Strategy is a foundational aspect of management education, whilst strategic thinking is an essential business skill. This shortform textbook provides the absolute essentials of the field, focusing on how strategy works as a managed process. The author, an experienced management educator, provides a clear and concise structure that enables readers to understand and excel in the core strategic skills that are essential to contemporary business globally. This concise and coherent text is a unique alternative to bloated strategic management textbooks and will be welcomed by students and reflective practitioners around the world.

Strategic marketing is a complex topic, and this short-form textbook illuminates its fundamental elements to provide a bird’s-eye view of the field for students of marketing strategy. Focused on the marketing of goods and services, the book highlights how incremental changes in the market environment drive changes to marketing strategies. The author, an experienced marketing expert, uses the concept of ‘strategic windows’ to facilitate student understanding, looking at how firms can best anticipate and react to opportunities and threats. Enhanced by text features such as essential summaries, focused references and additional online supplements, this very short introduction enables the reader to zero in on the core priorities for strategic marketers. The result is a volume that is valuable reading for marketing students around the world.

Strategic marketing is a complex topic and this shortform textbook illuminates its fundamental elements to provide a birds-eye view of the field for students of marketing strategy. Focused on the marketing of goods and services, the book highlights how incremental changes in the market environment drive changes to marketing strategies. The author, an experienced marketing expert, uses the concept of "strategic windows" to facilitate student understanding, looking at how firms can best anticipate and react to opportunities and threats. Enhanced by text features such as essential summaries, focused references, and additional online supplements, this very short introduction enables the reader to zero-in on the core priorities for strategic marketers. The result is a volume that is valuable reading for marketing students around the world.

Absolute Essentials of Public Relations offers a valuable quick-start introduction to the many facets and forms of public relations theory and practice. It explores contemporary public relations through multiple lenses by focusing on what public relations essentially comprises, how it has come into existence, what contexts public relations works within, what tools and techniques professionals can deploy, and how professionals assess and justify the outcomes of their work. Divided into two parts – Concepts and Theories, and Applications and Specialisms – the book covers the fundamental theories and concepts and their application in contemporary practice, which together broadly reflect the typical syllabus content for undergraduate, postgraduate, and post-experience introductory courses in public relations. The topics covered in both sections are complemented by mini cases, which showcase academic and professional insights into practice. Offering a concise and approachable alternative to the mainstream, more heavyweight textbooks available, this book provides a comprehensive introduction to public relations theory and practice.

Behavioural ethics in business is an emerging field that has challenged some of the established wisdom about ethics and added some truly new insights into our understanding about decision-making and behaviour. Why do seemingly responsible employees and managers sometimes act in bad ways? This book explains how people behave in real situations and what action can be taken to nudge behaviour in a more ethical direction. This concise textbook is ideal for use in the classroom as core or additional reading on courses in business ethics and corporate social responsibility; organisational behaviour and psychology; and any module with ethics content (for example, accounting ethics and strategic management). Each chapter is presented as a story with details about the experimental designs and related research findings. The key features include learning outcomes, suggested class activities, mock assessment questions, and an annotated list of key readings and these provide a one-stop text for tutors and students interested in this increasingly important area of study.

As challenges to the era of globalisation emerge, international business grows in importance and complexity as a field of study. This shortform textbook introduces learners to the frameworks within which international business occurs and to the range of actions that companies might undertake in these environments. Owing to an emphasis on cross-border interactions, international business is a politicised field, and this book provides readers with the tools to deepen their understanding not only of the actions that companies might take but also of the economic, societal, cultural and political frameworks affecting how decisions are made. With a refreshing realism in its approach, this book will be perfect brief reading for students required to understand the obstacles that global business practitioners must overcome to succeed.

This shortform textbook, a concise overview of the development and current state of corporate governance, provides a critical narrative on the field. Beginning with insightful historical background, the author shows how value-adding corporate governance involves more than unthinking compliance to a recitation of statutes, regulations and principles, devoid of context. Features include basic definitions, reviews of theoretical governance problems, and a worldwide review of current governance provisions along with more detail on the UK situation. Revealing the geology of governance in the business world, the book highlights its progress set into a framework of regulation and law. This textbook provides a brief, authoritative summary of the field for two core audiences: as a reference for specialist readers, and as an concise introduction for non-specialist readers.

Entrepreneurship is a fundamental business discipline and a phenomenon that drives economic growth globally. This shortform textbook focuses on the absolute essential elements of the field, covering theory and practice. Illuminating the development of entrepreneurship, the author also concise introduces the entrepreneurial personality and some of the additional hurdles faced by female and minority entrepreneurs. The central role of creativity, innovation and culture are also examined as well as entrepreneurial strategies for finance and marketing. This short text provides a unique expert overview for students of entrepreneurship, whilst the practical insights will also be useful in applications for budding entrepreneurs

ESSENTIALS OF STRATEGIC MANAGEMENT, Third Edition, is a brief version of the authors' market-leading text STRATEGIC MANAGEMENT: AN INTEGRATED APPROACH, helping students identify and focus on core concepts in the field in a more succinct, streamlined format. Based on real-world practices and current thinking, the text's presentation of strategic management features an increased emphasis on the business model concept as a way of framing the issues of competitive advantage. Cutting-edge research, new strategic management theory, and a hands-on approach allow students to explore major topics in management, including corporate performance, governance, strategic leadership, technology, and business ethics. Its high-quality case program examines small, medium, and large companies--both domestic and international--so that students gain practice putting chapter concepts into action.

Good Strategy/Bad Strategy clarifies the muddled thinking underlying too many strategies and provides a clear way to create and implement a powerful action-oriented strategy for the real world. Developing and implementing a strategy is the central task of a leader. A good strategy is a specific and coherent response to—and approach for—overcoming the obstacles to progress. A good strategy works by harnessing and applying power where it will have the greatest effect. Yet, Rumelt shows that there has been a growing and unfortunate tendency to equate Mom-and-apple-pie values, fluffy packages of buzzwords, motivational slogans, and financial goals with “strategy.” In Good Strategy/Bad Strategy, he debunks these elements of “bad strategy” and awakens an understanding of the power of a “good strategy.” He introduces nine sources of power—ranging from using leverage to effectively focusing on growth—that are eye-opening yet pragmatic tools that can easily be put to work on Monday morning, and uses fascinating examples from business, nonprofit, and military affairs to bring its original and pragmatic ideas to life. The detailed examples range from Apple to General Motors, from the two Iraq wars to Afghanistan, from a small local market to Wal-Mart, from Nvidia to Silicon Graphics, from the Getty Trust to the Los Angeles Unified School District, from Cisco Systems to Paccar, and from Global Crossing to the 2007–08 financial crisis. Reflecting an astonishing grasp and integration of economics, finance, technology, history, and the brilliance and foibles of the human character, Good Strategy/Bad Strategy stems from Rumelt’s decades of digging beyond the superficial to address hard questions with honesty and integrity.