Small Business & Entrepreneurship

In The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, author Stephen R. Covey presents a holistic, integrated, principle-centered approach for solving personal and professional problems. With penetrating insights and pointed anecdotes, Covey reveals a step-by-step pathway for living with fairness, integrity, honesty, and human dignity -- principles that give us the security to adapt to change and the wisdom and power to take advantage of the opportunities that change creates.

• How to set up shop on Amazon and generate worldwide sales volume with no up-front cost, risk or advertising.
• Run your Amazon store from home, a warehouse or a walk-in store-or outsource everything to Amazon's fulfillment center.
• Find bargain inventory; target niche markets for big profits.
• Get tax deductions and write-offs for business use of your home.
• Use Amazon as a stand-alone business or a lead generator for an existing busines.
• Pay lower sales commissions on Amazon.
• Sell your inventions, crafts or intellectual property on Amazon.
• Guard against scammers and rip-off artists.
• Automate your business with easy-to-use tools

• Feed your e-commerce business with a continual stream of hot products.
• Learn how to leverage the "Long Tail" of retail for low-risk, high-return profits.
• Uncover niche products online shoppers want to buy.
• Diversify your product line.
• Learn to minimize sales taxes and write off the business use of your home office and car.
• Find new and hard-to-find products from real wholesalers.
• Know exactly how much potential inventory is worth, and how quickly it sells.
• Get dirt-cheap warehouse space.
• Get the best product research tools available for your phone.
• Outsource your fulfillment and customer service tasks.
• Benefit from advice from the most experienced, profitable online sellers.

Built to Last, the defining management study of the nineties, showed how great companies triumph over time and how longterm sustained performance can be engineered into the DNA of an enterprise from the very beginning.

But what about companies that are not born with great DNA? How can good companies, mediocre companies, even bad companies achieve enduring greatness? Are there those that convert long-term mediocrity or worse into long-term superiority? If so, what are the distinguishing characteristics that cause a company to go from good to great?

Over five years, Jim Collins and his research team have analyzed the histories of 28 companies, discovering why some companies make the leap and others don't. The findings include:

• Level 5 Leadership: A surprising style, required for greatness.
• The Hedgehog Concept: Finding your three circles, to transcend the curse of competence.
• A Culture of Discipline: The alchemy of great results.
• Technology Accelerators: How good-to-great companies think differently about technology.
• The Flywheel and the Doom Loop: Why those who do radical restructuring fail to make the leap.

Most startups fail. But many of those failures are preventable.  The Lean Startup is a new approach being adopted across the globe, changing the way companies are built and new products are launched.

Eric Ries defines a startup as an organization dedicated to creating something new under conditions of extreme uncertainty. This is just as true for one person in a garage or a group of seasoned professionals in a Fortune 500 boardroom. What they have in common is a mission to penetrate that fog of uncertainty to discover a successful path to a sustainable business.

The Lean Startup approach fosters companies that are both more capital efficient and that leverage human creativity more effectively.  Inspired by lessons from lean manufacturing, it relies on “validated learning,” rapid scientific experimentation, as well as a number of counter-intuitive practices that shorten product development cycles, measure actual progress without resorting to vanity metrics, and learn what customers really want. It enables a company to shift directions with agility, altering plans inch by inch, minute by minute.

Rather than wasting time creating elaborate business plans, The Lean Startup offers entrepreneurs - in companies of all sizes - a way to test their vision continuously, to adapt and adjust before it’s too late. Ries provides a scientific approach to creating and managing successful startups in a age when companies need to innovate more than ever.