First Business

No one is born a leader. But through sheer determination and by confronting life’s challenges, Ant Middleton has come to know the meaning of true leadership. In First Man In, he shares the core lessons he’s learned over the course of his fascinating, exhilarating life. Special forces training is no walk in the park. The rules are strict, and they make sure you learn the hard way, pushing you beyond the limits of what is physically possible. There is no mercy. Even when you are bleeding and broken, to admit defeat is failure.

The world’s most trusted guide for leaders in transition. Transitions are a critical time for leaders. In fact, most agree that moving into a new role is the biggest challenge a manager will face. While transitions offer a chance to start fresh and make needed changes in an organization, they also place leaders in a position of acute vulnerability. Missteps made during the crucial first three months in a new role can jeopardize or even derail your success.

During economic contractions, it becomes much more difficult to sell your products, maintain your customer base, and gain market share. Mistakes become more costly, and failure becomes a real possibility for all those who are not able to make the transition. But imagine being able to sell your products when others cannot, being able to take market share from your competitors, and knowing the precise formulas that would allow you to expand your sales while others make excuses.

Conventional accounting uses the logical (albeit, flawed) formula: Sales - Expenses = Profit. The problem is, businesses are run by humans, and humans aren't always logical. Serial entrepreneur Mike Michalowicz has developed a behavioral approach to accounting to flip the formula: Sales - Profit = Expenses. Just as the most effective weight loss strategy is to limit portions by using smaller plates, Michalowicz shows that by taking profit first and apportioning only what remains for expenses, entrepreneurs will transform their businesses from cash-eating monsters to profitable cash cows.

Harvard Business Review is the foremost destination for smart management thinking. Now, at its 100th anniversary, this commemorative volume brings together the most influential ideas since its inception. With thought leaders including Michael E. Porter, W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne, Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Peter Drucker, and Clayton M. Christensen, this book puts HBR's greatest concepts at your fingertips. You'll learn how these groundbreaking ideas continue to be relevant in today's business context—and what to keep in mind as you prepare for the future.

You Win in the Locker Room First draws on the extraordinary experiences of Coach Mike Smith and Jon Gordon - consultant to numerous college and professional teams - to explore the seven powerful principles that any business, school, organization, or sports team can adopt to revitalize their organization.

Patagonia, named by Fortune in 2007 as the coolest company on the planet, has earned a reputation as much for its ground-breaking environmental and social practices as for the quality of its clothes. In this exceptionally frank account, Chouinard and Stanley recount how the company and its culture gained the confidence, by step and misstep, to make its work progressively more responsible, and to ultimately share its discoveries with companies as large as Wal-Mart or as small as the corner bakery.

Construction industry business coach, speaker, and author, Shawn Van Dyke, has taken the core concepts of Mike Michalowicz's Profit First and customized them to address the specific needs of the construction industry. Profit First for Contractors addresses the major struggles contractors face and provides clear and actionable guidance on how to overcome them. Shawn shows contractors how to go from simply getting by to becoming permanently profitable.

High-performance psychologist Michael Gervais presents a groundbreaking guide for overcoming what may be the single greatest constrictor of human potential: our fear of people's opinions (FOPO).

Learn to conquer every challenge like a pro with the clear, candid advice in The First-Time Manager. For nearly four decades, this trusted guide has brought newcomers up to speed on the nitty gritty realities of managing people. The updated seventh edition delivers new information that helps you manage across generations, use online performance appraisal tools, persuade with stories, oversee remote employees, build a team dynamic, match a boss’ style, and more.

First Things First is a revolutionary guide to managing your time by learning how to balance your life. Traditional time management suggests that working harder, smarter, and faster will help you gain control over your life, and that increased control will bring peace and fulfillment. But the authors of First Things First apply the insights of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People to our daily problems of struggling with the ever-increasing demands of work and home life.

You never dreamed being the boss would be so hard. You're caught in a web of conflicting expectations from your subordinates, from those above you, and from your peers and customers. You're not alone. As Harvard Business School's Linda Hill and manager and executive Kent Lineback reveal in Being the Boss, becoming an effective manager is a painful, difficult journey. It requires trial and error, endless effort, and slowly acquired personal insight. Many managers never complete the journey and instead just learn how to get by. At worst, they become terrible bosses.

While you might have the appearance of absolute success in everything you do, scratch below the surface the reality is that you are freaking out, even just a little. You have so many balls in the air that the juggle is becoming increasingly hard to sustain. You need to start doing things differently because trying to do it all represents a huge risk to your ongoing success and well being. This book teaches you how to successfully juggle your two lives and to be guilt-free, with a proven five-step process to help you identify and harness hours of lost time on the home front.

Building trust is your single greatest opportunity to create competitive advantage. With new data at its core, The Four Factors of Trust gives you practical guidance to measure and build trust in the relationships that matter the most—with your customers, workforce, and partners.

Learn all the essentials for making your first year of teaching a success! In this exciting audiobook, internationally renowned educator Todd Whitaker teams up with his daughters - Madeline, an elementary teacher, and Katherine, a secondary teacher - to share advice and inspiration. They offer step-by-step guidance to thriving in your new role and overcoming the challenges that many new teachers face.  

In your career, there is one transition that stands out as the most crucial - going from individual contributor to competent manager. New managers have to learn how to lead others rather than do the work themselves, to win trust and respect, to motivate, and to strike the right balance between delegation and control. Many fail to make the transition successfully. In this timeless, indispensable book, Harvard Business School professor and leadership guru Linda Hill traces the experiences of 19 new managers over the course of their first year in the role.

What does it take to thrive in one of the most pressurised leadership roles in modern times? What is the real story behind the men in the football hotseat who shape the dreams and ambitions of millions? The First 100 Days: Lessons in Leadership from the Football Bosses is both an entertaining book for football fans and a self-help manual for those embarking on a leadership challenge of their own.

The First-Time Leader provides basic frameworks, processes, and tools to help first-time leaders and their teams deliver better results faster. Leading is about inspiring and enabling others to do their absolute best, together, to realize a meaningful and rewarding shared purpose. 

It's weird and frankly bewildering that the most talented women in the world are often the ones struggling to make fabulous money from their talents. In Get Rich, Lucky Bitch!, you'll get the tools and inspiration you need to go to the next level of wealth - whether you're starting from scratch or itching to break through the million-dollar mark.

As work and organizations have become more fluid - and business strategy is no longer about planning years ahead but about sensing and seizing new opportunities and adapting to a constantly changing environment - companies must deploy talent in new ways to remain competitive. Turning conventional views on their heads, talent and leadership experts Ram Charan, Dominic Barton, and Dennis Carey provide leaders with a new and different playbook for acquiring, managing, and deploying talent.