open textbook – Page 3 – Globestrategy

International Business

The overarching logic of the book is intuitive—organized around answers to the what, where, why, and how of international business.

Sustainability, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship

This book offers students and instructors the opportunity to analyze businesses whose products and strategies are designed to offer innovative solutions to some of the twenty-first century’s most difficult societal challenges. A new generation of profitable businesses is actively engaged in cleantech, renewable energy, and financially successful product system design and supply chain strategies that attempt to meet our economic development aspirations while addressing our social and ecological challenges. This textbook offers background educational materials for instructors and students, business cases illustrating sustainability innovation, and teaching notes that enable instructors to work effectively and accelerate student learning.

Global Business Strategy: A Systems Approach by Asterios Kefalas

Future historians of business will undoubtedly describe the 1990s as the dawn of globalization. Gradually but steadily, goods, services, money, and people are coming to be exchanged in a market that has virtually no national borders. This market is not simply an extension of the domestic markets that grew up after the end of World War II. Rather, the global market is a new phenomenon brought about by a convergence of the social, political, and economic systems of the peoples of the earth.

At the center of this globalization process is the interplay between the multinational corporation (MNC) and the nation-state, or country. The nation state, responding to the political and economic cooperation among the great powers, has found that it must adopt a more cooperative attitude toward the MNC. Similarly, the MNC, faced with some new managerial challenges, has discovered that it needs the support of the nation-state. These challenges stem from changes in technology (primarily information technology), market forces, and people’s attitudes toward work. Even among MNCs, conventional “go-it alone” strategies, prevalent in the 1970s and early 1980s, are giving way to “cooperate-to-compete” strategies. Indeed, strategic alliances among some of the largest MNCs seem to be the norm rather than the exception.

Institutions of higher education, cognizant of this shift toward globalization, are developing curricula that aim at preventing American students, the business leaders of the future, from falling prey to “the backyard view.” When one sees no light in any of the other windows in the neighborhood, it is all too easy to assume that everyone in the world is asleep-to forget that there is more to the world than one’s own backyard. The business leader of the future must understand that from now on, business opportunities and challenges will be global ones; no single country will ever again have a monopoly on business or technological expertise.

Introducing Marketing by John Burnett

Through good economic times and bad, marketing remains the pivotal function in any business. Determining and satisfying the needs of customers through products that have value and accessibility and whose features are clearly communicated is the general purpose of any business. It is also a fundamental definition of marketing. This text introduces students to the marketing strategies and tools that practitioners use to market their products

Human Resource Management

Competing books are focused on the academic part of HRM, which is necessary in a university or college setting. However, the goal with this book is not only to provide the necessary academic background information but also to present the material with a practitioner’s focus on both large and small businesses. While the writing style is clear and focused, we don’t feel jargon and ten-dollar words are necessary to making a good textbook. Clear and concise language makes the book interesting and understandable (not to mention more fun to read) to the future HRM professional and manager alike.

It is highly likely that anyone in business will have to take on an HRM role at some point in their careers.

For example, should you decide to start your own business, many of the topics discussed will apply to your business. This is the goal of this book; it is useful enough for the HRM professional, but the information presented is also applicable to managers, supervisors, and entrepreneurs

Government Regulation and the Legal Environment of Business

This book engages students by relating law to everyday events with which they are already familiar (or with which they are familiarizing themselves in other business courses) and by its clear, concise, and readable style. (An earlier business law text by authors Lieberman and Siedel was hailed “the best written text in a very crowded field.”)

This textbook provides context and essential concepts across the entire range of legal issues with which managers and business executives must grapple. The text provides the vocabulary and legal acumen necessary for businesspeople to talk in an educated way to their customers, employees, suppliers, government officials—and to their own lawyers.

Fundamentals of Global Strategy

Exploring Business

Developing New Products and Services

A central theme of this book is that there is, or should be, a constant struggle going on in every organization, business, and system. The struggle is fueled by the dynamic tension that exists between delivering Midas feature-rich versions of products and services using extravagant engineering and delivering low-cost Hermes versions of products and services using frugal engineering (see Figure 1). Midas versions are high-end products for nonprice-sensitive consumers. Hermes versions are for price-sensitive consumers. The results of this dynamic tension between Midas versioning and Hermes versioning are Atlas products and services. Atlas products and services are designed for mainstream consumers. Atlas products and services incorporate the product design features that will attract the broadest customer base and will also be profitable. The driving force behind the development of Midas, Atlas, and Hermes versions is driven by the implicit creative genius that everyone possess and most businesses should possess as they engage in continuous learning-about and learn-by-doing activities

Building Strategy and Performance

The approach described here is based on strategy dynamics (Warren, 2008), a rigorous, fact-based method for developing and managing strategy. The underlying science is known as system dynamics, which originated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the 1960s (Forrester, 1961; Sterman, 2000). Strategy dynamics explain why the performance of an organization has changed through time in the way that it has, provide estimates of where it is likely to go in the future, and

allow management to design strategies and policies to improve that future path. Strategy dynamics achieve this by building an integrated, fact-based picture of how the resources of your business are developing through time, driven by mutual interdependence, management policies, external opportunities, and constraints.