“You had the power all along my dear.”
-Glinda the Good Witch in The Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum
Innovation Women are talented. They start companies, develop innovative new products, live on the bleeding edge of technology, and write scores of creative, fact-filled, and entertaining books. We’ve gathered a batch of business-related books for the person in your life who wants to start a company, lead her team, promote a new idea, or cultivate an existing business, career, or side-hustle.
In A Successful Woman’s Handbook: Thirty Steps to Starting your Green Business: Conscious Choices for Successful Women, Monica S. Flores outlines the steps you need to take to organize and start a green business, including information on sustainable practices, green metrics, and a handy list of resources.
If you have an idea for a business, but don’t know where to start, Jules Pieri has the information you need. In How We Make Stuff Now: Turn Ideas into Products That Build Successful Businesses Pieri, the CEO and founder of The Grommet, a product launch platform that helps innovative products gain exposure, guides you through every step of the consumer product creation process.
MECE stands for Mutually Exclusive, Collectively Exhaustive and is a structured management consulting technique used to solve complex business problems. Christie Lindor’s The MECE Muse: 100+ Selected Practices, Unwritten Rules, and Habits of Great Consultants takes insights gleaned from her connections at dozens of consulting firms to find and describe what makes a great consultant.
In 50 Ways To Mega Crush Your Media Career, authors Lau Lapides and Dan Lothian, two media industry veterans, offer insights and secrets gathered from years in the business. Full of insider tips and entertaining stories, 50 Ways serves as a handbook to help you make it in the media industry.
Poor employee retention costs businesses trillions of dollars a year. With employee engagement down and competition for job seekers up, companies are looking for ways to improve their onboarding and dam up the turnover flood. In How to Drive Employee Retention: In the First 90 Days (Volume 1), Doreen Lang explains why so many employees leave and how to create an atmosphere where they want to stay.
If you want to break through the glass ceiling, you’ll need a special set of skills — leadership skills.
In her years as a corporate leadership coach, Janet Bircher gained experience and expertise. Her book, Zoom Leadership: Change Your Focus Change Your Insights will help you change how you look at your working relationships and become the most effective leader possible.
Serenity, control, and clarity are important aspects of leadership. Tarra Mitchell’s book, The Yoga of Leadership: A Practical Guide to Health, Happiness, And Inspiring Total Team Engagement illustrates how you can use the calming power of yoga to increase focus, improve your health and the well-being of your team, and become the strong, positive leader you want to be.
You may not have sought a leadership position, but you have one. How do you make the most of it and become the kind of workplace leader and mentor your team needs? Eva C. Doyle knows. Years of training executives to lead has taught her how to bring out the best in people. Doyle’s book, The Reluctant Leader: From Technical Expert to Human Expert helps you make the transition from expert to leader.
You’ll also need to understand and empathize with your employees.
In The Thriving Hive: How People-Centric Workplaces Ignite Engagement and Fuel Results, Mari Ryan offers a parable, presenting the workplace as a beehive, faced with both internal and external threats and describes options, solutions, and best practices for enhancing employee well-being and increasing retention.
Telecommuting and increased connectivity can mean employees are never ‘out of the office’. That 24/7 work ethic can cause anything from a lack of focus to employee burn-out. In Maura Thomas’ book, Work Without Walls: An Executive’s Guide to Attention Management, Productivity, and the Future of Work, the author describes how to create a culture that improves productivity by focusing on employee well-being, efficient communication strategies, and work-life balance.
It might help if that empathy were a two-way street.
Written as a guide to educate men, women, and organizations about the barriers that prevent women from participating fully in the workplace, The Power of Perception: Leadership, Emotional Intelligence, and the Gender Divide by Dr. Shawn Andrews, provides real world examples and research illustrating the differences in leadership style and emotional intelligence between women and men. Andrews offers practical ideas and strategies to empower women and men to understand and change the status quo.
In Authentic Inclusion™: Drives Disruptive Innovation, women-in-technology trailblazer, Frances West proposes new ways that business leaders can affect sustainable and scalable change — and tap into tremendous opportunities — by viewing inclusion as strategic and by addressing diversity proactively. Drawing on her unique personal background and business experience in technology innovation, West describes her personal journey as a first-generation, non-English speaking immigrant to her professional path as a woman in tech and IBM’s first Chief Accessibility Officer. Her book offers leaders the necessary guidance to achieve disruptive innovation and lasting success.
Hungry for more? Here are a few other books to help you start, scale, and lead a business — because whether it’s yours or not, you own it.
How to Create a Successful Launch Event by Ni’cola Mitchell
Pivot: The Only Move That Matters Is Your Next One by Jenny Blake
The Connector’s Advantage: 7 Mindsets to Grow Your Influence and Impact by Michelle Tillis Lederman
