Author's notes: This book has been written to help experienced managers and those aspiring to a career in management understand and deal with the problems and opportunities they may face in managing people and organizations in contemporary contexts. It has grown first of all from material originally prepared for a distance learning course on the specialist masters programmes and MBA programme of Edinburgh Business School, Heriot Watt University. Second, it also draws heavily on my research, mostly with my good friends at the University of Glasgow, into management, HRM, organizational behaviour and change. Finally, I have incorporated insights from more than thirty years teaching, consulting and managing people in the UK and a number of countries in Europe, North America and Asia. The aim of the book is to fill a gap between conventional postgraduate and executive texts on organizational behaviour and human resource management. Arguably the former don’t focus enough on management and what it is required of managers – indeed some are almost anti-management – while the latter are too specialist for the needs of people occupying more generalist roles. Moreover, the majority of these texts are a little light on dealing with the contemporary and changing contexts in which management is performed, often failing to make the connections with major international economic, social and technological developments, the rise of creative and knowledge- based industries, intangible assets as the basis of competition, and the strategic concerns of organizations in the private, public and voluntary sectors of modern economies. My hope is that readers will find this book relevant to their existing or potential work as managers, regardless of where they live, helping them understand and apply some key concepts in business and management to their everyday working. The material in the book is based on a wide range of literature in disciplines and sub-disciplines that contribute to business and management, including organizational behaviour and organizational theory, management theory, human resource management, information systems, knowledge management, operations management, marketing, economics, international management, business history and strategic management. There are also some chapters that are intended to be innovative in bringing together bodies of knowledge that haven’t been integrated before, particularly in the fields of corporate reputation, branding and people management, and technology and people management. These chapters are based on original work for the UK Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development and speak directly to the future roles of HR specialists and line managers. It has been suggested by reviewers that this eclecticism and forward vision are part of the book’s strengths. However, I hope that specialists in some of these areas may forgive the inevitable lack of depth compared to that of their own works; this is always a danger of integration and attempting to move into new fields in business and management. Yet, the work of managers rests upon being able to integrate ideas and techniques from various disciplines, and books that help them along the way should be of value in this regard. I have written in the first person to make the book more accessible and to avoid the spurious objectivity that is sometimes associated with writing in the third person. Again I hope this will not offend my academic colleagues because it has not been written with them in mind. It is written for managers and students, many of whom have suggested that writing in such a style helps put a face behind the text, so long as it is not too intrusive. The book is also filled with examples, short cases and exercises, and longer cases from different industrial and national contexts. Lecturers and tutors can access additional cases and suggested answers to the exercises and case studies in the book from a companion website (www.textbooks.elsevier.com). These have all been tried and tested in my own teaching in the UK, USA, continental Europe, Asia and Australia and might be helpful in stimulating learning in your classrooms. Students who seek feedback on how well they understand and can apply the material in the book may want to use the review questions at the end of each chapter, answers to which are supplied in the book. Though the questions are of the multiple choice and true-false variety, often decried by educators as irrelevant to deep learning, a substantial proportion of these have been designed to test not only depth of understanding but also application. I’m grateful to my colleague, Fiona Lennon, for help with these.