What is the role off marketing in the business? How is value created in the marketing process? How can I develop a marketing plan? How do I conduct market research? Is the internet the best way to help me market my product or service, or are a multichannel approach the best solution as a distribution channel option?

This completely updated sixth edition of Introduction to marketing that started out in 1998 comprises twelve chapters that focuses on recent developments in the South African marketing environment. The business setting has changed drastically in the Post-Covid-19 environment. These changes are reflected in all the chapters of the textbook.

Of special interest are the new chapters that were introduced on sustainability, social responsibility and ethical decision-making in marketing, developing the marketing plan and how marketing is dealing with changes brought by Industry 4.0.

In 2023, Reuel Khoza unsealed a letter to the future, which he had written in 1999 when he was chair of Eskom, at the time recognised as the best power utility in the world. It was an optimistic letter, expressing hopes that have since been dashed by corruption and maladministration – by a failure of ethical leadership.

Khoza has written about leadership before – considering the importance of the intelligence, emotional and social quotients. Now he broadens his focus to explore the role of spirituality – a ‘faith quotient’ – in transformational leadership.

Powerful chapters deal with Ubuntu and Christianity, the social responsibilities of business, the nature of generosity in an unequal world, and the search for common values to bridge conflicts. This is a vital and timely book for a country that has lost its moral compass.

Unlock a new dimension in leadership by asking better questions.

Answers are overrated. In an unpredictable world, asking the right questions is significantly more powerful than clinging to stale, dated answers. What you knew yesterday won’t always take you where you need to go. Great leaders stand apart because they know how to ask themselves and their teams questions that spark insight, challenge assumptions, and drive action.

52 Big Questions for Business Leaders isn’t just a collection of prompts and provocations – it’s a guide to sharper, more intentional thinking. Whether you’re leading a start-up or a global enterprise, the questions in these pages will help you pause, reflect, and lead with clarity.

Drawing on decades of leadership experience, Mike Stopforth infuses wisdom, wit, and practical insight into the art of inquiry – because crafting big, beautiful questions is a skill worth mastering.

This isn’t a book to read once and shelve; it’s a tool to return to whenever you need fresh perspective, focus, or inspiration.

In the end, great leaders aren’t defined by the answers they give – but by the questions they dare to ask.

Retrospective accounts of the careers of twelve prominent management scholars The field of academic management is more competitive than ever before. Moreover, scholars have to deal with rapid advances in technology and an increasingly globalized discipline. But, for those who are prepared, there are also great opportunities to generate new and noteworthy scholarship. In this book, Xiao-Ping Chen and Kevin H. Steensma bring together the wisdom of some of the most prominent voices in the field to show how to develop influential research and succeed in the world of management studies. In A Journey toward Influential Scholarship, twelve prominent management scholars provide retrospective accounts of their professional journeys. These specialists share how they originated, developed, and published their research, as well as the mistakes they made along the way. Their stories offer insights to new scholars, including how to properly observe organizational phenomena, how to ask important research questions, and how to transform these questions into potentially fruitful areas of research. The book also provides useful strategies for developing collaborative relationships, managing the peer review and publication process, and disseminating findings. In combination, the essays provide scholars with an array of pathways for turning research into influential scholarship. More broadly, this is an essential guide for how to pursue a successful career in the field of management.

If you are not relentlessly fixated with relevance today, you will be ruthlessly annihilated by irrelevance tomorrow.

How relevant are you? Is your relevance under threat?

In a world where everything is changing before our eyes, nothing matters more than your ability to stay relentlessly relevant. Relentless Relevance is your must-read guide to thriving in chaos. Part business blueprint, part manifesto for forward-thinkers, this compelling book draws from insights in technology, culture, and human behaviour to empower individuals and organisations to rewrite their stories. Building on the provocative ideas of his bestselling book Legacide, Richard Mulholland makes a powerful case for abandoning legacy thinking. With sharp wit and actionable wisdom, he challenges you to reimagine the future and embrace the reinvention necessary to remain indispensable.

"I found myself asking the question, ‘Am I still relevant?’ What I discovered is that if you find yourself asking the question, the answer is no. Mostly because it’s the wrong question. The right question is, ‘What can I do today to stay relevant?’ You see, relevance is not a milestone anymore; it’s the path that we travel." – Richard Mulholland

Be prepared to shift from comfort to curiosity.

This introductory textbook to Business Management covers all the topics most important to those interested in the business world and managing businesses in South Africa, Africa and globally.

They include:

• General management, including planning, organising, leading and control
• Financial management
• Operations management
• Purchasing
• Logistics and supply chain management
• Management Information Systems
• Marketing management and public relations
• Human resource management.

The book also covers the business environment, entrepreneurship, business ethics and contemporary trends in 4IR relevant to management. It has been written by distinguished authors, all experts in their respective fields from various universities and the private sector, who share their knowledge and experience with a theoretically sound but practical approach. The intended readers are undergraduate students studying Introductory Business Management as part of a degree or diploma at a university, university of technology or private college.

Marketing is not a function by itself or a task for just one person – its success depends on several activities in the marketing value chain.

Understanding this value chain is important for companies to stay relevant, and crucial for seeing a return on their investment in marketing. Companies employ and interact with many members of the marketing value chain, and therefore need to be familiar with the relationships between each link in this chain.

Marketing Value Chain is about understanding this value chain, where marketing fits into the chain, and what role marketers play within it.

Key concepts are:

• the nature of distribution and its role in the supply chain and marketing
• the concept of value chain marketing
• distribution channels in South Africa
• understanding channel design and channel selection
• functions in the value chain
• behavioural processes in the value chain
• trends in value chain development and online channels
• the supply chain and logistics industry in South Africa
• buyer -supplier relationships

The Oxford Handbook of Innovation Management offers a comprehensive and timely analysis of the nature and importance of innovation and the strategies and practices that can be used to improve organizational benefits from innovation. Innovation is centrally important for business and national competitiveness, and for the quality and standard of living around the world, but it does not happen by itself. For innovation to succeed, it needs to be properly managed. With contributions from 49 world-leading scholars, the Handbook explores the many sources of innovation, the broader social, economic, and technological contexts that encourage and constrain it, and the cutting-edge strategies and practices of innovation management. The book addresses the traditional concerns of innovation management-such as managing R&D, intellectual property, and creativity, and the contributions of science and marketing-but substantially extends traditional areas of interest. In this new volume, chapters examine emerging topics including design, social networks, open and social innovation, and innovation in business models, ecosystems, services, and platforms. The book explores the importance of innovation management for environmental sustainability, and its evolving nature and practice in Asia. Written in an accessible style, and with carefully selected bibliographies and a comprehensive index, the Handbook offers a uniquely authoritative and wide-ranging source of knowledge about innovation management. Each chapter identifies key issues and reviews the most important research findings. Future research questions are identified. The Handbook will be invaluable for students and faculty studying, researching, and teaching innovation, and for managers seeking to improve innovation outcomes in their organizations.

This two-volume set examines the need for a consciousness-based view of leadership, which emphasizes universal human flourishing, as opposed to a resource-based view, which focuses on sustaining a competitive advantage. This approach is built around three main principles: 1) Paradigm (Consciousness is primary including complementary existence of opposites), 2) Interpersonal (focusing on empathy and compassion), and 3) Individual (experiencing Oneness and expressing creativity). Volume One is divided into three sections. The first section focuses on Consciousness-based approaches to Inclusive, Purposeful, Quantum, and Vedic leadership. The second section focuses on leadership principles from Vedic scriptures such as Ramayana and Vedanta. The third section includes leadership principles from other scriptures such as Buddhism, Confucianism, Daoism, and Thirukural. Aligning leadership practices with the notion of unbounded consciousness, this edited collection will extend the literature on organizational culture, leadership, and sustainability, contributing to solving the grand challenges facing humanity.

Africa is rich with potential and renowned for its innovation. However, with the long shadow of the Berlin Conference ever present, for Africa to catch up with the developed world, an exponential growth trajectory needs to be charted.

Musa Kalenga, technologist, marketer, brand communicator, entrepreneur, author of Ladders & Trampolines and Group CEO and shareholder of Brave Group, believes this is only possible using the springboard combination of creativity and technology. The Brave Code explores Musa’s journey with Brave Group to pioneer a shared value creative enterprise as a blueprint for other organisations in Africa.

Exploring tangible ways to benefit every member of its ecosystem, Brave Group upends traditional advertising models, challenges assumptions around equity, and pushes back at commonly accepted but outdated client and agency practices. Seeking to blaze a new trail and aiming to create a replicable model that has relevance beyond the advertising and marketing sector, Musa is spurred on by what is called a massive transformative purpose by Singularity University, and calls others to join him on the journey.

Weaving together anecdotal examples and personal musings with a working theory of change, The Brave Code is an encouragement to the young entrepreneurs, professionals and trailblazers in Africa to play a critical part in unlocking the immense value that the continent has to offer.

What can be learned from black South Africans who achieved success before South Africa became a democracy in 1994? What are the challenges they faced, and how did they overcome them? And, today, how have South Africans benefited from the country’s democratic system of governance? These are the questions Phumlani M. Majozi explores and attempts to answer in Lessons from Past Heroes.

He traces black people’s success and political activity back to the early 1900s; successful men and women who spearheaded the struggle against the segregationist, colonialist government and devoted their lives to advancing the interests of their communities. Phumlani explores the careers, challenges, and successes of people such as Pixley ka Isaka Seme, John Langalibalele Dube, Sol Plaatje and Josiah Tshangana Gumede.

During the apartheid years, South Africa produced black men and women who overcame the odds to succeed in their fields of business, entertainment, science, and politics. They excelled in the face of an oppressive government system, and their stories should inspire every South African today. After exploring the history of South Africa, Phumlani delves into the present and the future; evaluating the challenges South Africans face and proposes solutions that can speed up their economic progress.

He argues that much of South Africa’s history has portrayed the majority as victims of the minority, and that the inspirational stories of those people who overcame adversity are not being told widely enough.

These stories must be told to inspire future generations.

If black South Africans could succeed in the pre-1994 era, what can stop them today? The answer is nothing, Phumlani writes.

An innovation gap has emerged as American universities have focused on basic research and industry has concentrated on incremental product development. This gap has widened in recent decades, and the country has failed to close the gap in large part because of three myths-that innovation is about lone geniuses, the free market, and serendipity. It is time to embrace a new solution. In Organized Innovation: How Universities Can Join Forces with Business and Government to Renew America's Prosperity, Currall, Frauenheim, Perry, and Hunter provide a framework for optimizing the way America creates, develops, and commercializes technology breakthroughs. A blueprint for leaders in universities, business, and government, Organized Innovation addresses the innovation gap before us, builds upon the collaborative, brokered way that innovation happens best, and explains how these new discoveries can be most effectively put into practice today to the benefit of both our country and the world. The Organized Innovation framework is grounded in the authors' nearly decade-long study of lessons from a little-known but highly successful federal research program. Over the past quarter-century, the Engineering Research Center program has returned to the U.S. economy 10 times the funding invested in it. Detailed cases from the ERCs are used to bring to life the elements of the Organized Innovation framework.

Every company can point to a growth strategy. Far fewer, however, systematically implement them; instead, they spend their time on incremental innovations, or rely on acquisitions. Still, organic, internal growth, accomplished through product line renewal and new service development, is essential to the long-term vitality of corporations across all industries. The FASTPATH to Growth takes on the challenge large corporations have in generating internal innovation-developing new product lines that address new market applications and provide the corporation with new streams of revenue. It integrates the key disciplines-new product strategy, user research, concept development and prototyping, market testing, and business modeling-needed for enterprise growth. The book illustrates its framework with in-depth examples of companies that have leveraged their core technologies to new markets and new types of uses in order to generate impressive results, including IBM, Honda, and Mars. Many of these examples contain templates that readers can use in their own projects. The book ends by addressing the human side of new market applications, providing advice on what executives and innovation team leaders must do to execute the steps of Meyers framework for new market applications development. This comprehensive management guide should appeal to practitioners in research and development, new business development strategists, and product managers, along with students in engineering management, innovation management, and corporate strategy courses that focus on technology industries.

Starting a business is one thing. Making that business successful is quite another. We’ve all read the failure statistics of start-ups, yet we entrepreneurs are a determined bunch of people – we are not easily deterred and will try, and try, and try again.>

We are the drivers of economic growth and job creation, but sadly we are often the unsung heroes of the South African economy. With the lack of support for start-ups and absence of knowledge-sharing, being an entrepreneur is far from easy and what is missing is business guidance and mentorship.

Mistakes are made that could be avoided. We certainly don’t have all the answers all of the time, especially when we’re starting out. But you know who does? Those who’ve been down the same path before.

And that is where the value of this book, The Book Every Entrepreneur Has to Read, lies. It is full of sage advice, lessons learned, and thousands of hours of hard-earned knowledge from thriving entrepreneurs, covering: What they wish they knew when they were starting out.

What they wouldn’t do again, and the lesson learned. Wisdom they have picked up along the entrepreneurial journey from mindset to idea, planning to execution, funding to partnerships, networking to negotiating, innovation to strategy, hiring to company culture, social media to technology, and everything in between.

Don’t become a statistic – start reading and make notes and lists of what you can do today, to not only negotiate the sometimes hazardous entrepreneurial journey, but excel from a great idea to a successful business.

Future Purpose introduces a five-dimensional model designed to help mid to senior-level executives make better career decisions by helping them gain a deeper understanding of the major influences that drive these decisions. It presents a professional analysis of career change and growth that will inspire executives to take a deeply holistic view of themselves and their executive career development.

The Author’s “Five Dimensions of Influence” model, on which the book is based, provides a framework that holds together the challenges of managing our careers in an ever more complex and shifting world. This more holistic view of the individual executive’s career choices and career transitions sets this book apart from any other in this genre and takes the reader into a unique and deeply researched journey of discovery that presents the new world of work as a massive opportunity for new leaders to develop and participate in what van Melle Kamp refers to as the early stages of the “second renaissance”. Unlike many books that address leadership and change from an organisational perspective, this book provides individual executives with deep insights into how they can take charge of their own careers on a journey to the C-Suite in pursuit of purpose and meaningfulness.

Future Purpose is written in a narrative style in which the author “talks” to the reader, building a bond of under-standing as the model unfolds across the chapters. The style is supportive of the reader, helpful and deeply engaging as he takes us through his thinking and the complex scope of our career journeys. The book is peppered with stories and examples of individuals’ experiences in building their executive careers and how they managed through huge transitions on their “route to the top.” He weaves through the book valuable golden threads of knowledge and deep experience that reflect a combination of future-focused strategic insights, practical application and inspirational anecdotes.

Broad in its scope but deep in its application, the Five Dimensions of Influence model is a powerful road map for every senior executive on a journey to the C-Suite and in search of Future Purpose.

In Brandalism, the follow-up to his bestselling, award-winning debut book The Best Dick, Mike Sharman delves into the (start)ups and downs associated with brand building and the need for business to dismantle, and vandalise its perceived, public-facing, persona.

The future of PR and influence, when – or if – to launch a new business as opposed to a division, raising capital, the impact of presentations, start-up school fees, and emphasis on a manifesto rather than purpose, are the aspects Mike obsesses over in this insightful read, wrapped in his trademark, comedic, copy.

Mike Sharman, the co-founder of the creative, digital agency Retroviral that has made more brands ‘go viral’, globally, than any other agency in Africa, uses his unique storytelling proposition to provide insight into 12 years of building a business from scratch, while elevating his clients to emotional, (commercial) cult status.

Life is short. Play naked!

Just Whose Business Is It? offers a fresh and insightful exploration of ten common business owner types identified by Kathi Hyde during her 30-year career as an industrial psychologist and award-winning business coach.

From the ‘Rock Star’ and ‘Caged Bear’ to the ‘Magpie’ and more, Kathi helps business owners recognise how their owner-type behaviours influence every aspect of their business. She delves into the origins of these patterns, their impact on different areas of the business, and provides practical steps in each of these areas to address them. This transformative process empowers business owners to turn an established business into a sustainable, properly profitable and saleable asset. Kathi also defines the Gold Standard for a sustainable business, offering a clear benchmark for success.

With real-life business stories – including her own – this book combines practical advice with engaging, entertaining, and actionable guidance.

Features:

• Innovative approach: Introduces a brand-new framework for understanding business owner types, developed from Kathi's unique blend of industrial psychology and extensive coaching experience.
• Original insights: These owner-types are entirely original and not found elsewhere in the market.
• Real-life examples: Includes stories from Kathi's own experience and the experience of other businesses.
• Highly practical: Offers actionable strategies to create sustainable, profitable businesses.

A crisis means change. And for any business owner, change means opportunity.

There is nothing new about a crisis stalling or wiping out a business. The COVID-19 pandemic that has hit businesses globally does not feel any more or less devastating to the business owner than if their business was affected by the sudden loss of a dominant client, a trade war, burst water pipes halting operations, intransient employees or their product no longer being relevant to the market.

In Reset, Rebuild, Reignite, the second book from Pavlo Phitidis, his starting point is not how to avoid crises because some are inevitable. Instead, he shows how you can use any crisis to reset your business to get relevant, rebuild it to scale, and reignite it to accelerate growth by capitalising on the change and opportunities that any crisis brings with it.

Stories of business owners who have successfully turned crisis to their advantage are underpinned by Pavlo’s practical, action-oriented insights, tactics and strategies that will have you reading with a highlighter in hand, and will equip you to tackle any crisis that affects your business.

Leadership is not a destination. Leadership is an odyssey. A voyage of discovery, marked by changes of fortune and circumstances, informed by successes and failures. Defined by how you behaved and who you have become.

The Upside of Being Myself and Other Leadership Stories is a unique opportunity to catch a breath, step back, and take a long, hard, reflective look at who you are as a leader and where your odyssey will take you. Powered by experience, informed by the reality of operating in today’s harsh realities, and leveraging the insights gained from many leadership victories and defeats, each essay creates an opportunity for reflection, introspection and personal growth.

The book spans almost every aspect of leadership, including the journey towards that mythical corner office, the agility and flexibility of styles required for sustained success, the art of crisp, concise communication and the need for an internal compass to guide you on your journey. Ian Russell draws on his 30 years of leadership experience from around the world, using his irreverent, light-hearted but thought-provoking prose to land key leadership messages. Further diverse and powerful leadership insights come from a number of contributing writers on politics, large corporate life and entrepreneurial start-ups.

The Upside of Being Myself and Other Leadership Stories is an investment of your time into your leadership odyssey. This is not an opportunity you can pass by. So pick up a copy, settle down and enjoy.

How are firms, networks of firms, and production systems organized and how does this organization vary from place to place? What are the new geographies emerging from the need to create, access, and share knowledge, and sustain competitiveness? In what ways are local clusters and global exchange relations intertwined and co-constituted? What are the impacts of global changes in technology, demand, and competition on the organization of production, and how do these effects vary between communities, regions, and nations?
This book synthesizes theories from across the social sciences with empirical research and case studies in order to answer these questions and to demonstrate how people and firms organize economic action and interaction across local, national, and global flows of knowledge and innovation. It is structured in four clear parts:
- Part I: Foundations of Relational Thinking
- Part II: Relational Clusters of Knowledge
- Part III: Knowledge Circulation Across Territories
- Part IV: Toward a Relational Economic Policy?

The book employs a novel relational framework, which recognizes values, interpretative frameworks, and decision-making practices as subject to the contextuality of the social institutions that characterize the relationships between the human agents. It will be a valuable resource for academics, researchers, and graduate students across the social sciences, and practitioners in clusters policy.

Entrepreneurs generally lack the marketing capabilities necessary to bring their new product to market. To engage the resources required to do this, they must somehow place a value on the enterprise. However, all of the methods of valuation currently available are based on the use of historical or current revenues, and therefore are not applicable to an entrepreneurial enterprise with a first-time product. In Valuing an Entrepreneurial Enterprise, Audretsch and Link present a valuation method uniquely tailored to emerging technology-based ventures that have no revenue history to lean on. Unlike many traditional methods, theirs does not take into account the track record of companies and products similar to that being valuated. Instead, it draws on economic theory to formulate a solution to the problem.
The book develops conceptual ground, including trends in entrepreneurship, models of innovation, and the economics of standards and entrepreneurship policy. The authors review the traditional valuation methods and illustrate them numerically with case studies to show how the traditional approach produces an incorrect valuation. The core of the book presents the new methodology and demonstrates how it avoids the pitfalls of past approaches. The authors also show how public policy on technology and infrastructure changes valuations of start-up firms in areas such as stem-cell products and renewable fuels projects.
Valuing an Entrepreneurial Enterprise will serve as a valuable resource for advanced students, economists, financial planners, and valuators interested in new valuation methods and the theory behind them, as well as those interested in entrepreneurship.

HarperCollins and John C. Maxwell are celebrating the milestone anniversary of Maxwell’s New York Times bestselling book The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership with the publication of a new revised and updated 25th Anniversary Edition.

Maxwell has gone through every word of this book and updated it for the next generation of leaders. He has added new insights to these timeless laws and included lessons learned since he originally wrote the book. He removed dated stories and replaced them with fresh ones that apply to today’s world of business.

What Maxwell didn’t change are the powerful leadership truths that have been helping people become better leaders for the last quarter century. This is still the best book on leadership people can buy, whether they want to learn leadership on their own, develop as leaders in a group, or teach leadership to others as a mentor.

Readers new to Maxwell, as well as lifelong fans will want to get this new edition of the leadership book that has sold millions of copies in the United States and around the world.

African leadership is in crisis. The legacy of colonialism has prevailed, while novel challenges such as the pandemic and its aftermath, substantial developmental setbacks, the scourge of corruption and troughs in growth have challenged the ‘Africa Rising’ narrative that once dominated. In a deeply fragmented and uncertain world, one might ask, what is the source of inspiration for leadership?

As leaders are faced with the seemingly insurmountable task of rebuilding Africa’s economies, structures and systems, there is an argument to be made that leadership approaches should be uniquely and distinctly African.

Letlhokwa George Mpedi draws inspiration from African culture and African approaches to challenge the prevailing systems. By exploring selected proverbs and sayings, Letlhokwa identifies the tenets of successful and effective leadership. Traversing the ages, sourcing from indigenous practices, drawing from different regions and exploring diverse cultures on the continent, he finds common threads to rethink the practice of leadership.

From the Baobab to the Mosquito emphasises the value of collaboration and collective decision-making, reflecting the communal values that are at the heart of many African cultures. It offers a powerful reminder that leadership is not just about individual achievement, but about building strong relationships, fostering a sense of community, and making a positive difference in the lives of others.

Through this collection of African concepts in a contemporary context, Letlhokwa George Mpedi sounds the call for authentic African leaders.

Keep your cool and get the results you want when faced with crucial conversations. This New York Times bestseller and business classic has been fully updated for a world where skilled communication is more important than ever.

The book that revolutionized business communications has been updated for today’s workplace. Crucial Conversations provides powerful skills to ensure every conversation―especially difficult ones―leads to the results you want. Written in an engaging and witty style, the book teaches readers how to be persuasive rather than abrasive, how to get back to productive dialogue when others blow up or clam up, and it offers powerful skills for mastering high-stakes conversations, regardless of the topic or person.

This new edition addresses issues that have arisen in recent years. You’ll learn how to:

• Respond when someone initiates a crucial conversation with you
• Identify and address the lag time between identifying a problem and discussing it
• Communicate more effectively across digital mediums

When stakes are high, opinions vary, and emotions run strong, you have three choices: Avoid a crucial conversation and suffer the consequences; handle the conversation poorly and suffer the consequences; or apply the lessons and strategies of Crucial Conversations and improve relationships and results.

Whether they take place at work or at home, with your coworkers or your spouse, crucial conversations have a profound impact on your career, your happiness, and your future. With the skills you learn in this book, you'll never have to worry about the outcome of a crucial conversation again.