Growing a business

is an excellent book by Paul Hawken (isbn 0-413-19340-3). As usual I'm going to quote from a few pages:
Be careful, you may succeed.
Gregory Bateson once defined the most elementary unit of information as the 'difference that makes a difference'. … The ability to create differences in manufacturing and delivery of goods and services will be the key to success.
Don't start two businesses.
Take a product and reduce it to its essence.
If employees, customers, and vendors don't laugh and have a good time at your company, something is wrong.
You don't ever manage people - you work with them.
Enterprises fail more often because of the sum total of seemingly inconsequential events acting upon them than because of a sudden disaster or discontinuity.
In the beginning, survival is more important than success.
Nothing in nature tells us that rapid growth is good, and certainly nothing in human biology. In our own bodies, the most rapid growth of all is cancer.
Businesses that grow too fast or in the wrong way overwhelm the adaptive capacity of the people who work there.
Responsibility is participation.
If a village in Europe or China wanted to censure and remove a member of its society, the townspeople went to the offender's home and burned it to the ground, along with all the possessions inside. That's how they fired someone.
Hire the person, not the position.