Book excerpt: Business knowledge has been evolving ever since the emergence of the first economic book, The Wealth of Nations, written by Adam Smith. A profound load of business management theories, concepts, notions, techniques and tools have been developed. However, pragmatic applications of those “good stuffs” to business in practice seem not quite satisfactory. Many evidences show that the majority of senior managers are still reactive (instead of proactive) to the environmental changes, myopia in strategic planning, inconsistent in managing and bias in analyzing. Those are obviously the handicaps in the treacherously changing business environment. On the other hand, the under-performance of MBA graduates somehow reveals that there might be a need to renovate and supplement the current education system in management. Those problems will be well defined and addressed in this book through introducing a new approach in thinking and effective methods that can readily help resolve these problems. Unlike the pure academic writings, our principles, systems, methods and tools are developed based upon not only academic theories, but also the practical experiences through being practiced and testified in numerous business cases in reality. Furthermore, our principles and systems are designed to be readily applicable to business in practice.Business in its nature is a holistic and indivisible piece of matter, and it is also a complex, volatile and conceptual matter as well. The former characteristics hinder the business practitioners from managing and making decisions effectively while the latter ones hinder the students from acquiring the mastery of its overall rationale. Image that, without a holistic and integrative framework and engineering mindset, the tasks of business planning and implementation might end up like constructing a cross-sea bridge without an overall blueprint and engineering concepts and practices. Unfortunately, there is by far no such a single framework that provides a holistic view systematically and visually that allows people to concisely capture the essence of business.Conceptualization is deemed to be one of the crucial abilities in strategic planning and decision making for senior executive level and usually becomes a bottleneck for many middle managers to move up along their career ladder. One of the challenges of conceptualizing business lies in the complexity and vagueness of the relationship among numerous business elements. For removing this difficulty to a considerable extent, we take the systematic approach to provide the framework that holistically captures the panorama of business environment and logically integrates the essential business elements in seamless manner, from financial status and performance to management functions to strategy to market environment to macro environment. Essentially, our system serves as a frame of mind in the field of business, called Business “MindFrame”, in which people can be aided in better modeling business contexts, reasoning the business decisions out, and charting the effective courses of actions rationally.Published by SCPG Publishing Corporation and distributed by World Scientific for all markets except China