Digital library
Textbooks, references and open learning resources.
External
Elementary Algebra
Wade Ellis; Denny Burzynski · OpenStax CNX · 2010
This course takes an interdisciplinary approach to ethics in business and provides modules in Ethical Leadership, Ethical Decision-Making, Social Responsibility, and Corporate Governance. Students will actively study ethical theory by carrying out exercises to help them build theory-based tools for encountering ethical problems in business practice. They will also work with cases in business ethics designed to give them practice in developing skills of ethical leadership, ethical decision-making, and carrying out socio-technical analyses to respond to issues of social responsibility. This course will culminate in an Ethics Bowl competition in which students will practice ethics advocacy in a variety of organizational contexts in business.
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An Introduction to Cooperation and Mutualism
Michael Boland · University of Minnesota Libraries Publishing · 2017
This textbook introduces readers to the idea of cooperation and mutualism. Cooperatives and mutuals are participatory organizations in which members participate in control and governance, receive economic benefits through patronage refunds or net income, and become owners through equity. These mutual-benefit organizations exist alongside non-profit organizations and investor-benefit organizations through the global economy.
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Financial Strategy for Public Managers
Sharon Kioko; Justin Marlowe · Rebus Community · 2016
Financial Strategy for Public Managers is a new generation textbook for financial management in the public sector. It offers a thorough, applied, and concise introduction to the essential financial concepts and analytical tools that today's effective public servants need to know. It starts “at the beginning” and assumes no prior knowledge or experience in financial management. Throughout the text, Kioko and Marlowe emphasize how financial information can and should inform every aspect of public sector strategy, from routine procurement decisions to budget preparation to program design to major new policy initiatives. They draw upon dozens of real-world examples, cases, and applied problems to bring that relationship between information and strategy to life. Unlike other public financial management texts, the authors also integrate foundational principles across the government, non-profit, and “hybrid/for-benefit” sectors. Coverage includes basic principles of accounting and financial reporting, preparing and analyzing financial statements, cost analysis, and the process and politics of budget preparation. The text also includes several large case studies appropriate for class discussion and/or graded assignments.
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Entrepreneurship and Innovation Toolkit
Lee Swanson · OPENPRESS.USASK.CA · 2017
This book is designed for upper year undergraduate students and graduate students studying fundamental entrepreneurship concepts.
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Project Management
Adrienne Watt · BCcampus · 2014
This book covers the basics of project management. This includes the process of initiation, planning, execution, control and close out that all projects share.
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Health and Safety in Canadian Workplaces
Jason Foster; Bob Barnetson · Athabasca University Press · 2016
Workplace injuries happen every day and can profoundly affect workers, their families, and the communities they live in. This textbook provides workers with an introduction to effective injury prevention. The book pays particular attention to how issues of precarious employment, gender, and ill health can be better handled in Canadian occupational health and safety (OHS).This introduction to OHS differs from others because it contends that the practice of occupational health and safety can only be properly understood if we acknowledge that workers and employers have conflicting interests. Specifically, we investigate which workplace hazards are recognized and controlled,the manner in which these hazards are controlled, and who makes these decisions. These are all factors that reflect the broader political economy of employment and suggest that OHS is contested terrain.
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Mastering Strategic Management
Janice Edwards; Dave Ketchen; Jeremy Short · BCcampus · 2014
Mastering Strategic Management is designed to enhance student engagement in three innovative ways. The first is through visual adaptations of the key content in the book. It is well documented that many of today's students are visual learners. To meet students' wants and needs (and thereby create a much better teaching experience for professors), Mastering Strategic Management contains multiple graphic concept pages in ever section of every chapter of the book. Think of graphic concept pages as almost like info-graphics for key concepts in each section. This feature sets Mastering Strategic Management apart from any strategic management book on the market today. The second way the authors capture student interest through their textbook is by using a real-world company as the running example in each chapter. For example, Chapter 1 in Mastering Strategic Management utilizes Blackberry to harness the conceptual coverage of the chapter in a running, corporate, application to which students will relate. The third inventive way Mastering Strategic Management holds the attention of strategic management students is through the “strategy at the movies” feature in each chapter that links course concepts with a popular motion picture.
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Introducing Marketing
John Burnett · BCcampus · 2011
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.
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Legal Aspects of Marketing and Sales
Don Mayer; Daniel Warner; George Siedel; Jethro Lieberman · Saylor Foundation · 2012
Legal Aspects of Marketing and Sales is an up-to-date textbook that covers legal issues that students who will work in marketing or with marketing managers must understand. The text is organized to permit instructors to tailor the materials to their particular approach. The authors take special care to engage students by relating law to everyday events with their clear, concise and readable style. After introductory chapters covering the legal environment of business, Legal Aspects of Marketing and Sales provides students with context and essential legal concepts relating to contracts, sales, intellectual property, antitrust law and unfair trade practices. The text provides the vocabulary and legal savvy they will need to talk in an educated way to customers, suppliers, shareholders, government regulators and other stakeholders — and to their own lawyers.
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Legal Aspects of Corporate Management and Finance
Don Mayer; Daniel Warner; George Siedel; Jethro Lieberman · Saylor Foundation · 2012
Legal Aspects of Corporate Management and Finance is an up-to-date textbook that covers key legal issues relating to corporate management and finance. The text is organized to permit instructors to tailor the materials to their particular approach. The authors take special care to engage students by relating law to everyday events with their clear, concise and readable style. After introductory chapters covering the legal environment of business, Legal Aspects of Corporate Management and Finance provides students with context and essential legal concepts relating to contracts, agency law, partnerships, corporations, commercial paper, debtors and creditors. The text provides the vocabulary and legal savvy students will need to talk in an educated way to customers, suppliers, employees, creditors, shareholders, government regulators and other stakeholders — and to their own lawyers.
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Law of Commercial Transactions
Don Mayer; Daniel Warner; George Siedel; Jethro Lieberman · Saylor Foundation · 2012
Law of Commercial Transactions is an up-to-date textbook that covers legal issues that students who engage in commercial transactions must understand. The text is organized to permit instructors to tailor the materials to their particular approach. The authors take special care to engage students by relating law to everyday events with their clear, concise and readable style. After introductory chapters covering the legal environment of business, Law of Commercial Transactions provides students with context and essential legal concepts relating to key commercial transactions topics: contracts, sales, commercial paper, debtors and creditors. The text provides the vocabulary and legal savvy students will need to talk in an educated way to customers, suppliers, creditors, government regulators and other stakeholders — and to their own lawyers.
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Law for Entrepreneurs
Don Mayer; Daniel Warner; George Siedel; Jethro Lieberman · Saylor Foundation · 2012
Law for Entrepreneurs is an up-to-date textbook that covers the broad spectrum of legal issues that entrepreneurs must understand when starting and running a business. The text is organized to permit instructors to tailor the materials to their particular approach. The authors take special care to engage students by relating law to everyday events with their clear, concise and readable style. After introductory chapters covering the legal environment of business, Law for Entrepreneurs provides students with context and essential legal concepts relating to contracts, product liability, intellectual property, insurance, agency law, partnerships, corporations, and employment law. The text provides the vocabulary and legal savvy that entrepreneurs need to talk in an educated way to customers, suppliers, employees, creditors, shareholders, government regulators and other stakeholders — and to their own lawyers.
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Introduction to the Law of Property, Estate Planning and Insurance
Don Mayer; Daniel Warner; George Siedel; Jethro Lieberman · Saylor Foundation · 2012
Introduction to the Law of Property, Estate Planning and Insurance is an up-to-date textbook that covers legal issues that students must understand relating to real estate (an especially important business asset), as well as estate planning and insurance. The text is organized to permit instructors to tailor the materials to their particular approach. The authors take special care to engage students by relating law to everyday events with their clear, concise and readable style. After introductory chapters covering the legal environment of business, Introduction to the Law of Property, Estate Planning and Insurance provides students with context and essential legal concepts relating to property rights and duties, estate planning, insurance, secured transactions, mortgages, and related topics. The text provides the vocabulary and legal savvy they will need when working with these concepts, which are critical to business planning and success.
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Introduction to Contracts, Sales and Product Liability
Don Mayer; Daniel Warner; George Siedel; Jethro Lieberman · Saylor Foundation · 2012
This textbook provides context and essential concepts across the entire range of legal issues with whichmanagers and business executives must grapple. The text provides the vocabulary and legal acumennecessary for businesspeople to talk in an educated way to their customers, employees, suppliers,government officials—and to their own lawyers. Traditional publishers often create confusion among customers in the text selection process by offering ahuge array of publications. Once a text is selected, customers might still have to customize the text to meettheir needs. For example, publishers usually offer books that include either case summaries or excerptedcases, but some instructors prefer to combine case summaries with a few excerpted cases so that studentscan experience reading original material. Likewise, the manner in which most conventional textsincorporate video is cumbersome because the videos are contained in a separate library, which makesaccess more complicating for instructors and students.
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Growth and Competitive Strategy in 3 Circles
Joe Urbany; James Davis · Saylor Foundation · 2012
The 3-Circle model was developed over the past several years, initially in strategic planning for a university graduate program and in an executive MBA course designed to integrate the concepts of marketing and competitive strategy. Over the course of time, the 3-Circle model has been successfully used by hundreds of organizations throughout the world in establishing and growing their market positions. Many of the case examples in this book demonstrating applications of the 3-Circle model applications are from executives who have attended executive education training at the University of Notre Dame. The development of competitive strategy is difficult because there are a lot of moving parts, as well as hundreds of frameworks, that might potentially guide the effort. Executives appreciate how the 3-Circle model simplifies the integration of customer, firm, and competitor analysis to generate growth strategies. It also provides a common language and process for understanding and explaining competitive advantage and for identifying profitable growth strategy.
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Good Corporation, Bad Corporation: Corporate Social Responsibility in the Global Economy
Guillermo Jimenez; Elizabeth Pulos · Open SUNY · 2016
This textbook provides an innovative, internationally oriented approach to the teaching of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and business ethics. Drawing on case studies involving companies and countries around the world, the textbook explores the social, ethical, and business dynamics underlying CSR in such areas as global warming, genetically modified organisms (GMO) in food production, free trade and fair trade, anti-sweatshop and living-wage movements, organic foods and textiles, ethical marketing practices and codes, corporate speech and lobbying, and social enterprise. The book is designed to encourage students and instructors to challenge their own assumptions and prejudices by stimulating a class debate based on each case study.
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Beyond Lean: Simulation in Practice
Charles Standridge · Grand Valley State University · 2013
Lean thinking, as well as associated processes and tools, have involved into a ubiquitous perspective for improving systems particularly in the manufacturing arena. With application experience has come an understanding of the boundaries of lean capabilities and the benefits of getting beyond these boundaries to further improve performance. Discrete event simulation is recognized as one beyond-the-boundaries of lean technique. Thus, the fundamental goal of this text is to show how discrete event simulation can be used in addition to lean thinking to achieve greater benefits in system improvement than with lean alone. Realizing this goal requires learning the problems that simulation solves as well as the methods required to solve them. The problems that simulation solves are captured in a collection of case studies. These studies serve as metaphors for industrial problems that are commonly addressed using lean and simulation.
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Guidelines for Improving the Effectiveness of Boards of Directors of Nonprofit Organizations
Yvonne Harrison; Vic Murray · Open SUNY · 2014
The purpose of this book is to help boards of directors of nonprofit organizations improve their performance after completing the online board self-assessment tool found at www.boardcheckup.com. However, it can also be used as a stand-alone resource for any board seeking to enhance its effectiveness in that it also contains the diagnostic questions on which the online tool is based. The approach taken here is similar to that which lies behind health checkups for individuals. Doctors usually begin by asking us to review a lengthy list of many possible health issues and we check those about which we have concerns. The doctor and patient then focus their discussions on these issues. The typical process proceeds through the following three stages: Understanding the symptoms. The doctor and patient begin by trying to define the issues more clearly. Diagnosis. Effort is made to understand the causes of the problems through tests and further examination. Treatment. Once the problem has been properly diagnosed, a treatment program to remedy it is begun. While the Board Check-Up survey on which this book is based does not pretend to be as scientifically rigorous as a medical examination, it is based on the same logic. It begins by having those who belong to, or relate to, boards provide their perceptions of how well the board is working by guiding them through a list of potential "health issues”, i.e. statements of possible problems, issues or challenges that boards might encounter in their work. These statements have been derived from comments made by those who serve on boards or interact with them as well as from the work of researchers and consultants who have studied boards over the past 30 years. Once issues (symptoms) have been identified, they become the focal point for discussions that explore how serious they are, what might be causing them (diagnosis) and what can be done to resolve them (treatment). As noted above, this book is intended to help boards assess perfo
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Leading with Cultural Intelligence
Mai Moua · Saylor Foundation · 2012
Organizations in the 21st century are in need of culturally intelligent managers and leaders. The pressure to build authentic global networks and to cultivate an appreciation and respect for cultural differences and similarities has driven cultural intelligence to the forefront of diversity and inclusion work. Preparing today's students to be effective leaders in their professional lives requires that they hone their cultural intelligence as it is vital to working inter- and intra-culturally in today's global economy. This unique ability to identify, recognize, and acknowledge the differences and similarities that exist between and among cultural groups and systems will set their leadership skills apart from the masses. And when applied, cultural intelligence can bridge the gap in cultural misunderstanding by creating awareness, knowledge, and patience of cultural norms and behaviors. The purpose of Leading With Cultural Intelligence by Mia Moua is to outline the important ideas of cultural intelligence and the steps that must be considered and then practiced to become a culturally intelligent leader. The most important aspect covered within this book is that cultural intelligence is both a strategy and a tool towards cultural competency and proficiency. This book outlines the importance of understanding culture and its impact on organizations, the strategic value of cultural intelligence, and the significance of integrating and practicing cultural intelligence in everyday business life. When all these aspects are properly integrated and applied in the leadership and management process, organizations are more innovative and adaptable to respond to cultural changes.
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Fundamentals of Global Strategy
Cornelis de Kluyver · Saylor Foundation · 2012
The globalization of the competitive landscape has forced companies to fundamentally rethink their strategies. Whereas once only a few industries such as oil could be labeled truly global, today many—from pharmaceuticals to aircraft to computers—have become global in scale and scope. As a consequence, creating a global competitive advantage has become a key strategic issue for many companies, and students need to possess an understanding of the impact of global strategies on a business. Crafting a global strategy requires making decisions about which strategy elements can and should be globalized and to what extent, and de Kluyver's Fundamentals of Global Strategy can help you illuminate these facts to your students. Fundamentals of Global Strategy poses the following questions for your students to analyze: What markets and/or regions should a company compete in and why? To what degree can and should products and services be standardized? Is it advantageous to adopt a more or less uniform market positioning worldwide? What value-added activities should it keep in-house, outsource, or relocate for competitive advantage? How can competitive responses be most effectively coordinated on a global basis?