A guide for those with limited business experience or education covers preparing a business plan, identifying the market, managing finances, developing a product-service strategy, and more

The McGraw-Hill Guide to Starting Your Own Business: A Step-By-Step Blueprint for the First-Time Entrepreneur

Business & Money

Harper, Stephen C.

Management & Leadership

McGraw=Hill

The McGraw-Hill Guide to Starting Your Own Business: A Step-by-Step Blueprint for the First Time Entrepreneur

Business Development & Entrepreneurship

Most new businesses that fail do so during the transition from start-up to the growth phase. Here's a much-needed book that can dramatically increase your odds of succeeding during the toughest and most critical stage of any new venture. Written by the best-selling author of The McGraw-Hill Guide to Starting Your Own Business, this new guide constitutes a complete field manual for entrepreneurs looking to transform their small businesses into exceptional enterprises. In 20 concise, reader-friendly chapters - each one addressed to a vital growth-related issue - you'll find step-by-step plans and blueprints to follow, proven answers to tough, real-life questions, and valuable tips from forty entrepreneurs and managers who have survived the minefields of high-growth ventures. You'll learn why growth does not simply mean doing "more of the same" on a larger scale; what kinds of challenges you're likely to face during each phase of the growth process, and how to begin preparing for them today; the difference between uncontrolled growth (which can actually jeopardize your firm's very existence) and sustained growth, which is the kind of growth savvy entrepreneurs seek; the secrets of perceptive timing, both in entering and exiting markets; how to go beyond conventional, or incremental, growth strategies with "corpreneurial" strategies designed to keep your company on the cutting edge of change; how to develop a long-term vision of what you want your company to become; and how to master seven key stages of venture evolution and perfect the particular managerial skills needed for each stage. The Guide explores growth strategies for every area of your company, including capitalizing on the firm's human resources; developing an effective management information system; establishing strategic alliances; utilizing the board of directors to maximum effect; and much more. Each chapter concludes with a "Chief Executive Guidelines" section, in which two or more successful CEOs - many who have been profiled in Inc., Business Week, Fortune, and Nation's Business - share their valuable insights and explain how various approaches have worked for them in today's increasingly competitive environment. With the help of this book, your company will be better positioned to create the kind of sustained growth that will make it one of tomorrow's corporate winners.

The McGraw-Hill Guide to Managing Growth in Your Emerging Business: Guidelines for Transforming Your Small Business into an Exceptional Enterprise

This insightful guide showcases a new psychological framework through which business leaders can transform themselves and their organizations.
"Most managers," author Stephen C. Harper writes, "do not understand what is involved in transforming organizations." His book, The Ever-Evolving Enterprise: Guidelines for Creating Your Company's Future, is intended to remedy that, focusing on ten areas proactive business leaders must address as they guide their companies through everyday activities and into the future.
The book stresses the need for firms to evolve to remain in sync with an ever-changing marketplace. It explores the multifaceted nature of transformational leadership and offers specific guidelines, ideas, and techniques leaders can institute to seize new opportunities and develop innovative products and services that offer sustainable competitive advantages. But it also invites executives to take a closer look at how they lead their firms, promoting a fresh psychological framework that will keep business leaders―and their companies―anticipatory, perceptive, agile, innovative, results-oriented, and able to execute so that their visions become realities.
 • Hundreds of cautions, insights, tips, and techniques
• Candid "reality checks" throughout 
• Chapter-ending quizzes that profile the extent to which a firm is demonstrating the qualities of Ever-Evolving Enterprises
• Numerous figures that profile the multidimensional nature of organizational transformation
• Sources and notes at the end of each chapter

The Ever-Evolving Enterprise: Guidelines for Creating Your Company's Future

Praeger

Extraordinary Entrepreneurship: The Professional's Guide to Starting an Exceptional Enterprise

The 21st Century brings all new rules. Entrepreneurs are challenging conventional wisdom and thinking outside the box. One of the first challenges involves challenging the assumption that a business has to be big to be successful. While most of the 20th century heralded big businesses, it is clear that businesses no longer have to be big to do big business. Now it is possible for a handful of people to operate a global business from virtually any place on the planet. Today, the keyboard has overtaken the boardroom. Financial markets, alliances, and joint ventures have eliminated the need for entrepreneurs to put up substantial capital investments. Today's businesses are driven by ideas, innovation, and execution. This book will show entrepreneurs and business leaders will provide CEOs and entrepreneurs with the tools that they will need to become leaders in their market.

wiley

John Wiley&Sons, Inc.

Business success demands more than taking the road less traveled. It requires creating new roads and committing to future-focused breakthrough leadership. For busy managers, this timely book provides a direct and robust plan of action. It blends proven ideas from leading-edge thinkers with the author's original, hands-on approach to change management. 
The Forward-Focused Organization shows how to move beyond kiss-of-death incremental change toward a corporate/entrepreneurial ("corpreneurial") environment that takes fast, giant steps into the future. Readers will learn how to adopt "ASAP management": the ability to anticipate what's ahead, develop the agility to operate in an accelerating marketplace, and identify opportunities before competitors do. 
Rich in useful examples from traditional companies and dot-coms, this book covers every strategic and operational concern that change managers should be thinking about. On a humorously cautionary note, it also recaps "100 Ways to Self-Destruct as a Change Leader" and "100 Ways to Lose Customers.

The Forward-Focused Organization : Visionary Thinking and Breakthrough Leadership to Create Your Company's Future

Amacom Books

Management: Who Ever Said It Would Be Easy

Harper & Assoc

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Harper, Stephen C.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Harper, Stephen C.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Harper, Stephen C.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The McGraw-Hill Guide to Starting Your Own Business: A Step-By-Step Blueprint for the First-Time Entrepreneur

The McGraw-Hill Guide to Starting Your Own Business: A Step-by-Step Blueprint for the First Time Entrepreneur

The McGraw-Hill Guide to Managing Growth in Your Emerging Business: Guidelines for Transforming Your Small Business into an Exceptional Enterprise

The Ever-Evolving Enterprise: Guidelines for Creating Your Company's Future

Extraordinary Entrepreneurship: The Professional's Guide to Starting an Exceptional Enterprise

Extraordinary Entrepreneurship: The Professional's Guide to Starting an Exceptional Enterprise

The Forward-Focused Organization : Visionary Thinking and Breakthrough Leadership to Create Your Company's Future

Management: Who Ever Said It Would Be Easy