The philosophical methods of moral reasoning suggest that once we have ascertained the facts, we should ask ourselves certain questions when trying to resolve a moral issue. Which of the following is NOT one of those questions? A. Which course of action maximizes my net benefits? B. Which course of action develops moral virtues? C. Which course of action advances the common good? D. What benefits and what harms will each course of action produce and which alternative will lead to the best overall consequences?

Whitney is shopping with her mom and they are deciding on clothing to purchase, which scenario best represents the purchase of a need?A Whitney is being inducted into the National Honor Society at her high school. Students have been directed to dress nicely' Whitney
has a dress she wore to a wedding last year that still fits but her mom thinks she needs a new one to celebrate this occasion
B Whitney has been selected to attend a national leadership conference and has been instructed that she will need to dress
professionally' for one of the tours. She plans to wear her new jeans and a T-shirt that has the logo of the leadership conference
on it. Her mother thinks she needs to purchase something more appropriate.
C. Whitney has several pairs of jeans in her closet but found some that really hit her well at an excellent price when she and her mom
were shopping. Her mom agrees that with these jeans at this price, they need to purchase a pair.
D Whitney will be traveling to Europe with a youth ambassador program this summer. She has been instructed to pack a rain jacket,
The rain jacket she already owns does not have a hood since she always uses an umbrella in rainy situations. Her mom believes
she needs to purchase a hooded rain Jacket because it would be more convenient

What steps can you take to prevent yourself from being affected by a market correction?

A budget is a planning tool.
a. True
b. False

All of these are ways a society can improve its productivity EXCEPT

Cosmetic Profits. Sally is the executive vice president of Big Name Cosmetics Company. Through important and material, nonpublic information, she learns that the company is soon going to purchase a smaller chain of stores. It is expected that stock in Big Name Cosmetics will rise dramatically at that point. Sally immediately buys a number of shares of her company's stock. She also tells her friend Alice about the expected purchase of stores. Alice wanted to purchase stock in the company but lacked the funds with which to do so. Although she did not have the funds in Bank A, Alice decided to draw a check on Bank A and deposit the check in Bank B and then proceed to write a check on Bank B to cover the purchase of the stock. She hoped that she would have sufficient funds to deposit before the check was presented for payment. Of which offense is Sally guilty, if any, in purchasing stock of her company?

Mini Case (Amazon)Strategic thinking focuses on the longer term and on taking different approaches to deliver customer value; on choosing different sets of activities that cannot easily be imitated, thereby providing a basis for an enduring competitive advantage. Amazon is a good example. Today, Amazon offers 230 million items for sale in America—some 30 times the number sold by Wal-Mart, the world’s biggest retailer, which has its own fast-growing online business. Its total 2013 revenues were $74.5 billion, but when one takes into account the merchandise that other companies sell through its "marketplace" service the sales volume is nearly double that. Though by far the biggest online retailer in America, Amazon is still growing faster than the 17 percent pace of e-commerce as a whole. It is the top online seller in Europe and Japan, too, and has designs on China’s vast market. Last year Amazon was the world’s ninth biggest retailer ranked by sales; by 2018 it may well be in the top two. On top of its online-retail success, Amazon has produced two other transformative businesses. The Kindle e-reader pioneered the shift from paper books to electronic ones, creating a market that now accounts for more than a 10th of spending on books in America and which Amazon dominates. Less visible but just as transformative is Amazon’s invention in 2006 of cloud-computing as a pay-as-you-go service, now a $9 billion market. That venture, called Amazon Web Services (AWS), has slashed the technology costs of starting an enterprise or running an existing one. And Amazon enjoys an advantage most competitors envy: Remarkably patient shareholders. The company made a net profit of just $274 million last year, a minuscule amount in relation to its revenues and its $154 billion value on the stock exchange; its shares are valued at more than 500 times last year’s earnings, 34 times the multiple for Wal-Mart. Its core retail business is thought to do little better than break-even; most of its profits come from the independent vendors who sell through Amazon’s marketplace. Such long-termism takes investment. In its early days Amazon avoided direct competition with retailers because its lack of stores made it "capital light". Today its empire of warehouses and data centers has changed that. Now its pitch to merchants and technologists is that it will build physical assets so that they do not have to. By doing so, it keeps its competitors close and makes them depend on Amazon for key parts of their business models.
Source: Amazon - Relentless.com, The Economist, Print edition, June 21, 2014.
a) What is strategic thinking?
b) Why long-term perspective is important for strategic thinking?
c) What are the sources of Amazon’s success described in the mini case above?