Book Review of Business Policy and Strategy: An Action Guide :: Accounting Finances Businesses Essays

Book Review of Business insurance policy and Strategy An Action Guide Business Policy and Strategy An Action Guide, by Robert Murdick, R.Carl Moor and Richard H. Eckhouse, attempts to tie together the broad policiesand interrelationships that exist among the many functional areas whichundergraduate students typically study. The authors intend the text to add-on the typical model book and/or computer simulations used in teaching ancestry strategy (ix). Situational analysis is presented, as is a structurefor growing strategy. Practicality and real world experience is combinedwith educational theory to provide as complete a picture as possible of strategyin business.The authors prolong divided the text into 15 chapters with no furthersubdivisions. It is possible, however, to group the chapters into specific areasof study. For example, the first chapter, Business Failure -- BusinessSuccess, examines why businesses fail, and provides the reason for chronicwith the remainder of the te xt. The next two chapters focus on the field ofaction, including the business environment and the business system. The fourthand fifth chapters introduce strategic management (chapter 4) and the battlenot only to survive, but to prosper using strategic management (chapter 5).Chapters Six through Nine address specific functional areas (marketing,accounting/finance, production, and engine room/research and development).Chapters 10 and 11 introduce the reader to the problems of managing humanresources (chapter 10) and data processing resources (chapter 11). The lastfour chapters discuss the issues involved with analyzing business situations.Multinational business analysis is the subject of chapter 12, while chapter 13turns the readers attention to how to conduct an industry study. Chapters 14and 15 focus on how to analyze a case and illustrations of case analysis,respectively. The text concludes with an appendix of symbols used by those whoevaluate reports and a general index to topi cs within the book. The authors makegood and frequent use of charts, graphs, forms and other brilliant techniques toillustrate their points. Each chapter concludes with a selected bibliographythat the student may use for additional research. The book is printed entirelyin black ink the use of color for cite concepts would have enhanced the booksvalue as a teaching text. Visually, the book is crowded without much whitespace for readers to make notes. Key concepts could also have been separatedfrom supporting text in a more clear manner. While each chapter has a summary,they do not have an introduction or a listing of key words of concepts that thestudent should learn as a result of studying each chapter. Such aids would make