Entreleadership: 20 Years Of Practical Business Wisdom From The Trenches By Dave Ramsey

EntreLeadership: 20 Years of Practical Business Wisdom from the Trenches By Dave Ramsey List Price: $26.00 Price: $13.00 & eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25. Details Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours Ships from and sold by Amazon.com 76 new or used available from $11.00 Average customer review: (177 customer reviews)

Product Description

Your company is only as strong as your leaders. These are the men and women doing battle daily beneath the banner that is your brand. Are they courageous or indecisive? Are they serving a motivated team or managing employees? Are they valued?

Your team will never grow beyond you, so here's another question to consider.  Are you growing? Whether you're sitting at the CEO's desk, the middle manager's cubicle, or a card table in your living-room-based startup, EntreLeadership provides the practical, step-by-step guidance to grow your business where you want it to go. Dave opens up his championship playbook for business to show you how to:

• Inspire your team to take ownership and love what they do
• Unify your team and get rid of all gossip
• Handle money to set your business up for success
• Reach every goal you set
• And much, much more!

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #295 in Books
• Published on: 2011-09-20
• Released on: 2011-09-20
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: 1.09" h x 6.38" w x 9.21" l, 1.04 pounds
• Binding: Hardcover
• 320 pages

Editorial Reviews

Review
"Full of excellent anecdotes and practical tips on entrepreneurship, hirings and firings, and leadership at its best. This book is quintessentially Ramsey."

—Stephen R. Covey, author, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and The Leader in Me

"Dave Ramsey's EntreLeadership speaks right to the heart of business leaders, showing not just the 'how tos,' but also the 'why tos' that apply to any sized business, from a garage-based startup to a powerhouse market leader. And by the way, I'm the biggest Dave Ramsey acolyte ever!"

—Dr. Arthur B. Laffer, economic advisor to President Ronald Reagan

"Entrepreneurs are needed in America now more than ever—but there's a big difference between starting a company and leading one. And there's an even bigger difference between a company that's valuable and one that has values. But Dave has figured out the recipe to being both things at once, and his lessons are invaluable."

—Glenn Beck, #1 New York Times bestselling author

"Dave Ramsey has taken commonsense leadership principles and made them uncommonly practical, useful, and life changing. His straightforward and plain-talk approach is refreshing. Even more admirable is that his advice is not a bunch of leadership fru-fru fluff, but it's solid and substantive."

—Mike Huckabee, former governor, FOX News host

"Every entrepreneur is searching for the elusive formula that perfectly blends the creativity of the start-up with the leadership qualities to guide a growing team. Dave Ramsey reveals the ingredients in EntreLeadership, a guide for the complete business leader."

—S. Truett Cathy, founder and CEO, Chick-fil-A, Inc.

"Throughout my career, I've been blessed to spend time with millions of quality leaders at practically every level of every industry—and I haven't met one yet that could not benefit from the clear, practical business principles Dave lays out in EntreLeadership!"

—John Maxwell, New York Times bestselling author

"Wisdom equals knowledge plus scars. If it is your passion to be successful in business, it would be foolish not to listen to the wisdom of someone who has done so for decades. As I read, I kept thinking, Yes! This is right on the money!"

—Jeff Foxworthy, comedian, television and radio personality, author

"Dave Ramsey is a straight-shooting, no-nonsense, faith-anchored blessing to our world. Each time he speaks, millions of us listen up and learn. Dave leads one of America's most successful organizations. Learn from his common sense counsel. You'll be glad you did."

—Max Lucado, New York Times bestselling author

"How do I know Dave Ramsey's EntreLeadership book can help every small business? Because my son, as CEO of our company, attended Dave's EntreLeadership ultimate business experience and applied the principles in our company with dramatic results. The difference is bigger than black and white—the difference is between red and black!"

—Zig Ziglar, motivational speaker, New York Times bestselling author

"Over a thousand Hobby Lobby employees have proudly benefited from Financial Peace University for several years. Now I am excited to learn about EntreLeadership, which provides great insight on how to become a successful Entrepreneur leader."

—David Green, CEO and founder, Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc.

About the Author
Dave Ramsey is America's trusted voice on money and business. He's authored three New York Times bestselling books: Financial Peace, More Than Enough, and The Total Money Makeover. His latest book, EntreLeadership, releases in September 2011. The Dave Ramsey Show is heard by more than 4.5 million listeners each week on more than 500 radio stations. Follow Dave on Twitter at @DaveRamsey and on the web at daveramsey.com.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

1
EntreLeadership Defined

Looking out the window of my personal office, I was watching the sun come up. I had come to the office extremely early because I couldn't sleep and I needed some answers. Our business was officially bigger than me and it was scaring the crud out of me. I was going to have to add more layers of leadership, which meant I was going to have to relinquish control or not grow. Sounds simple, but I am a control freak extraordinaire, so turning loose tasks and responsibilities is not easy.

Those of us who are small-business people have stacked our own boxes, answered our own phones, and served our own customers. So making sure business is done the way we would do it matters a lot to guys like me. No corporate training program that creates plastic scripts that mannequins spit out, where the customer leaves feeling like something fake just happened. Oh no, guys like me want everyone we come in contact with to feel our dream. We want and demand that customers have an experience. And many of us have had our corporate experience, and we didn't like it. We want something that is real for us, our team, and our customers. So turning loose is a really emotional thing… 'cause the person you task with that area really has to breathe air the way you do.

After having mentored and grown my first three key leaders over several years with one-on-one instruction, I was seeing the benefit of growing fellow believers in the cause. But this hand-to-hand method of growing leaders was way too slow and was holding back our business. I needed new leaders and I needed them faster than three years. In order to raise new leaders, my core team and I set out to teach a class that is our playbook on how to do business our way. We mentor, cuss, and discuss with our leaders daily—and in a very intentional way. But the EntreLeadership class is the foundation.

EntreLeader?

Tons of books have been written on growing leaders. There are famous leaders in all walks of life whose leadership principles I have learned from. As I sat that first morning trying to find a way to communicate to our next new leaders what we wanted them to do, I thought it might be as simple as teaching leadership.

What Is a Leader?

When I teach this course live, I ask the audience to picture the face of a wonderful leader. Then I ask them to write down the best one-word character qualities these great leaders have. What one word best describes the character of a great leader? When we do this we always get character qualities like:

• Integrity

• Servant

• Humble

• Visionary

• Decisive

• Disciplined

• Passionate

• Loyal

• Listener

• Influential

• Driven

• Charismatic

Taken together, this is a good definition of leadership. It's interesting to me that most of us can list what we want our leader to look like, but we don't apply it to ourselves. Have you ever asked yourself what kind of leader your team members want? If you want to lead, or you want to grow or hire leaders, they and you must have the above listed character qualities. We all have some of these qualities and we all have some we can work on. The big deal here is to remember that the very things you want from a leader are the very things the people you are leading expect from you. You must intentionally become more of each of these every day to grow yourself and your business. And to the extent you're not doing that, you're failing as a leader.

What Is in a Name?

As I sat in my office with the sun coming up writing the first lesson and thinking what to name our little leadership course, I hit a snag. I know that the title is supposed to give an indication of what is in the material (duh). When I thought about calling this material "leadership," I knew that wasn't right. Because there is so much more to business than simply leadership and leadership theory. I have sat in "management classes" and "leadership seminars," and for a practitioner, a doer, like me, they weren't enough. I learned something, I always do, but those classes were too much about concept for a guy who has stacked his own boxes and answered his own phone. I concluded that I didn't want to grow my business simply with leaders—that was a little too dry, a little too theoretical for an entrepreneur like me.

Entrepreneur

Maybe I was trying to grow entrepreneurs. Maybe I wanted a company full of little mini-mes. After all, when you think of an entrepreneur, what words come to mind to describe that animal?

• Risk taker

• Visionary

• Passionate

• Driven

• Work ethic

• Creative

• Out of the box

• Determined

• Courageous

• Motivated

• Learner

• Maverick

As I thought about what a pure entrepreneur is, I decided in three seconds I didn't want to grow a company full of us. Leading that group would be like herding cats or trying to nail Jell-O to a tree. I do want the spirit of the entrepreneur woven into our cultural DNA, but a whole building full of us would be a really bad plan.

So growing leaders was too refined and calm for me, but growing entrepreneurs was too wild and chaotic for me. So I decided we needed to grow a combination of the two… and thus the EntreLeader was born. I want EntreLeaders who can be

• Passionately serving

• Mavericks who have integrity

• Disciplined risk takers

• Courageous while humble

• Motivated visionaries

• Driven while loyal

• Influential learners

Are you getting the idea? We wanted the personal power of the entrepreneur polished and grown by a desire to be a quality leader. We wanted big leaders who have the passion and push of the entrepreneur. These character qualities are what we look for in potential leaders and what we intentionally build into our team every day to cause us to win.

Words matter. So when we call someone a "team member" at our place, that means something; it isn't some corporate HR program that tries to make slaves to jerks feel better by changing the words. It means you will be treated like and expected to act like you are on a team. When we call someone an EntreLeader it means something. It means you are more than a renegade lone ranger and it means you are more than a corporate bureaucrat who treats his people like units of production.

Defined

A leader, according to Webster's Dictionary, is "someone who rules, guides, and inspires others." The dictionary says an entrepreneur is "someone who organizes, operates, and assumes risk for a venture." The root of the word "entrepreneur" is a French word, "entreprendre," meaning "one who takes a risk."

So for our purposes EntreLeadership is defined as "the process of leading to cause a venture to grow and prosper."

Once we had our title and definition, we had to determine the components of our playbook. We began to list what is essential for other new and growing EntreLeaders to know about starting, operating, and leading a business the way we do it. Because we are practitioners we ended up addressing mechanical things like accounting and contracts. Because we are very concerned about our culture as well, we needed to explain how a team is grown, motivated, compensated, and unified. Because we are also marketers we knew we needed to sell some stuff in order for all of us to eat. So our playbook has truly become "everything you want to know about building and running a business but didn't know who to ask."

EntreLeadership Basics

Let's start at the beginning: your mirror. John Maxwell has written a wonderful leadership book entitled The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership. In this book John discusses one of his laws, the Law of the Lid. Basically he says that there is a lid on my organization and on my future, and that lid is me. I am the problem with my company and you are the problem with your company. Your education, character, capacity, ability, and vision are limiting your company. You want to know what is holding back your dreams from becoming a reality? Go look in your mirror.

When I first started leading in my early thirties, I was a horrible leader. My ambition and drive caused me to accomplish the task and pick up the pieces later. One cold winter morning when we had about fourteen people on our team, I became angry over people coming to work late. I don't get it—come to work early like I do. Don't come dragging your tail in twenty minutes late and mumble something about traffic. I have noticed there is less traffic before the sun comes up. Get to work on time. I am paying you, and when you don't come to work on time you are a thief.

We were at the beginning stages, and every sale meant our survival. Every customer was a big deal, and every person on the team had three jobs. I couldn't grasp how these people I hired didn't understand that if they slacked off, they would lose their jobs because we would go broke. Get with it. So I got angry. Sometimes it is good to be angry, but what you do with it can have lasting consequences. I am not proud of this, but on that Monday morning, for the staff meeting I moved fourteen chairs out on the sidewalk in sixteen-degree weather. I gave a talk that morning about showing up to work on time and said that if every one of us didn't do two people's work, we were all g...

Customer Reviews

Most helpful customer reviews

70 of 83 people found the following review helpful.
Solid Work on Leadership in Business: Very Good, But not Great
By Fr. Charles Erlandson
Even though I'm not a businessman, I'm very interested in leadership and have read a lot of works on leadership. I've also learned so much from Dave Ramsey's Financial Peace University that I thought surely Dave's newest work, "EntreLeadership" would be worth my money.

"EntreLeadership," is a good book on leadership in business. But I don't feel it's a great one. He has, as always, a lot of good practical knowledge that he's willing to share with us. But it's usually not something I haven't read elsewhere in books on leadership or related literature. So, yes, the book's probably worth buying, but it didn't seem to be as excellent in its genre as is Dave's "Financial Peace." There is a lot of excellent basic material here on leadership, goals, organization, working with people, etc. But it's not especially original or compelling. And it's not very in-depth, largely because Dave deals with so many topics all in one book. Still, "EntreLeadership" is a good, one-stop place for good, basic advice on many subjects related to leadership and business. Almost everyone will find something of value in it, especially businessmen looking for a proven, practical vision with integrity.

What Dave shares in this book is his "playbook" for business success, divided up into 15 topics.

Dave sets out first to define what an "EntreLeader" is. It's kind of an ugly word, but Dave feels that what he wanted in business from himself and others was people who had the good characteristics of both leaders and entrepreneurs. So what is an EntreLeader? I'm glad you asked! According to Dave, they're people who can be:

Passionately serving
Mavericks who have integrity
Disciplined risk takers
Courageous while humble
Motivated visionaries
Driven while loyal
Influential learners

Dave concludes Chapter 1 by discussing some of the characteristics of leaders, such as power, the need to be servants, and passion. There's some good stuff here, but it's not really original or uniquely compelling.

In Chapter 2, Dave walks us from Dreams to Visions to Mission Statements and Goals. Again, there's good wisdom here, but it's not really unique, and he doesn't spend a lot of time on each. He spends the most time on goals (I won't rehearse what he says here), and it's good material that almost anyone will benefit from. But once again, it's not groundbreaking or original stuff you can't get elsewhere.

Chapter 3 deals with time management and organization. This is something I'm naturally good enough at but not nearly as good as I ought to be. So I learned some new tricks in this chapter - or, more accurately - was motivated to make a better effort to apply what I already know.

The rest of the chapters follow suit in giving good and even excellent advice, but possibly material you've heard before. I have less experience with business than with leading or dreaming, so I can't speak as specifically to the parts that deal specifically with business (such as Chapters 7, 13, and 14). But from what I can tell, they're good solid material for running a business, if that's what I did. I particularly like the chapter on selling (such as Chapters 7, 8, 11, and 12) because in these chapters Dave shows how business can be done with integrity. I like as well the way that throughout he demonstrates a genuine interest in the people who work for him (this especially came out in a touching story in Chapter 7 about someone Dave hired who couldn't live off the salary he could afford to pay her) and those he is serving. These chapters, dealing with people, are probably his strongest chapters because he highlights the need to serve the people around you and not exalt yourself at their expense.

A lot of what Dave says applies, even if you're not in business. For example, any leader can benefit from Dave's philosophy in Chapter 11 that as leaders we must put people first and that the way to judge this is by the Golden Rule. It's good advice to remember, as he teaches in Chapter 12, that we should remember to recognize people. I know that personally, I thrive on appropriate and deserved recognition. In Chapter 12, Dave provides a list of various ways we can actually do this for others. Most of these, such as casting a vision, storytelling, passion, and example, are ways of recognizing others that you could use outside of business, too.

There's much more I could say, but by now you've gotten an idea of the value of the book.

The remainder of the book is organized this way (I'm giving the gist of each chapter, and not the fancy titles):

Chapter 4 - Making Decisions
Chapter 5 - Great Marketing
Chapter 6 - Launching Your Dream
Chapter 7 - Hiring and Firing
Chapter 8 - Selling by Serving
Chapter 9 - Financial Peace for Business
Chapter 10 - Great Communication and Great Companies
Chapter 11 - People Matter Most
Chapter 12 - Recognizing and Inspiring Employees
Chapter 13 - Contracts, Vendors, and Collections
Chapter 14 - Compensation Plans
Chapter 15 - Delegating

I recommend "EntreLeadership" as a good, big picture, book that will help leaders and businessman lead and innovate with greater integrity and skill.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful.
Practical application for the business leader who puts integrity above all else.
By Mike Larson
I am a small business leader, owner. I don't plan on running a 500 person company, or a 50 person company. I have 15 people and I want to be a better leader, and keeping things simple. I know my character is the driving force behind whether i succeed or not.

I do want to grow my company! However I do believe in Dave's philosophy of not letting debt own you. Growing your business debt free means you have some freedoms, maybe you don't start out of the gate a larger company, but you start out stronger financially in terms of freedom.

So I chose to attend the Entreleadership workshop in Nashville 2 years ago. That rocked my world. I came away with 28 pages of typed notes, and a binder full of notes and thoughts. I condensed my notes into 6 pages of action items (another still learned from Entre).

Whatever you learn is worthless unless you apply it. I felt equipped to maintain the character needed to sustain leading my team with an entrepreneurial leadership style that Dave encourages. Its one thing to read a business book and get all hyped up about some new method or networking practice.

When it comes down to it, people hire people they like. Entreleadship taught me how to be the leader that attracts the right people, how to be the right person, before you grow the right company, because as its well known, "how you are in the small things, is how you are in the large things".

The Entre wisdom is amazingly simple, profound, and biblical. Its not a calculated hype. It works, and was one of the best returns on the money and time I spent in terms of business material to help me grow, and be profitable.

Still to this day, we utilize, EntreLeadership principles in our daily workplace. I recommend this book to anyone who wants to use their business to grow their character, and their character to shape their leadership and their leadership to grow their business.

Thanks Dave.

18 of 23 people found the following review helpful.
Great book with advice you can apply immediately
By JenS
This book works whether you lead a team at work or lead your family at home. I love how he puts so clearly into perspective the big things that matter when it comes to business and leadership. While many of these things we know, the examples and practical application provided in EntreLeadership make it well worth keeping this book handy on the shelf. It's a great road map for business and leadership of all types.

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