Business Briefs

This book is a collection of practical writings on business and management topics and is a companion to “Management Briefs: Management and Leadership Theory Made Simple.”

These writings originally appeared in the business section of the local newspaper in Abilene, Texas, U.S.A. Using examples from movies, books, sports, and everyday experiences, they are designed to introduce readers to a variety of business topics in a concise, fun, and interesting manner. This volume should be useful to professional and aspiring managers as well as to students of management and business.

Some of the examples mentioned in the writings are specific to an American audience and refer to specific events or times of the year (e.g., sports championships, Christmas shopping, etc.), but were included because of their larger underlying lessons. The original titles and publication dates of the articles appear in the appendix at the end of the book.

1. Change
   1. Skill Development
   2. Information Technology
   3. Creative Destruction
   4. Continuous and Discontinuous Change
2. Decision-Making
   1. Legal and Ethical Decisions
   2. Brainstorming
   3. Divergent Thinking
   4. Normative Decision Model
   5. Diagnosing Performance Problems
   6. Escalation of Commitment
3. Electronic Commerce
   1. Websites
   2. Globalization
   3. Location
   4. Catalogs
4. Marketing
   1. Marketing Mix
   2. Consumers
   3. Integrated Marketing Communication
   4. Global Markets
   5. Social Identity Theory
   6. Observation Research
5. Organization Theory
   1. Purpose and Mission
   2. Workers and Owners
   3. Bureaucracy
   4. Maslow’s Need Hierarchy
   5. Inertia
   6. Management by Wandering Around
   7. Management Skills: Social
   8. Management Skills: Communication
   9. Organizational Commitment
   10. Job Satisfaction
   11. Parkinson’s Law
   12. Global
   13. Business Start-Up Options
6. Personal Finance
   1. Compound Interest
   2. Debt Financing
7. Quantitative Methods
   1. Modeling
   2. Statistics
   3. Probability and Decision Making
   4. Levels of Data
   5. Regression Analysis
   6. Spreadsheets
8. Strategy
   1. SWOT
   2. Luxury versus Necessity
   3. Unique Selling Proposition: Differentiation
   4. Unique Selling Proposition: Monopolistic Competition
9. Appendix
   1. Original Titles and Dates of Publication in Abilene Reporter-News Newspaper