Strategic Management and Business Policy

by Thomas L. Wheelen and J. David Hunger

Book Overview

The new edition of this successful strategic management text continues its broad & balanced coverage of the field of strategy, while incorporating cutting-edge topics & issues. The authors' well-known... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0131494597
• ISBN13: 9780131494596
• Release Date: October 2005
• Publisher: Prentice Hall
• Length: 1104 Pages
• Weight: 4.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.7" x 8.3" x 10.2"

Customer Reviews

This was a required textbook for a course in business policy.

This book has been very interesting, and that certainly helps from a textbook. It is required for my Business Policy class and it has helped more than some of the other textbooks that I have used. I was very lucky, mine was new for a fraction of the cost. That certainly made things easier for me.

Truly excellent textbook

I'm not often motivated to write positive things about my business textbooks. However, this book was a truly excellent companion to my class on Strategic Management, with clear explanations of the concepts and ample real-world examples. The book is divided roughly 50/50 between expository text and case studies. The case studies are nothing to write home about, you'll find lots of books full of case studies, and I do think that some of them leave out critical details. However, that does not detract from the excellent quality of the text itself.

Already within the text

All cases in this book are already within the hardcover text. I wasted my money. The actual cases within this text are great ones though, because they really require the reader to think about several aspects of business.

Common sense for those that know business concepts well...

Although one may learn new terms, most of the concepts laid out in this book are fairly common sense, if you've had any type of job in your life where you had to do payroll, forcast sales, or any other "strategic" processes of doing business. This is not to talk down at the book....it is an excellent book that covers the topic(s) that it set out to quite well. In the real business world, you would always try to figure out the most cost effective way to increase profits, decrease costs, and simultaneously maintain workplace efficiency. I didn't really need a textbook to tell me that. I originally bought this book on the advice of bain4weeks.com which recommended this as the text of choice to successfully test out of the Excelsior College Exam ECE Business Policy and Strategy. While I merely scanned through a few of the pages, I ended up getting a "B" on what was supposed to the the "capstone" business degree class. The test was all essay response, which made it sound hard, but to be honest, it was probably one of the easiest tests I've taken. It took all 3 hours, but it was kind of hard to fail that exam. AS LONG AS you put something down for an answer, and it made sense to the senario. It was very open-response and more or less asked for your opinion on the best way to solve the particular case study. I strongly recommend anyone wishing to get 3 required upper level semester credits in Business Policy/Strategy to register NOW for that ECE exam; it will be discontinued in Sept 2004. Grab the Strategic Management book if you feel you'll need a good review of what would be unfamiliar business concepts for you. TECEP does have a version of the Business Policy test as well . But I'd try to take the Excelsior version while I can. outlines the whole credit-by-examination process and how to finish your degree a lot faster.

See your business as an integrated whole

I originally used an older version of this book in 1991 when I took Wheelen's class "Strategic Management and Business Policy". The value of this book is Wheelen's methods of taking all the parts of a business and integrating them into a workable whole--the physical tool to enable such a transformation is the strategic business plan. I was only 20 when I read this book, and I was awestruck.This was the most valuable book I read in college.