Law, in its simplest form, is used to protect one party from another. For instance, laws protect customers from being exploited by companies. Laws protect companies from other companies. Laws even protect citizens and corporations from the government. However, law is neither perfect nor all encompassing. This course will introduce the student to the laws and ethical standards that managers must abide by in the course of conducting business. Laws and ethics almost always shape a company's decision-making process; a bank cannot charge any interest rate it wants to charge that rate must be appropriate. By the end of this course, the student will have a clear understanding of the legal and ethical environment in which businesses operate. Upon successful completion of this course, the student will be able to: Identify sources of law in the United States; Describe the function and role of courts in the US legal system; Differentiate litigation from methods of alternative dispute resolution; List the elements of the major torts; List the essential elements of a valid contract; Describe how a contract can fail; Summarize the remedies available for breach of contract; Distinguish between real and personal property; Identify the various interests in real property and how they pass; Identify the requirements to hold various rights under intellectual property laws; Analyze the impact of the digital era on intellectual property rights; Distinguish between at-will employment and contractual employment; Identify laws that generally regulate the employer-employee relationship; Identify criminal acts related to the business world; Define white collar crime; Describe the various forms of business organization; Identify the major laws regulating business in the United States; Identify major ethical concerns in business today. (Business Administration 205)

Strategic management is usually among the last courses of the business education curriculum. Taught from a top-management perspective, the course generally involves concepts, cases, and a business game. The balance among the work expected of students in studying concepts and engaging in cases and game vary greatly among institutions and their instructors.This narrative content is written for the strategic management course that is lighter-on-content and heavier-on-engagement. The content herein covers principles that are useful in practice. The student is told only what the student must be told, on the presumption that the student is intelligent enough to fill in the gaps, a presumption that should be reasonable for anyone aspiring to a top management position.To simplify the narrative, the discussion herein refers only to profit-making entities, labeled firms, even though much of the material is applicable also to not-for-profit organizations. Additionally, the revenue-generating output of firms are referred to always as products, even when the product could be a service, such as transportation.

A strategy is a plan with actionable elements. Many strategies fall readily into one of a small number of common types. A type is not a strategy, because a type is not a plan. When a strategy fits into a type, however, the strategy may be immediately assessed as better or worse because of its type.