Contents
Business in Action
Rationale
In economics, Business is the social science of managing people to organize and maintain collective productivity toward accomplishing particular creative and productive goals, usually to generate profit.
The etymology of "business" refers to the state of being busy, in the context of the individual as well as the community or society. In other words, to be busy is to be doing commercially viable and profitable work.
The term "business" has at least three usages, depending on the scope — the general usage (above), the singular usage to refer to a particular company or corporation, and the generalized usage to refer to a particular market sector, such as "the record business," "the computer business," or "the business community" -- the community of suppliers of goods and services.
The singular "business" can be a legally-recognized entity within an economically free society, wherein individuals organize based on expertise and skills to bring about social and technological advancement.
In predominantly capitalist economies, businesses are typically formed to earn profit and grow the personal wealth of their owners.
The owners and operators of a business have as one of their main objectives the receipt or generation of a financial return in exchange for their work — that is, the expense of time and energy — and for their acceptance of risk — investing work and money without certainty of success.
Notable exceptions to this rule include some businesses which are cooperatives, or government institutions.
However, the exact definition of business is disputable as is business philosophy; for example, most Marxists use "means of production" as a rough synonym for "business." Socialists advocate either government, public, or worker ownership of most sizable businesses. Some advocate a mixed economy of private and state-owned enterprises. Others advocate a capitalist economy where all, or nearly all, enterprises are privately owned.
- Types of businesses
- Limited and Unlimited Liability
- Organization
- Business and government
- Capital
- Intellectual property
- Business and management
- Exit plans
Today's Videos
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Teaching and Learning Resources
Understanding the Fundamentals of Business and Economics. Communication Fundamentals
- Understanding the Fundamentals of Business and Economics
- Practicing Ethical Behavior and Social Responsibility
- Competing in the Global Economy
Business economics is that part of economic theory which focuses on business enterprises and inquires into the factors contributing to the diversity of organizational structures and to the relationships of firms with labour, capital and product markets.
- Subject matter
- Ambiguity in the use of term
- Interpretations of business economics from various universities
Competitiveness is a comparative concept of the ability and performance of a firm, sub-sector or country to sell and supply goods and/or services in a given market. Although widely used in economics and business management, the usefulness of the concept, particularly in the context of national competitiveness, is vigorously disputed by economists, such as Paul Krugman [1].
The term may also be applied to markets, where it is used to refer to the extent to which the market structure may be regarded as perfectly competitive. This usage has nothing to do with the extent to which individual firms are "competitive'.
- WEF Global Competitiveness Report
- World Competitiveness Yearbook by IMD Lausanne
- Ireland's National Competitiveness Council
- Croatia's National Competitiveness Council
- Sri Lanka's The Competitiveness Program, Sri Lanka
- U.S. Council on Competitiveness
- Basque Country (Spain) Basque Institute of Competitiveness - Orkestra
- AccountAbility Responsible Competitiveness
Case Study
The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) is a non-profit libertarian[1] think tank[2] founded on March 9, 1984 in Washington, D.C. by lobbyist Fred L. Smith, Jr to fight big government. CEI's stated belief is that people are best helped not by government regulation of commercial interests, but by a free marketplace. CEI states that it promotes libertarian ideals through analysis, education, coalition-building, advocacy, and regulation.[3] CEI offers or has offered analysis and advocacy on public policy issues such as energy, environment, biotechnology, pharmaceutical regulation, chemical risk, telecommunications, insurance, transportation, tobacco regulation, constitutional issues, economic policy and securities law.[4]
CEI is funded by donations from individuals, foundations and corporations. CEI does not accept government funding. Past and present funders include the Scaife Foundations, Exxon Mobil, the Ford Motor Company Fund, Pfizer, and the Earhart Foundation.[5][6][unreliable source?][relevant? – discuss] CEI cites its major issues of concern as Environmental Policy, Regulation and Economic Liberty, Legal and Constitutional, and Health and Safety. Among the methods used to implement the organization's agenda are various press releases and policy papers, testifying at governmental hearings, suits against various governmental agencies, paid advertising, editorial and op-ed pieces, open letters, books, and NGO operations. CEI's last television ad campaign (to date), entitled A Bright Future For Some, focused on energy policy and global warming, criticizing policies advocated by former Vice President Al Gore. The CEI ad aired nation-wide in March and April, 2008.
- CEI homepage
- CEI Open Market Official blog
- GlobalWarming.org Cooler Heads Coalition homepage
- CEI Studios a CEI project
- Bureaucrash a CEI project
- Bureaucrash TV a CEI project
- gmwatch.org: Profiles: CEI
- Clean Air Trust
- Think Progress blog post
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The
Competitive Enterprise : 10 Principles of Business Excellence
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Starting, Financing, and Expanding a Small Business
Tutorials
- Starting, Financing, and Expanding a Small Business
- Selecting the Proper Form of Business Ownership and Exploring Business Combinations
- Understanding the Functions and Roles of Management
- Organizing and Working in Teams
Readings
Entrepreneurship is the act of being an entrepreneur, which can be defined as "one who undertakes innovations, finance and business acumen in an effort to transform innovations into economic goods". This may result in new organizations or may be part of revitalizing mature organizations in response to a perceived opportunity. The most obvious form of entrepreneurship is that of starting new businesses (referred as Startup Company however, in recent years, the term has been extended to include social and political forms of entrepreneurial activity. When entrepreneurship is describing activities within a firm or large organization it is referred to as intra-preneurship and may include corporate venturing, when large entities spin-off organizations.[1]
According to Paul Reynolds, entrepreneurship scholar and creator of the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, "by the time they reach their retirement years, half of all working men in the United States probably have a period of self-employment of one or more years; one in four may have engaged in self-employment for six or more years. Participating in a new business creation is a common activity among U.S. workers over the course of their careers. "And in recent years has been documented by scholars such as David Audretsch to be a major driver of economic growth in both the United States and Western Europe.
Entrepreneurial activities are substantially different depending on the type of organization that is being started. Entrepreneurship ranges in scale from solo projects (even involving the entrepreneur only part-time) to major undertakings creating many job opportunities. Many "high value" entrepreneurial ventures seek venture capital or angel funding
(seed money) in order to raise capital to build the business. Angel investors generally seek annualized returns of 20-30% and more, as well as extensive involvement in the business.
Many kinds of organizations now exist to support would-be entrepreneurs, including specialized government agencies, business incubators, science parks, and some NGOs. In more recent times, the term entrepreneurship has been extended to include elements not related necessarily to business formation activity such as conceptualizations of entrepreneurship as a specific mindset (see also entrepreneurial mindset) resulting in entrepreneurial initiatives e.g. in the form of social entrepreneurship, political entrepreneurship, or knowledge entrepreneurship have emerged.
- Business opportunity
- Business plan
- Corporate Social Entrepreneurship
- Entrepreneurship education
- Economy and Entrepreneurship
- Junior enterprise
- References
- Further reading
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Operations and Production Management
Tutorials
Readings
Operations management is an area of management concerned with overseeing, designing, and redesigning business operations in the production of goods and services. It involves the responsibility of ensuring that business operations are efficient in terms of using as little resources as needed, and effective in terms of meeting customer requirements. It is concerned with managing the process that converts inputs (in the forms of materials, labor, and energy) into outputs (in the form of goods and services).
The relationship of operations management to senior management in commercial contexts can be compared to the relationship of line officers to the highest-level senior officers in military science. The highest-level officers shape the strategy and revise it over time, while the line officers make tactical decisions in support of carrying out the strategy. In business as in military affairs, the boundaries between levels are not always distinct; tactical information dynamically informs strategy, and individual people often move between roles over time.
Operations traditionally refers to the production of goods and services separately, although the distinction between these two main types of operations is increasingly difficult to make as manufacturers tend to merge product and service offerings. More generally, operations management aims to increase the content of value-added activities in any given process. Fundamentally, these value-adding creative activities should be aligned with market opportunity (through marketing) for optimal enterprise performance.
According to the U.S. Department of Education, operations management is the field concerned with managing and directing the physical and/or technical functions of a firm or organization, particularly those relating to development, production, and manufacturing. Operations management programs typically include instruction in principles of general management, manufacturing and production systems, plant management, equipment maintenance management, production control, industrial labor relations and skilled trades supervision, strategic manufacturing policy, systems analysis, productivity analysis and cost control, and materials planning. Management, including operations management, is like engineering in that it blends art with applied science. People skills, creativity, and rational analysis are all required for success.
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Since the late 1980s, firms around the world have launched Total Quality Management (TQM) programs in an attempt to retain or regain competitiveness in order to achieve customer satisfaction in the face of increasing competition from around the world in this era of globalization. TQM is an integrative philosophy of management for continuously improving the quality of products and processes. [1]
TQM functions on the premise that the quality of the products and processes is the responsibility of everyone who is involved with the creation or consumption of the products or services offered by the organization. In other words, TQM capitalizes on the involvement of management, workforce, suppliers, and even customers, in order to meet or exceed customer expectations. Considering the practices of TQM as discussed in six empirical studies, Cua, McKone, and Schroeder (2001) identified the nine common TQM practices as cross-functional product design, process management, supplier quality management, customer involvement, information and feedback, committed leadership, strategic planning, cross-functional training, and employee involvement. [2]
TQM and Six Sigma
The Six Sigma process improvement originated in 1986 from Motorola’s drive towards reducing defects by minimizing variation in processes through metrics measurement. [3] Applications of the Six Sigma project execution methodology have since expanded to include practices common in Total Quality Management and Supply Chain Management, such as increasing customer satisfaction, and developing closer supplier relationships. The main difference between TQM and Six Sigma (a newer concept) is the approach. TQM tries to improve quality by ensuring conformance to internal requirements, while Six Sigma focuses on improving quality by reducing the number of defects and impurities. |
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Human Resource Management
Tutorials
Readings
Human resource management (HRM) is the strategic and coherent approach to the management of an organization's most valued assets - the people working there who individually and collectively contribute to the achievement of the objectives of the business.
The terms "human resource management" and "human resources" (HR) have largely replaced the term "personnel management" as a description of the processes involved in managing people in organizations.[1] In simple words, HRM means employing people, developing their capacities, utilizing, maintaining and compensating their services in tune with the job and organizational requirement.
- Features
- Academic theory
- Business practice
- Careers and education
- Professional organizations
- Functions
Marketing Mix
Tutorials
Readings
The term "marketing mix" was coined in 1953 by Neil Borden in his American Marketing Association presidential address. However, this was actually a reformulation of an earlier idea by his associate, James Culliton, who in 1948 described the role of the marketing manager as a "mixer of ingredients", who sometimes follows recipes prepared by others, sometimes prepares his own recipe as he goes along, sometimes adapts a recipe from immediately available ingredients, and at other times invents new ingredients no one else has tried.
A prominent marketer, E. Jerome McCarthy, proposed a Four P classification in 1960, which has seen wide use. The Four P's concept is explained in most marketing textbooks and classes.
- Marketing Mix (bitesize 4P's) British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) Schools.
- [1] The Marketing Mix of IMC.
- [2] Four P’s, Four C’s And The Consumer Revolution.
- 7Cs Compas Model: http://www.josai.ac.jp/~shimizu/essence/Professor%20Koichi %20Shimizu%27s%207Cs%20Compass%20Model.html
- Marketing Mix Theory The Times 100 Business Case Studies.
Accounting and Finance
Tutorials
Readings
Accountancy is the process of communicating financial information about a business entity to users such as shareholders and managers.[1] The communication is generally in the form of financial statements that show in money terms the economic resources under the control of management; the art lies in selecting the information that is relevant to the user and is reliable.[2]
Accountancy is a branch of mathematical science that is useful in discovering the causes of success and failure in business. The principles of accountancy are applied to business entities in three divisions of practical art, named accounting, bookkeeping, and auditing.[3]
Accounting is defined by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) as "the art of recording, classifying, and summarizing in a significant manner and in terms of money, transactions and events which are, in part at least, of financial character, and interpreting the results thereof."[4]
Accounting is thousands of years old; the earliest accounting records, which date back more than 7,000 years, were found in the Middle East. The people of that time relied on primitive accounting methods to record the growth of crops and herds. Accounting evolved, improving over the years and advancing as business advanced.[5]
Early accounts served mainly to assist the memory of the businessperson and the audience for the account was the proprietor or record keeper alone. Cruder forms of accounting were inadequate for the problems created by a business entity involving multiple investors, so double-entry bookkeeping first emerged in northern Italy in the 14th century, where trading ventures began to require more capital than a single individual was able to invest. The development of joint stock companies created wider audiences for accounts, as investors without firsthand knowledge of their operations relied on accounts to provide the requisite information.[6] This development resulted in a split of accounting systems for internal (i.e. management accounting) and external (i.e. financial accounting) purposes, and subsequently also in accounting and disclosure regulations and a growing need for independent attestation of external accounts by auditors.[7]
Today, accounting is called "the language of business" because it is the vehicle for reporting financial information about a business entity to many different groups of people. Accounting that concentrates on reporting to people inside the business entity is called management accounting and is used to provide information to employees, managers, owner-managers and auditors. Management accounting is concerned primarily with providing a basis for making management or operating decisions. Accounting that provides information to people outside the business entity is called financial accounting and provides information to present and potential shareholders, creditors such as banks or vendors, financial analysts, economists, and government agencies. Because these users have different needs, the presentation of financial accounts is very structured and subject to many more rules than management accounting. The body of rules that governs financial accounting is called Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, or GAAP.[8]
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Finance is the science of funds management.[1] The general areas of finance are business finance, personal finance, and public finance.[2] Finance includes saving money and often includes lending money. The field of finance deals with the concepts of time, money, risk and how they are interrelated. It also deals with how money is spent and budgeted.
One facet of finance is through individuals and business organizations, which deposit money in a bank. The bank then lends the money out to other individuals or corporations for consumption or investment and charges interest on the loans.
Loans have become increasingly packaged for resale, meaning that an investor buys the loan (debt) from a bank or directly from a corporation. Bonds are debt instruments sold to investors for organizations such as companies, governments or charities.[3] The investor can then hold the debt and collect the interest or sell the debt on a secondary market. Banks are the main facilitators of funding through the provision of credit, although private equity, mutual funds, hedge funds, and other organizations have become important as they invest in various forms of debt. Financial assets, known as investments, are financially managed with careful attention to financial risk management to control financial risk. Financial instruments allow many forms of securitized assets to be traded on securities exchanges such as stock exchanges, including debt such as bonds as well as equity in publicly traded corporations. [dubious – discuss]
Central banks, such as the Federal Reserve System banks in the United States and Bank of England in the United Kingdom, are strong players in public finance, acting as lenders of last resort as well as strong influences on monetary and credit conditions in the economy.[4]
- Overview of techniques and sectors of the financial industry
- Personal finance
- Corporate finance
- Finance of public entities
- Financial economics
- Financial mathematics
- Experimental finance
- Behavioral finance
- Intangible Asset Finance
- Related professional qualifications
Business Communication Tutorials
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Business
Communication,
6e
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Tutorials
1. Business
Communication Foundations
3. Technological, Legal, and Ethical Considerations
EFFECTIVE COMMUNICATION DEVELOPMENT
4. Principles of Business Communication
5. Print and Electronic Messages
CORRESPONDENCE APPLICATIONS
6. Positive and Neutral Messages
WRITTEN REPORT APPLICATIONS
10. Business Research and Report Writing
11. Proposals, Business Plans, and Special Reports
12. Visual Aids
13. Interpersonal Communication and Teamwork
ORAL AND NONVERBAL COMMUNICATION
14. Listening and Nonverbal Messages
15. Oral Communication Essentials
EMPLOYMENT COMMUNICATION
17. Employment Communication and Interviewing
Readings
Communication is a process whereby meaning is defined and shared between living organisms. Communication requires a sender, a message, and an intended recipient, although the receiver need not be present or aware of the sender's intent to communicate at the time of communication; thus communication can occur across vast distances in time and space. Communication requires that the communicating parties share an area of communicative commonality. The communication process is complete once the receiver has understood the sender.
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Resources
