In choosing your career, you must consider the key dimensions of the business environment and your place within it. That would mean that you should: consider your interests and abilities as well as those skills you learned in college.

In 2005, General Motors introduced a blockbuster promotion by offering customers the employee discount prices for any vehicle. Chrysler and Ford followed the trend and offered the same program. This intense price competition among three major automobile producers resulted in lower profits for all three companies. This outcome illustrates a problem for firms in oligopolistic markets.

Natasha is very unhappy with conditions in her country. She has very little economic or political freedom. Virtually all productive enterprises are owned by the government, and they seem to be run very inefficiently. The result is frequent shortages and surpluses of goods and services. These conditions suggest that Natasha’s country relies on a communist economic system.

A growing number of firms have developed nonprofit partnerships with a profit-minded approach (i.e., Kraft, Polo Ralph Lauren, Los Angeles Times). By using the same investment dollars to improve society and support their strategic missions, these businesses are raising their public profile.