Bringing Your Business to Life


Book Description

Bringing Your Business to Life examines the four virtues necessary for doing well and being good, within the complexities of the life of the businessperson. The authors draw from their vast combined experiences and from the rich and profound tradition of the four virtues of prudence, justice, courage, and temperance to teach today's entrepreneur in business. Practical and inspiring, this unique blend of real cases and practical insights provides a balanced approach to doing business. For anyone with entrepreneurial spirit, Bringing Your Business to Life provides a unique integration of moral reflection and entrepreneurial experience that displays the importance and the benefits of applying faith at work, both personally and professionally.




Bringing Your Business to Life


Book Description

Bringing Your Business to Life examines the four virtues necessary for doing well and being good, within the complexities of the life of the businessperson. The authors draw from their vast combined experiences and from the rich and profound tradition of the four virtues of prudence, justice, courage and temperance to teach today’s entrepreneur in business. Practical and inspiring, this unique blend of real cases and practical insights provides a balanced approach to doing business. For anyone with entrepreneurial spirit, Bringing Your Business to Life provides a unique integration of moral reflection and entrepreneurial experience that displays the importance and the benefits of applying faith at work, both personally and professionally.




Values


Book Description

What matters to us? One way of answering that question is through the lens of values, which have a powerful influence on our attitudes and behaviours. Yet it can be difficult for businesses to realize the true potential of values, which is to engage staff, customers and suppliers in an emotional way that touches on their own core motivations. Drawing on a range of case studies worldwide, including “profit with purpose” businesses such as co-operatives, this short guide reveals how to make a success of values. By unpacking what we mean by values and ethics, and setting out a series of practical approaches, Ed Mayo presents how values can become a natural part of commercial life. This book identifies both the pitfalls and the potential of bringing values into the heart of an organization, from a bank that responds to an ethical crisis to a fast-growing worker co-operative founded on the values of equality. The values that guide your business are not necessarily the ones that are written down, or that you would expect. There is no one right or wrong set of values, but there is power and potential in making the most of the values that are right for the business you are in. By reading Values: How to Bring Values to Life in Your Business, you will find out more about the business that you are, and the business that you could be.




Why Startups Fail


Book Description

If you want your startup to succeed, you need to understand why startups fail. “Whether you’re a first-time founder or looking to bring innovation into a corporate environment, Why Startups Fail is essential reading.”—Eric Ries, founder and CEO, LTSE, and New York Times bestselling author of The Lean Startup and The Startup Way Why do startups fail? That question caught Harvard Business School professor Tom Eisenmann by surprise when he realized he couldn’t answer it. So he launched a multiyear research project to find out. In Why Startups Fail, Eisenmann reveals his findings: six distinct patterns that account for the vast majority of startup failures. • Bad Bedfellows. Startup success is thought to rest largely on the founder’s talents and instincts. But the wrong team, investors, or partners can sink a venture just as quickly. • False Starts. In following the oft-cited advice to “fail fast” and to “launch before you’re ready,” founders risk wasting time and capital on the wrong solutions. • False Promises. Success with early adopters can be misleading and give founders unwarranted confidence to expand. • Speed Traps. Despite the pressure to “get big fast,” hypergrowth can spell disaster for even the most promising ventures. • Help Wanted. Rapidly scaling startups need lots of capital and talent, but they can make mistakes that leave them suddenly in short supply of both. • Cascading Miracles. Silicon Valley exhorts entrepreneurs to dream big. But the bigger the vision, the more things that can go wrong. Drawing on fascinating stories of ventures that failed to fulfill their early promise—from a home-furnishings retailer to a concierge dog-walking service, from a dating app to the inventor of a sophisticated social robot, from a fashion brand to a startup deploying a vast network of charging stations for electric vehicles—Eisenmann offers frameworks for detecting when a venture is vulnerable to these patterns, along with a wealth of strategies and tactics for avoiding them. A must-read for founders at any stage of their entrepreneurial journey, Why Startups Fail is not merely a guide to preventing failure but also a roadmap charting the path to startup success.




Disciplined Entrepreneurship


Book Description

24 Steps to Success! Disciplined Entrepreneurship will change the way you think about starting a company. Many believe that entrepreneurship cannot be taught, but great entrepreneurs aren’t born with something special – they simply make great products. This book will show you how to create a successful startup through developing an innovative product. It breaks down the necessary processes into an integrated, comprehensive, and proven 24-step framework that any industrious person can learn and apply. You will learn: Why the “F” word – focus – is crucial to a startup’s success Common obstacles that entrepreneurs face – and how to overcome them How to use innovation to stand out in the crowd – it’s not just about technology Whether you’re a first-time or repeat entrepreneur, Disciplined Entrepreneurship gives you the tools you need to improve your odds of making a product people want. Author Bill Aulet is the managing director of the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship as well as a senior lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management. For more please visit http://disciplinedentrepreneurship.com/




Spark Click Go: How to Bring Your Creative Business Idea to Life


Book Description

You've Got a Creative Business Idea, Now What? Has this ever happened to you? You come up with a brilliant idea for a business, and then . . . nothing happens. Your idea goes nowhere. It lives in your thoughts or you have some fun talking about it, but your idea dies along the way. Cause of death? Lack of action. That's where SPARK-CLICK-GO comes in. Without the SPARK of the idea, with no follow-through and testing, the CLICK with end users, and ultimately validation or GO, aspiring entrepreneurs like you may remain just that-aspiring. You may waste time or money. You may stumble. You may get discouraged and re-up to a corporate life that zaps you of your creative energy. But what if you could learn the steps along a path to creating a lasting business-one that could meet your financial needs-one that could even become something really big? The SPARK-CLICK-GO Journey is designed to help you develop a worthy creative business-one that reflects you as a person and brings value to customers and to society. Innovator and start-up mentor Douglas Ross introduces a process designed to help aspiring entrepreneurs everywhere build momentum by discovering, developing, testing, launching, and strengthening a creative business idea. And he does so with warmth, humor, and storytelling. Are you ready to get to GO? GRAB a copy of this book today and get your ideas out of your head and on the path to success.




Start Your Business in 7 Days


Book Description

Work for yourself in just one week with Britain's most dynamic entrepreneur 'Everybody wants to be an entrepreneur. Every single day of my life I am bombarded by people with pitches. But 90% of new businesses fail, because their founders failed to ask themselves the simplest of questions. I can save you years of wasted time and thousands of pounds of wasted money by giving you the ammunition to ask the right questions, and helping you make the decision that is right for you. I will show you how to spend a maximum of seven days deciding if your idea is workable and bankable. How to say 'I'm in', but equally importantly, to have the courage to say 'I'm out'. How to become your own Dragon. Each piece of advice in this book is based on my thirty years of starting businesses. You will find all the fundamental ingredients for any new company, whatever sector you want to be in, whatever size of business you have in mind, along with the tools to make it work. Answer all the tough questions I am going to get you to ask yourself and you will have a business that genuinely has a chance of success. You can be one of the 10% of businesses that do make it.' - James Caan. James Caan is one of the UK's most successful and dynamic entrepreneurs, having built and sold businesses since 1985. After dropping out of school at sixteen and starting his first business in a Pall Mall broom cupboard - armed with little more than charm and his father's advice - Caan went on to make his fortune in the recruitment industry, founding the Alexander Mann Group, a company with a turnover of £130m. A 2003 graduate of Harvard Business School, Caan's most recent endeavour has been to set up private equity firm Hamilton Bradshaw. Caan hit our screens when he joined the panel of the BBC's Dragons' Den in 2007. He is a regular in the national and business press, advises on various Government programmes, and initiates numerous philanthropic projects via the James Caan Foundation.




The Pocket Small Business Owner's Guide to Business Plans


Book Description

Planning is essential to creating a competitive advantage for your small business, and properly done, it can actually be fun. That is the message of this thorough guide, written in easy-to-follow, nontechnical language that you don’t need an MBA to understand. In what areas will your business specialize? What are some of the resources you will need, and challenges you will face? How much do you want your company to grow? Once you have established a vision of your business’s future, you will be on your way to making it a reality. Topics covered include: Creating a business model Identifying and beating the competition Calculating expenses Determining whether you need additional capital Avoiding common mistakes Writing your executive summary Developing a marketing strategy Evaluating your team Analyzing your progress And more! Whatever your background and whatever kind of business you dream of starting, this latest installment in our popular Pocket Small Business Owner’s Guide will help you to achieve your goals!




The Founder's Dilemmas


Book Description

The Founder's Dilemmas examines how early decisions by entrepreneurs can make or break a startup and its team. Drawing on a decade of research, including quantitative data on almost ten thousand founders as well as inside stories of founders like Evan Williams of Twitter and Tim Westergren of Pandora, Noam Wasserman reveals the common pitfalls founders face and how to avoid them.




The Art of Living Consciously


Book Description

The Art of Living Consciously Is an Operating Manual for Our Basic Tool of Survival In The Art of Living Consciously, Dr. Nathaniel Branden, our foremost authority on self-esteem, takes us into new territory, exploring the actions of our minds when they are operating as our life and well-being require -- and also when they are not. No other book illuminates so clearly what true mindfulness means: * In the workplace * In the arena of romantic love * In child-rearing * In the pursuit of personal development Today we are exposed to an unprecedented amount of information and an unprecedented number of opinions about every conceivable aspect of life. We are thrown on our own resources as never before -- and we have nothing to protect us but the clarity of our thinking. In The Art of Living Consciously, Branden gives us the tools with which to draw out the best within us.