After you have read and studied this chapter, you should be able to:

1. Describe how businesses and nonprofit organizations add to a country’s standard of living and quality of life.
2. Explain the importance of entrepreneurship to the wealth of an economy and show the relationship of profit to risk assumption.
3. Examine how the economic environment and taxes affect businesses.
4. Illustrate how the technological environment has affected businesses.
5. Identify various ways in which businesses can meet and beat competition.
6. Demonstrate how the social environment has changed and what the reaction of the business community has been.
7. Analyze what businesses must do to meet the global challenge.
8. Review how trends from the past are being repeated in the present and what such trends will mean for the service sector.