Bernard B. Kamoroff - Small Time Operator: How to Start Your Own Business, Keep Your Books, Pay Your Taxes, and Stay Out of Trouble (Taylor Trade Publishing)

So you’ve taken that great idea, brilliant concept or winning product or service and you’re ready to take the leap and start your own business; now what? What are the steps you need to take? Do you need a license? How do you write a business plan? How do you use a business plan? What the heck is a business plan?

There is an old cliché that goes something like this; “businesses don’t plan to fail, they fail to plan.” There are plenty of great ideas; the question is how do you make the transition from the drawing board to the execution of actually starting a business. Bernard Kamoroff provides some of the answers to those questions in Small Time Operator: How to Start Your Own Business, Keep Your Books, Pay Your Taxes, and Stay Out of Trouble.

Now in its 13^th Edition, Kamoroff walks you through the basics of startup and offers sobering advice about the realities of starting a business. While many small time operators are focused on their products, services, marketing and selling, all too often they don’t spend enough time to focus on the basics of bookkeeping. A CPA by trade, Kamoroff offers easy to understand and implement guidance for tracking cash flow, keeping track of and paying taxes, and how best to avoid running afoul of the IRS.

No matter what path you take to starting your business, be it; solo practitioner, freelancer, at home, online, franchise, or buying an existing operation, the book offers great advice and interesting insights notably for those who are dipping their toe into the business waters for the first time.

Michelle Rhee- Radical: Fighting To Put Students First (Harper)

The cliché is to judge a person by the company they keep. In the case of Michelle Rhee the saying may need a shift to judge a person by the enemies she makes. Rhee is either a heroic education reformer or an evil villain controlled by big corporations and out to get teachers and break unions depending on whom you ask.

In the book Radical: Fighting to Put Students First Rhee chronicles her path from being a short term teacher in the rough and tumble inner city Baltimore school district to the evolutionary process that moved her from teacher recruitment, to education policy and on to education reformer. Along that craggy path she has won friends and fans and stepped on some powerful toes in teachers unions.

While the problems with the U.S. education system are multitude and systemic, Rhee clings to the seemingly pie in the sky notion that every student deserves a first class education. While many decry the “lack of funding” or alleged cuts in funding, on average we spend thousands and thousands of dollars on every student in the public school systems. Rhee identifies many of the roadblocks that prevent the delivery of a first class education as being systemic issues that have built up over time and the difficulty of trying to eliminate those roadblocks as interest groups ranging from administrators to unions and even politicians cling to their turf and strangle reform.

While at times in the book and in real life Rhee can come off as a shameless self-promoter, she has also been successful in offering substantive solutions to try to reform what is all too often a lackluster education system that delivers a sub-par product. While her detractors are legion in the teachers unions, it is safe to conclude that unlike the unions Rhee truly has made a noble attempt to put students first.

The Managers Phrase Book – Patrick Alain (Career Press)

Do you manage people? What Kind of a manager do you think you are? What kind of a manager do you think the people you manage think you are? Do they think that you’re firm, but fair? Do they think you’re a pushover? Or do they think that you’re just a plain old @#$%^!

At some point every leader needs to take the time to step back and look at how they do their job and at how they are perceived. And maybe one of the most important things that they can consider is the words they use when managing a wide array of leadership and management scenarios. What do you say and how you say can make the difference between being a boss that everybody loves and one that everyone hates! It can make the difference between keeping key staffers and losing them to your competition.

To help with that process is a clever little book that every manager should keep handy on their credenza; The Manager’s Phrase Book by Patrick Alain. Alain breaks the book down in to a wide range of everyday business scenarios that managers must confront and deal with on a regular basis. He also shows you responses that range from the good to the bad to the downright ugly!

I think at one point or another in our careers we have come across that boos that always said just the right thing at the right time; and by contrast one that drove a nail in your heart while pulling the knife out of your back. The Manger’s Phrase Book covers everything from motivation and personal situations to bad behavior and dealing with problem employees.

While you’re not likely to commit the over 3000 powerful phrases to memory, what the book does is to get you thinking about how to do a better job of communicating with your staff. You may see any number of things that might turn on the light bulb and have you thinking how you could have handled a situation more appropriately if you had simply said things in a different way. Aside from being a handy tool in your management tool belt; it will also provide great food for thought.

Work Like A Spy: Business Tips From A Former CIA Officer - J C Carleson (Portfolio)

If the title conjures up images in your mind of you decked out in a slick black tux, sipping a martini, shaken, not stirred and utilizing snappy repartee on you business competition with a hot babe on your arm, sorry to ruin the delusion.

Yes, author J C Carleson did depart a private sector career path with Starbucks and Baxter International to spend eight years as an undercover officer with the CIA, Work Like  Spy: Business Tips From A Former CIA Officer, is not a recruiting tool the Agency. In Work Like a Spy Carleson makes a case that the techniques utilized by spies to develop new assets and gather useful intel are transferable to the private sector.

Carleson illustrates the techniques by utilizing laundered, real world examples of from her time spent undercover; then places similar circumstances that occur every day in the business world. The case can certainly be made that a multitude of successful businesses have been built on a foundation of having critical information about not only the competition, but of other successful ventures. The most difficult part of that equation is how to go about developing the sources and resources to gather that information.

While  Work Like a Spy provides a variety of techniques and tactics for developing businesses information sources, the devil is not in the details, but in the execution. Carleson can’t make you a smooth operator, but she may help you hone critical skills like intuition, listening skills and developing an attitude for action.