Book excerpt: For Introduction to Business courses. This best-selling text by Ricky Griffin and Ronald Ebert provides students with a comprehensive overview of all the important functions of business. Each edition has introduced cutting-edge firsts while ensuring the underlying principles that guided its creation, Doing the Basics Best, were retained. The seventh edition focuses on three simple rules- Learn, Evaluate, Apply. - NEW- Chapter 2: Understanding the Environments of Business - This new chapter puts business operations in contemporary context, explaining the idea of organizational boundaries and describing the ways in which elements from multiple environments cross those boundaries and shape organizational activities. This chapter sets the stage as an introduction to some of the most important topics covered in the rest of the book, for example: - The Economics Environment includes the role of aggregate output, standard of living, real growth rate; GDP per capita; real GDP; purchasing power parity; and the Consumer Price Index. - The Technology Environment includes special attention to new tools for competitiveness in both goods and services and business process technologies, plus e