It's surprising how poorly many companies are run. They tend to focus - maybe too much - on entrepreneurship and revenue growth at the expense of behaviour, structure, transparency and control. There's little or no time for efficiency. The first step on the road to improvement is acknowledging that there's a problem. This book will help you organise your business and make it all work. It gives you guidelines for raising your profitability by keeping things under control. The ultimate goal is to make your life easy and to achieve organisational ex- cellence. There are no complicated theories. Instead, Wim Kromhout provides straight- forward explanations and examples, together with a raft of quick wins to get you going. This book could be your best investment ever!

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.

Most of your employees have all the ingredients for greatness inside them already. They simply need you to motivate them. Learn how today!

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?

Master the fundamentals, hone your business instincts, and save a fortune in tuition. The consensus is clear: MBA programs are a waste of time and money. Even the elite schools offer outdated assembly-line educations about profit-and-loss statements and PowerPoint presentations. After two years poring over sanitized case studies, students are shuffled off into middle management to find out how business really works. Josh Kaufman has made a business out of distilling the core principles of business and delivering them quickly and concisely to people at all stages of their careers. His blog has introduced hundreds of thousands of readers to the best business books and most powerful business concepts of all time. In The Personal MBA, he shares the essentials of sales, marketing, negotiation, strategy, and much more. True leaders aren't made by business schools-they make themselves, seeking out the knowledge, skills, and experiences they need to succeed. Read this book and in one week you will learn the principles it takes most people a lifetime to master.

Imagine the perfect business for you. Not only a business that you love, but one that generates consistent wealth and is so well systemized that it mostly runs itself. In Startups Made Simple, small business expert Matt Knee has created a complete guide that takes you from idea to systemized company as quickly and easily as humanly possible. This book is not for the stereotypical Silicon Valley-type of startup that get millions in venture capital. This book is for "the rest of us"-the 99% of entrepreneurs who bootstrap and start real businesses. In this book, Matt Knee pulls back the curtain and guides you through a proven six-step process that he and other successful entrepreneurs have used to build multi-million dollar startups.Whether you have a business now or are looking for an idea to start one, this book will systematically take you (and quickly, using lots of checklists and bullet points) through the process of perfecting and growing your business. This includes how to get out of your own way and even take a real vacation. In addition, you'll discover: - How to supercharge your energy, productivity, and daily routine to get much more done in less time (and not have to work 50+ hours a week like most founders). - How to build a clear vision so you get great ideas and know exactly how to turn them into reality. - How to avoid the fatal mistakes that have destroyed startups in the past. (Most are easily avoidable.)- How to identify that magic cross-section of what you love, what you're good at, and what you can get highly paid for in your business. - How to simply and inexpensively test if your idea is any good before starting the actual business!- A step-by-step process for building your Sales Machine and putting your marketing and sales process on auto-pilot. - Managing and systemizing your business with clear procedures, a simple one-page plan, and a manual that will show anyone how to operate your business (so you can take a real vacation).Table of Contents: PART ONE: The Founder Superpowers1. Energy2. Vision3. Execution4. LeadershipPART TWO: The 6-Step System5. Step One: Imagine It6. Step Two: Plan It7: Step Three: Start It8. Step Four: Grow It9. Step Five: Manage It10. Step Six: Systemize ItPART THREE: The ScorecardsThe Founder Superpowers ScorecardThe 6-Step Scorecard