Dr. Michael A. Levin:

There were several things I thought about when thinking about the books I’ve used for intro to business in the past. Specifically, while they cover the topic material, there was no purpose for it. The students would ask themselves, “Why am I learning these different concepts? How do they relate to each other?” And we often hear that from our students that textbooks are dry, boring.

One of the things I wanted to do was offer a different way to organize the material. There are seven chapters and the first three chapters are about starting a business and all the elements that go into creating a business. When we think about creating a business, we want to come up with a business idea, maybe start designing our website for it, and so on, and that's great, that is all part of starting a business. But we also have to think about the drier, more mundane topics such as, what type of legal entity are you going to create? And those topics need to be discussed because that's a critical component of starting a business.

The last three chapters are about running the business. So once the excitement of the new business wears off, how do we manage the day-to-day, week-to-week, month-to-month, and quarter-to-quarter aspects of the business? Because that's truly where our business can become sustainable. That is, it's going to generate enough profit that we can afford to hire people, even pay ourselves enough to make our rent payments and maybe even take a vacation, certainly car payments, and perhaps even grow the business that is more than one location or more than one market served. That middle chapter then, marketing, serves as a bridge between the starting of the business and the running of the business. Because oftentimes we need marketing to help create awareness and excitement in our new business, we're also going to need marketing to sustain that excitement over time, to help it make it sustainable. And that's why I located Chapter 4, Marketing, where I did.

I also wanted to write for point of view. One of the best textbooks that I got in terms of positive response from students was a retailing textbook written by Bob Lush and Patrick Dunn. And part of what made the students enjoy that textbook was they wrote for point of view, that is, tone. And too often, textbooks are just missing tone, hence why students say, “This is so dry, it's boring, it's dull.” And so I wanted to create something that had a tone to it.

The other thing that I wanted to add to it was discussion questions in the form of ethical dilemmas. And I borrowed an idea from Jeff Tanner and Steven Castleberry, and out of their textbook, their ethical dilemmas, as I taught them, I found the students struggled with them. And that is a contrast to a lot of the ethical dilemmas that we see where the answer is obvious or a little packed. And the better ones, the ones that I found that really engage the students and sparked a lively discussion, and even had some discussion points, weeks later, where students were writing in their journals, I'm still thinking about that question, and I'm still rolling it over in my mind. And that was something else I wanted to add to the text, that is, some questions that could elicit either class discussion or could be used as part of an essay or even just a prompt for, say, a time writing exercise.

The last thing that I wanted to add to this was the teaching note. The teaching material really is designed with a specific person in mind, that is an instructor who has been handed this introduction to business or first year seminar, about two to four weeks before it starts. And I wanted to help provide ancillary materials that would help you succeed in the classroom. Those are some of the things that I think are points of distinction about this textbook as compared to other introduction to business textbooks that are out on the market.

Dr. Michael A. Levin:

It's a great question. As I mentioned earlier, this is really an end-to-end solution. By adopting this eBook, what you're really doing is being able to integrate in a very systematic purposeful fashion the topic of the simulation from the first week of the semester to the last week of the semester. Whether you're on a seven-week schedule or 14-week schedule, it doesn't really matter. This is all end-to-end. So, within each chapter, you will find discussion points. For example, we talk about different types of investors, and there's a discussion question. Jane, who's the initial investor of the coffee shop, what type of investor is she? And so for students to discuss that and to kick that around, they need to read the material in the chapter. And they'll be able to begin to integrate knowledge in that system, what we should match to about level three, I believe, on Bloom’s taxonomy, the cognitive effort. There's also at the end of each chapter, the relevant BizCafe assignments. And so you can integrate the assignments as you're doing the chapter. I've used those as punch points. Hey, did you do it? Does it look reasonable? Great, you get credit.

I've also done them as graded assignments as part of low-stakes assignments, like a quiz, to ensure that the students are paying attention and starting to think about the simulation. And that's really what the textbook does in that specific sense in terms of end-to-end. It integrates those concepts, those ideas that are in the simulation in the textbook.

But I also provide additional examples, so to think a little bigger and broader. There are some discussion points involving, say, Starbucks. We'll make McDonald's, other food retailers. I also look for ways to integrate the student's experience. For example, I had students go out to coffee shops and I would give them a little rubric, if you will. We talk about it in one of the chapters about atmospherics. That is, how do we encounter the store? How is it lit? How does it smell? What's the relationship between walking in the door and where the ordering is? What type of ordering is it? How is the Espresso machine positioned?

As an example with one of my students, they observed that one local coffee shop owner puts his Espresso machine down at the counter level to encourage eye contact between the barista and the customer. Whereas if you've been in a Starbucks, theirs is above the counter, and it's harder to make eye contact and hence conversation. Those are two very different experiences. And students, by and large, have been to a coffee shop. If they haven't, you can always send them to a coffee shop. But you can then bring that back and talk about What experience did you have and how did those atmospherics influence that experience? Now, when you're setting up your coffee shop decisions in BizCafé, what type of furniture are you going to use? And they should have a more grounded, more concrete thought process because you've built them to that point by using the textbook.

In the end, the simulation represents the day to day operations of their business ideas, and that’s great. But I also want them to incorporate what they experience in the outside world, even if it’s not directly applicable to their simulation experience. Bottom line, we’re not teaching students to run a coffee shop. We’re teaching them to run a business, or to at least understand the elements of running a business. With this eBook and sim combination, the students practical, hands-on material, together with the experience of running a business themselves.