Writing

Study the biographical data of Michael Del and Ingvar Kamprad, find the information about famous businessmen and write it down as in the examples that follows the tables.

Michael Dell

Timeline

1965	Born.
1977	Aged 12, sells stamps by catalogue.
1983	Enters the University of Texas at Austin.
1984	Drops out of university to found Dell Computer.
1988	Dell Computer’s first-year revenues $257.8 million.
1994	www.dell.com launched.
1997	Dell’s online sales, begun in 1996, exceed $3 million a day.
2000	Online sales reach $50 million.

Example

Michael Dell (1965–) was always going to be a winner. After all, how many high school students earn more than their teachers? Dell progressed from selling newspaper subscriptions to selling computers.

Yet it wasn’t the product that made him wealthy, it was the way he sold it. The Dell corporation pioneered direct selling of computers. It is also an excellent example of a company succeeding by sticking to its founding principles: build to order, keep low stocks, sell direct, understand your customer. And the Internet was a godsend for Dell. What better way of reaching the global consumer? Dell’s success with the direct selling business model has made him the youngest CEO ever of a Fortune 500 company.

Ingvar Kamprad Timeline

1926	Born.
1943	Registers company, Ikéa.
1948	Advertises furniture for the first time.
1951	Publishes first catalogue. Revenue exceeds one million kronor ($95,000).
1953	Opens factory combined with furniture exhibition centre in Älmhult.
1956	Introduces flat packaging.
1958	Opens first store in Älmhult.
1965	Introduces self-service in stores.
1982	Ownership transferred to Dutch Foundation – Stichting INGKA.
1986	Officially retires, handing day-to-day running to Anders Moberg.
1995	Stichting INGKA buys Habitat chain.
1999	150th store opens. Turnover reaches Kr60 billion ($5.689 billion).

Example

Kamprad is a brilliant flat-pack king of furniture. Kamprad enjoys challenging the establishment and upsetting the odds. Industrious from an early age, Kamprad took on the furniture cartel in Sweden and neatly out-manoeuvred it. In the end, as he always predicted they would, customers got what they demanded: low prices and good quality. A man who prides himself on being an ordinary person, Kamprad continued to deliver value for money to ordinary people through innovations such as flat-pack furniture and self-service. Shopping the IKEA way became a family day out, a fun experience, long before the advent of the out-of-town shopping centre. When Kamprad officially took a back seat from line management at IKEA in 1986, he had changed the nature of retailing and provided inspiration for thousands of entrepreneurs.

Translation a. Translate into Russian. Woman’s Place in Management

Bad news for female managers. Their subordinates resent being disciplined by them. Men and women alike would far rather be scolded by a male boss than a female one. Indeed, a study of gender and discipline at work, by Leanne Atwater, a professor at the school of Management at Arizona State University, and two colleagues, finds that women dislike being told off by another woman even more than men do.

Many studies of male and female have claimed that the sexes differ in their styles of leadership: women do better at the people’s side, men at the getting-the-job-done side. Sociologists have studied the different reactions of girls and boys to discipline at school: boys get used to being reprimanded whereas girls, who are more rarely rebuked, take it more personally. But nobody seems to have studied discipline and gender at work.

Ms Atwater and her colleagues interviewed 163 workers from a broad range of jobs who had been disciplined in a variety of ways, from being fired to being ticked off. In about 40% of cases, they found, subordinates changed their behavior as a result of their telling – off, and female bosses were as successful in this as men. But male bosses were much more severe than women: they were three times as likely to suspend or sack a subordinate, and only half as likely to give merely an oral wigging. Even so, when female subordinates were asked if they felt responsible for their bad behavior, 52% said no when a female boss read the riot act – but only 18% when the boss was male.

One explanation for such differences, suggested by a member of the audience at the Academy of Management conference in Toronto where the paper was recently presented, is that women tend to resolve conflicts quickly – and are therefore blamed for overreacting – while men wait in the hope that things will blow over.

Another explanation, from Alice Eagly, a professor of psychology at North-western University, is that women are recent arrivals in managerial roles, and so have less legitimacy than men. There is also a problem of “gender spillover”: people assume women are kind and gentle at home, and expect the same at work. Spillover, though, works both ways. The paper called “Wait Until Your Father Gets Home”, a line that small family subordinates are all too used to hearing.