Small Business Trends - Editor's Choice Awards: 2009 Best Small Business Books Twelve recommended books listed in alphabetical order along with expert input from a 27 member advisory panel.
Driving Growth and Shareholder Value: The Distribution Value Map™E. Neil Gholson, Mark T. Schloegel
A publication of National Association of Wholesaler Distributors (NAW)
Whether you choose to read Driving Growth and Shareholder Value: The Distribution Value Map™, from front to back or dive into a chapter that is most relevant for you today, you will discover provocative suggestions and handy reminders that can help you to elevate your organization to the next level of performance. Refer to this dynamic and interactive resource again and again as your leading guide for driving growth and improving shareholder value.
The Art of ProfitabilityAdrian Slywotzky
Warner Books, Incorporated, c2002
In the Art of Profitability the author takes the subject of profitability out of the realm of strategic planning and away from the number-crunching; instead he writes about how profit happens. It reads like a play with many scenes. Slywotsky sets out twenty-three chapters that are identified as "lessons" each one dealing with a specific strategy in the generation of profitable business activity.
The Upside: The 7 Strategies For Turning Big Threats Into Growth Breakthroughs
Adrian Slywotzky with Karl Weber
Crown Business, c2007
Slywotzky devotes less attention to the "what" (i.e. seven strategies), preferring to focus primarily on the "why" and "how" of strategic risk management which enables just about any organization (regardless of size or nature) to "turn big threats into growth breakthroughs."
More specifically, if a major initiative fails or at least falls far short of high hopes and great expectations; there is a significant loss of customer revenue; there is a paradigm, shift within the given industry; a seeming unbeatable competitor appears; loss of brand power and leverage; the given industry has become a no-profit zone; zero or insignificant organizational growth. "The first two jobs of strategic management are to sidestep the unnecessary blows [i.e. self-inflicted wounds] and mitigate the blows you can't avoid. You can avoid the biggest hits to your company's value through as strategic risk management system that uses the principles and techniques described in the rest of this book."
You Need To Be A Little Crazy: The Truth About Starting and Growing Your Business
Barry J. Moltz
Dearborn, c2003
The best way to debunk myths about start-up business is to tell the truth: You have to be crazy to start a business. Entrepreneurs live at the complex intersection of business, financial health, physical well-being, spiritual wholeness, and family life. Tidbits of insight will vaporize isolation, encourage self-reflection, and refresh the spirit of anyone running their own business.
The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make A Big Difference
Malcolm Gladwell
Little Brown, c2000
It's a book about change. In particular, it's a book that presents a new way of understanding why change so often happens as quickly and as unexpectedly as it does. It's that ideas and behavior and messages and products sometimes behave just like outbreaks of infectious disease. They are social epidemics. The Tipping Point is an examination of the social epidemics that surround us.
Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking
Malcolm Gladwell
Taurus/Santillana, 2005
It's a book about rapid cognition, about the kind of thinking that happens in a blink of an eye. When you meet someone for the first time, or walk into a house you are thinking of buying, or read the first few sentences of a book, your mind takes about two seconds to jump to a series of conclusions. Well, "Blink" is a book about those two seconds, because I think those instant conclusions that we reach are really powerful and really important and, occasionally, really good.