20 Aug A New Edition of Brewing a Business
Brewing a Business · Second Edition
A New Edition of Brewing a Business: Connecting Business Concepts to Business Decisions
What does a student really need to understand about business?
That question was at the center of the new second edition of Brewing a Business, the eBook developed specifically to accompany the BizCafe business simulation. Rather than trying to cover every possible topic in an introductory business textbook, Brewing a Business focuses on the concepts students need to understand how a business works and then gives them an opportunity to put those concepts into practice.
For the second edition, we took a fresh look at the book: its structure, the concepts it emphasizes, and especially the connections between what students read and what they experience while running their simulated café in BizCafe.
Michael Levin, Author, Brewing a Business
A More Intentional Journey Through Business
The second edition has been reorganized into six chapters that follow a more natural progression through the life of a business.
Students begin with one of the most fundamental ideas in business: creating and exchanging value. From there, they explore how businesses understand markets and customers, develop marketing strategies, manage people, operate effectively, and ultimately measure the financial results of all those decisions. Accounting and finance now come at the end of that journey, helping students see financial performance not as an isolated subject, but as the result of choices made throughout the business.
The content has also been substantially updated. Entrepreneurship receives broader treatment, while topics including digital marketing, sustainability, changing employment models, supply-chain challenges, customer experience, and artificial intelligence are integrated throughout the book. Operations has become a stronger standalone chapter, covering areas such as forecasting, suppliers, quality, logistics, and customer service.
The new edition also puts greater emphasis on business judgment, focusing on making decisions when the information available is incomplete and learning from the results.
Read It. See It. Do It.
Learning business judgment gets to the heart of the simulation experience. That’s why the combination of Brewing a Business and BizCafe works so well, we believe. Students aren’t simply reading about business while simultaneously playing a simulation. The two were designed to work together.
A student might learn about creating customer value in the eBook, discuss how a real business owner thinks about it in an interview, and then confront that same issue when making decisions in BizCafe. Marketing, staffing, operations, pricing, customer service, and finance become decisions with consequences rather than definitions to memorize.
Throughout the book, concepts are reinforced through mini-cases, assignments, ethical discussions, interviews with business owners, quizzes, and direct connections to the simulation. Instructors can use the entire book or select the chapters and resources that best fit their course.
The result is what we think an Introduction to Business course should increasingly provide: an introduction to the different functions of a business and an opportunity for students to see how those functions fit together.
With the second edition of Brewing a Business and BizCafe, students get to experience those connections for themselves.
And that’s where learning business starts becoming learning by doing.
Interested in reviewing the new second edition?
Instructors with Faculty Access can explore Brewing a Business, BizCafe, and the complete set of teaching resources through their Interpretive account.