Completely revised and updated edition of this very popular and successful small business book The first edition of 201 Great Ideas for Your Small Business was hailed by management guru and author Tom Peters as "Brilliantly researched. Brilliantly written. A gem of priceless value on almost every page. Read. Inhale. Absorb. Great Stuff!" In this completely updated third edition of 201 Great Ideas for Your Small Business, renowned small-business expert and consultant Jane Applegate shares new, powerful, creative, simple, and proven approaches for building a better small business. Details how business owners can use online marketing and social networking more effectively Offers timely strategies for thriving in challenging economic times Includes scores of real-life success stories and all-new interviews with small-business owners, experts, and VIP's including Guy Kawasaki, Kay Koplovitz, and Michael Bloomberg It may be small, but your business is a big deal to you, your customers, and employees. 201 Great Ideas provides lively, practical strategies to help you manage, grow, and promote your business.

Completely revised and updated edition of this very popular and successful small business book The first edition of 201 Great Ideas for Your Small Business was hailed by management guru and author Tom Peters as "Brilliantly researched. Brilliantly written. A gem of priceless value on almost every page. Read. Inhale. Absorb. Great Stuff!" In this completely updated third edition of 201 Great Ideas for Your Small Business, renowned small-business expert and consultant Jane Applegate shares new, powerful, creative, simple, and proven approaches for building a better small business. Details how business owners can use online marketing and social networking more effectively Offers timely strategies for thriving in challenging economic times Includes scores of real-life success stories and all-new interviews with small-business owners, experts, and VIP's including Guy Kawasaki, Kay Koplovitz, and Michael Bloomberg It may be small, but your business is a big deal to you, your customers, and employees. 201 Great Ideas provides lively, practical strategies to help you manage, grow, and promote your business.

getAbstract Summary: Get the key points from this book in less than 10 minutes.Jane Applegate's book is an idea journal for the budding entrepreneur. No one business can use all these ideas, every business owner will be able to use a few of the ideas Applegate mentions. Some of her great ideas are specific to a single type of business. Other ideas sound fine, but deal with areas that are difficult for an entrepreneur to control. The book's big drawback is that it lacks an over-reaching strategy. It is a set of disconnected ideas, which makes it more useful as a brainstorming tool than as anything you would use as the basis of a business. It doesn't tell you how to create a marketing plan, but it gives you marketing ideas you can incorporate into the plan you develop. getAbstract recommends this book to owners of relatively new, small businesses who are hungry for a few ideas to move it further along. [Note: many of the ideas are specific to the United States.]Book Publisher:Bloomberg Press

A practical guide to effective business model testing 7 out of 10 new products fail to deliver on expectations. Testing Business Ideas aims to reverse that statistic. In the tradition of Alex Osterwalder’s global bestseller Business Model Generation, this practical guide contains a library of hands-on techniques for rapidly testing new business ideas. Testing Business Ideas explains how systematically testing business ideas dramatically reduces the risk and increases the likelihood of success for any new venture or business project. It builds on the internationally popular Business Model Canvas and Value Proposition Canvas by integrating Assumptions Mapping and other powerful lean startup-style experiments. Testing Business Ideas uses an engaging 4-color format to: Increase the success of any venture and decrease the risk of wasting time, money, and resources on bad ideas Close the knowledge gap between strategy and experimentation/validation Identify and test your key business assumptions with the Business Model Canvas and Value Proposition Canvas A definitive field guide to business model testing, this book features practical tips for making major decisions that are not based on intuition and guesses. Testing Business Ideas shows leaders how to encourage an experimentation mindset within their organization and make experimentation a continuous, repeatable process.

An updated third edition of the most comprehensive guide to small business success Whether you're a novice entrepreneur or a seasoned pro, The Small Business Bible offers you everything you need to know to build and grow your dream business. It shows you what really works (and what doesn't!) and includes scores of tips, insider information, stories, and proven secrets of success. Even if you've run your own business for years, this handy guide keeps you up to date on the latest business and tech trends. This Third Edition includes entirely new chapters devoted to social media, mobility and apps, and new trends in online discounting and group buying that are vital to small business owners everywhere. New chapters include: How to use Facebook, Twitter, and other social media tools to engage customers and potential stakeholders How to generate leads and win strategic partnerships with LinkedIn How to employ videos and YouTube to further your brand What you need to know about Groupon and group discount buying What mobile marketing can do for your business Give your small business its best shot by understanding the best and latest small business strategies, especially in this transformative and volatile period. The Small Business Bible offers every bit of information you'll need to know to succeed.

The Challenge Built to Last, the defining management study of the nineties, showed how great companies triumph over time and how long-term sustained performance can be engineered into the DNA of an enterprise from the verybeginning. But what about the company that is not born with great DNA? How can good companies, mediocre companies, even bad companies achieve enduring greatness? The Study For years, this question preyed on the mind of Jim Collins. Are there companies that defy gravity and convert long-term mediocrity or worse into long-term superiority? And if so, what are the universal distinguishing characteristics that cause a company to go from good to great? The Standards Using tough benchmarks, Collins and his research team identified a set of elite companies that made the leap to great results and sustained those results for at least fifteen years. How great? After the leap, the good-to-great companies generated cumulative stock returns that beat the general stock market by an average of seven times in fifteen years, better than twice the results delivered by a composite index of the world's greatest companies, including Coca-Cola, Intel, General Electric, and Merck. The Comparisons The research team contrasted the good-to-great companies with a carefully selected set of comparison companies that failed to make the leap from good to great. What was different? Why did one set of companies become truly great performers while the other set remained only good? Over five years, the team analyzed the histories of all twenty-eight companies in the study. After sifting through mountains of data and thousands of pages of interviews, Collins and his crew discovered the key determinants of greatness -- why some companies make the leap and others don't. The Findings The findings of the Good to Great study will surprise many readers and shed light on virtually every area of management strategy and practice. The findings include: Level 5 Leaders: The research team was shocked to discover the type of leadership required to achieve greatness. The Hedgehog Concept (Simplicity within the Three Circles): To go from good to great requires transcending the curse of competence. A Culture of Discipline: When you combine a culture of discipline with an ethic of entrepreneurship, you get the magical alchemy of great results. Technology Accelerators: Good-to-great companies think differently about the role of technology. The Flywheel and the Doom Loop: Those who launch radical change programs and wrenching restructurings will almost certainly fail to make the leap. “Some of the key concepts discerned in the study,” comments Jim Collins, "fly in the face of our modern business culture and will, quite frankly, upset some people.” Perhaps, but who can afford to ignore these findings?

The definitive history of America’s greatest incubator of innovation and the birthplace of some of the 20th century’s most influential technologies “Filled with colorful characters and inspiring lessons . . . The Idea Factory explores one of the most critical issues of our time: What causes innovation?” —Walter Isaacson, The New York Times Book Review “Compelling . . . Gertner's book offers fascinating evidence for those seeking to understand how a society should best invest its research resources.” —The Wall Street Journal From its beginnings in the 1920s until its demise in the 1980s, Bell Labs-officially, the research and development wing of AT&T-was the biggest, and arguably the best, laboratory for new ideas in the world. From the transistor to the laser, from digital communications to cellular telephony, it's hard to find an aspect of modern life that hasn't been touched by Bell Labs. In The Idea Factory, Jon Gertner traces the origins of some of the twentieth century's most important inventions and delivers a riveting and heretofore untold chapter of American history. At its heart this is a story about the life and work of a small group of brilliant and eccentric men-Mervin Kelly, Bill Shockley, Claude Shannon, John Pierce, and Bill Baker-who spent their careers at Bell Labs. Today, when the drive to invent has become a mantra, Bell Labs offers us a way to enrich our understanding of the challenges and solutions to technological innovation. Here, after all, was where the foundational ideas on the management of innovation were born.