offers a deeper real-world look at entrepreneurship and what it takes to operate and grow a successful business.

Not confident with your negotiating skills? This book will cure you! A must-have for any small business owner, The Pocket Small Business Owner’s Guide to Negotiating is full of helpful tips and strategies for getting what you want without alienating your clients and suppliers. You will learn to analyze your wants, needs, advantages, and disadvantages going in, maintain your resolve, and see the negotiation through to a successful end. Topics include position bargaining, contracts, purchases, conflict resolution, and more.

You’d think that was self-evident, but usually, companies are unintentionally giving it away. If you’re like most of our clients, you’ve got enough worries on your plate when it comes to making sure everything in the business is running smoothly. You don’t have the bandwidth to take on another project, especially one this large—that has the probability of costing the company thousands of dollars in repairs, overages, gas...the list goes on.

We typically work most directly with a small group of no more than 10 people, and in that team, we have a high degree of influence. Charlie Gilkey, an internationally known thought leader on productivity, planning, strategy, and leadership for creative people, explains how changing our team's habits can change our company's culture since that culture is always just an aggregation of its various teams' work habits.

From generating ideas to gaining your first paying customers, The 7 Day Startup is the bootstrapper's bible for launching your next product.

In this lesson, learn about acquisitions and mergers, the role they play in business and how to use them successfully. Advice for entrepreneurs who want to rapidly expand their business and safely buy a functioning company or companies.