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.

A practical, enjoyable and proven manual for leading transformational change - by the award-winning author of No Bullsh*t Leadership.

Drawing on an international career of leading successful change programmes, Chris Hirst cuts through the bullsh*t to reveal uncomplicated strategies for transformation - no matter the size of your organisation or the nature of the challenge. Leading change is about:

• Being honest and clear
• Building teams full of thriving people
• Finding your point of maximum impact

Most importantly, it's about taking action - and this book will show you how.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Chasing the Internet, a revised version of Life Lessons: How to Fail and Win, chronicles Alan Knott-Craig’s relentless pursuit to bridge South Africa’s digital divide, taking readers from his early entrepreneurial struggles to building one of the country’s most innovative connectivity companies.

This isn’t just another startup story – it’s a blueprint for purpose-driven entrepreneurship in emerging markets.

Learn powerful lessons about partnerships, leadership transitions, and knowing when to bring in new talent to scale. Find out why tackling ‘hard things’ like township connectivity creates unbeatable competitive advantages. Be inspired by fibertime’s remarkable turnaround story. See that purpose and innovative thinking can transform both businesses and communities.

This is the story of chasing an impossible dream and actually catching it.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is upending life, work, and play as we know it … and it’s only just getting started. The rise of AI is a milestone on par with the discovery of fire, the invention of the wheel, and the creation of the internet. In short, AI is going to change everything. For some, that’s an exciting prospect. For others, it’s terrifying. However you feel about AI, there’s no escaping it, whether you’re in a global metropolis or a farmer in rural KwaZulu-Natal.

Dr Mark Nasila has been watching AI’s ascent for over a decade, studying its effects on everything from agriculture and aviation to healthcare, education, entertainment, crime prevention, energy management, policy creation, finance, and anything in between, and applying them to his role at one of South Africa’s most successful financial institutions, First National Bank, a division of FirstRand Group.

African Artificial Intelligence is a comprehensive and fascinating journey, tracing the rise of AI and its evolution into the emerging technology underpinning all others – from connected devices and smart chatbots to the metaverse. Mark combines unexpected use cases and tales of cutting-edge innovation with a unique and potent argument: harnessing AI to solve Africa’s problems requires embracing it from an African perspective.

African nations can’t afford to simply import AI solutions from afar. Instead, Mark contends, they need to rework, remix, and refine AI so it’s able to meet uniquely African challenges in uniquely African ways, and to take advantage of the once-in-a-generation opportunity AI represents for every industry, sector, and person, everywhere.

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.

Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard invented the model of the Silicon Valley start-up and set in motion a process of corporate becoming that made it possible for HP to transform itself six times over the 77 years since its founding in the face of sweeping technological changes that felled most of its competitors over the years. Today, HP is in the throes of a seventh transformation to secure its continued survival by splitting in two independent companies: HP Inc. and Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Based on extensive primary research conducted over more than 15 years, this book documents the differential contribution of HP's successive CEOs in sustaining the company's integral process of becoming. It uses a comprehensive strategic leadership framework to examine and explain the role of the CEO: (1) defining and executing the key tasks of strategic leadership, and (2) developing four key elements of the company's strategic leadership capability. The study of the strategic leadership of HP's successive CEOs revealed the paradox of corporate becoming, the existential situation facing successive CEOs (that justifies the book's empathic approach), and the importance of the CEO's ability to harness the company's past while also driving its future. Building on these novel insights, the book shows how the frameworks used to conceptualize the tasks of strategic leadership and the development of strategic leadership capability can serve as steps toward a dynamic theory of strategic leadership that animates an evolutionary framework of corporate becoming. This framework will be helpful for further theory development about strategic leadership and also offers practical tools for founders of new companies and CEOs and boards of directors of existing companies who intend to create, run or oversee companies built for continued relevance, longevity and greatness.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Labour Disrupted exposes the precariousness of union organisation and how labour movements have had to respond to the challenges of the Covid-19 pandemic. It addresses issues related to the fourth industrial revolution on the working class, and the challenges of skills development and inclusiveness.

Labour Disrupted reflects on the past and the future of labour, primarily in South Africa but also globally. It focuses on how South Africa’s lockdown during the Covid-19 pandemic further exposed key contradictions and challenges that labour movements face.

The contributions include a diverse range of topics currently engaged with by those actively engaged in the field of labour movement. Essays by academics and activists tackle thorny issues: from redefining democracy in South Africa, to experiences of inclusiveness (or lack thereof) in workplace environments by women, young people, migrant workers, LGBTI people and people living with disabilities. The volume addresses contemporary issues related to the use of technology and the impact of the fourth industrial revolution on the youth and the working class, and the challenges of skills development and restructuring in the workplace.

Labour Disrupted shows new forms of organising and alliances that labour movements are involved in to address issues of social justice in education, health and community solidarity.

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.