General Business: Getting Started

This book shares unique perspectives on the successful global evolution and future ambitions of Chinese consumer companies. It presents an unprecedented collection of one-on-one interviews with some of the most influential leaders in China, whose companies offer diverse products and services. Further, the book offers future business leaders encouragement and guidance on how to ride the consumer wave in China. It also investigates some of the foremost current trends, revealing the best opportunities for companies to succeed on the Chinese market.

Although research on business model innovation is flourishing internationally, many important questions on the 'how', 'what', and 'when' of this process remain largely unanswered, particularly in regard to the role of top management. This book answers some of those pressing questions by taking a deliberately managerial perspective. Based on new and original findings derived from a survey among firms from various industries, and several case studies (including DSM, NXP Semiconductors, Randstad, and TomTom), the authors provide new insights into how and when managers can change a firm's business model.

Business Strategies for Sustainability brings together important research contributions that demonstrate different approaches to business strategies for sustainability. Many corporate initiatives toward what firms perceive to be sustainability are simply efficiency drives or competitive moves - falling far short of actual strategies for ecological sustainability. To suggest true ecological sustainability strategies, this new research anthology adopts an interdisciplinary, or transdisciplinary, approach to discern what business strategies might look like if they were underpinned by environmental and ecological science. The 23 chapters in this anthology reflect five main topic sections: (a) delineating sustainability challenges and visions; (b) contradiction, integration and transformation of business and sustainability logics; (c) innovating and developing strategic capabilities for sustainability; (d) assessing and valuing sustainability; and (e) toward multi-level engagement and collaboration.