Don Martin – författare

It's one thing to come up with a good business idea, and quite another to marshal the people, money, and other resources entrepreneurs need to make the dream a successful reality. That's why most businesses fail within the first two years. The Entrepreneur's Guide to Successful Leadership helps budding moguls make it out of the toddler phase of entrepreneurship and into adolescence and adulthood with confidence. A concise and practical guide to leading smaller enterprises, the book is based on a proven, nine-step model of effective leadership developed by Dan Goldberg—the founder of the For Eyes optical chain—and entrepreneur and educator Don Martin. Step by step, readers learn what real leadership looks like and how to lead and grow the successful enterprise.Creating a vibrant business starts with understanding who you are, say the authors, and then coming up with a vision, mission, and strategy. That's the easy part. The hard part is to execute the strategy in line with your dreams, while using effective, ethical tactics to establish the business and prosper. Seasoned hands, the authors make that job easier, while helping entrepreneurs understand what makes employees tick and helping them become their productive best. The hard work not only gets easier, say the authors—it pays off as entrepreneurs watch their fledgling businesses take graceful flight. This book is a treasure chest that provides key insights and methods in the form of real-life stories, humor, strategies, techniques, exercises, checklists, templates, and other resources. Each illustrates in a unique way how good leaders achieve powerful results. Many books on leadership are gimmicky. The Entrepreneur's Guide to Successful Leadership focuses—in clear, simple, and direct terms—on the essential fundamentals, the blocking and tackling, required for business success.

Those researching the history of political democracy in Scotland will inevitably find that one name stands out from the crowd, namely that of Thomas Muir of Huntershill. He was one of several people tried in Scottish courts during the 1790s for the alleged crime of 'Sedition', and four of the others share commemoration with him on a large monument in Edinburgh, but somehow Muir seems special. The way he used his trial as a platform to promote the logic of 'an equal representation of the People in the House of the People' was extremely dramatic and was fully reported at the time both in newspapers and in several published editions of the trial proceedings. Yet somehow historians have never been fully convinced about Muir's claim to recognition. For some he represents a sour note in the triumphant story of the Scottish Enlightenment, while others have dismissed him as a failure in his own time, conceding little consequence to the example he set for future generations. Over the years there have been attempts to right what many people regard as a grievous wrong, in this respect.This substantial and insightful edited volume adds to the debate the views of Rhona Brown, Gerard Carruthers, Tom Devine, Tom Dowds, Satinder Kaur, Thomas Lemoine, David McVey, Don Martin, Gordon Pentland, Alex Salmond, Beverley Sherry, Alex Watson, Jimmy Watson, and Ronnie Young.