Contemporary Management with Student CD-ROM and PowerWeb

Rating:
Summary: Contemporary Management
Review: This book was an excellent book on the principles of management. The student CD was a great help in reviewing each chapter prior to class. The quizzes also helped in understanding the objectives. Would reccommend this book to anyone taking a business course.

Rating:
Summary: Good Book
Review: This was a great course book for use with my business class Itook last term. I had current up to date examples and was veryreadable.

Rating:
Summary: Poorly Written
Review: This was the required text for a class, as we had a very lazy instructor who relied 100% on the book to teach her class - including the quiz questions. The book is very wordy, contains many poor examples, and contains language that is downright wrong and confusing at times. I wrote the authors about some of the questions/concerns I had and recieved the most poorly written reply from the author - a PhD and professor at Texas A&M. He would have had trouble passing High School English from the email he sent.

The quiz questions within the book were very poorly written. The class, as a whole, used reason and argument to overturn over 10% of the books answers within the class.

Below is the reply from Professor Gareth Jones
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hello kevin

writing a textbook and keeping its lenght within limits is always a major problem for authors. ther short answer to your quesiton is that the "invalidated theories are discussed because many instructors want them, and many people out there still think they are valid. by the end of each chapter you see how far research has come and how complex thew topic really is. our goal is to help people understand the compleixty of the issues involved and that management is not a cut and dried issue but one intimately tied up with the appraoch and beliefs of each manager

our text is rarely regarded as being wordy, quite the opposite as people find our examples and boxes interesting, i dontg know what your own background is possibly computers/engineering? its always hard crossing disciplines, and the issues you raise with motivation are addressed in adsvanced classes inside management departments for majors and for MBAs

the test bank is another issue, and i have forwarded your comments to the publisheds who are responsible for that

possibly by the end of the book, and having digested what is a lot of material, you can think back to whaty you knew before the course and wehat you know now and you find that we will have added value to your understand, that is our goal anyway and one thats is succeeding as our book is one of the most widely used across the U.S.

good luck, gareth