Why is the module leader recommending his own textbook?

The two main reasons are:

• Because it is the only book that contains all the material you need for the module – all the competing texts fall short in at least one area
• Because we (my co-author, Alison Rieple, and I) genuinely believe that a lot of the models are not explained well enough in other books for students to be able to go off and apply them. Other books just write the theory down and leave it at that. We have taken a lot of trouble to try and steer you away from the most common mistakes that students make when trying to use these models in practice.

Aren’t you just making money at our expense?

I personally earn about £1 for every copy of “The Strategic Management of Organisations” that is sold. This means that, in the unlikely event that every student I teach in the course of an academic year buys the book, I’ll make about £600 – useful money, but not exactly a fortune.

Of course, we hope to make rather more money than that. But in order to do so we need to persuade lecturers and students in other institutions – people over whom we have no influence - that our book is better than the alternatives. Our publishers seem to believe that the book is good enough to hold its own in a crowded market place.

What if I don’t like the book?

There are several alternatives mentioned in the Module Handbook and referenced in the week-by-week reading list. The library has ample stocks of them all.

Copies of the case studies used for seminar work and assessment can be obtained from me, directly or via your seminar tutor.

Any other selling points?

We have tried to make the book accessible. This means:

• keeping the language simple, so that even a student whose mother tongue is not English can understand every paragraph at first reading
• using companies you have heard of as the main examples, and using them consistently throughout the book, so that you can apply each new concept in a familiar context
• linking strategic management theory to other subjects you have studied– in particular economics and HRM.

There are a number of other reasons why we wrote the book – mainly to do with our dissatisfaction with what we saw as the unbalanced way in which the theory was put across in other texts, and the number of important areas that they missed out and skimmed over. We believe that we give the most comprehensive account of the subject available.

Adrian Haberberg

Tuesday, 11 September 2001