- •А кадемия управления при Президенте Республики Беларусь
- •Система открытого образования
- •Business english Курс лекций
- •Is she talking? 8
- •1. Starting to trade 151
- •2. The marketing mix 166
- •The Future: will
- •I/you/he/she/it/we/they will go (I’ll. He’ll, they’ll go)
- •Past Simple Tense
- •Positive (regular verbs)
- •Present Perfect Tense
- •Question Have you done it yet? Where have you been?
- •Review of time expressions
- •Word study Putting Nouns Together
- •Summary
- •The president
- •For discussion
- •The future perfect
- •More about auxiliary verbs
- •Word study
- •Two More Ways to Put Nouns Together
- •Company structure
- •Application for a job
- •74 Dockside Manchester m15 7bj 8 March 2000
- •Utility chiefs top executive pay increases
- •Unit II
- •Types of companies
- •Text № 1
- •Types of companies
- •Investing in a limited company
- •Summary of modal verbs
- •Modals with more than one meaning
- •You mustn’t vs. You don’t have to
- •Other uses of “will” and “would”
- •Degrees of probability
- •Exercise 15. Which is the closest in meaning?
- •The passive with modals
- •The indirect passive
- •Share capital
- •Companies
- •Must have and might have
- •Present Past
- •Could have and should have
- •Present
- •Types of business units
- •Unit III starting a business
- •Participles
- •A real estate purchase
- •Another use for participles
- •Participles
- •The problem of cash flow
- •Exchange rates cause budgeting problems
- •The flow of funds
- •Read and give the summary of the newspaper articles.
- •1. Greenalls refocuses spending By Dominic Walsh
- •2. Mandelson wants uk "digital leader" By Raymond Snoddy, Media Editor
- •3. Paget departs from telspec By Chris Ayres
- •4. Tlg succumbs to 353 million pounds wassall bid By Paul Durman
- •5. Progress hope at pilkington By Paul Durman
- •Unit IV management
- •What is management?
- •1.1. Read and translate the text.
- •1.2. Put 5 questions to part 1 of the text the answers to which are marked by •
- •1.3.. Answer the following questions:
- •1.4. Try to remember 5 main duties of managers.
- •2.1.. Read the notes of the lecture about management. Write out new words. Translate the text.
- •2.2.. Discuss:
- •3.1. Read text ¹ 3. Complete the sentences, finding them in the text:
- •3.2. Discuss:
- •4.1. Read text ¹ 4 about managers’ skills. There are 9 of them mentioned. Make the list of them and discuss the following:
- •Gerunds
- •The infinitive Positive Infinitive Negative Infinitive
- •Conditionals First conditional
- •Second conditional
- •Third conditional
- •The conditional
- •Texts for reading Holding Meetings
- •1. Put a tick or a cross in the box after each statement to show whether you think it is correct or not:
- •London borough Spring Personnel. Legal pa £25,000
- •Relative clauses
- •Miss Johnson is a secretary I work with.*
- •More examples of relative clauses
- •Of which vs. Whose
- •Past participles used as adjectives
- •Relative clauses with prepositions
- •Relative clauses with deletions
- •Conjunctions and related phrases
- •Agreement of tenses
- •Reported speech: agreement of tenses
- •Direct Reported
- •Reported questions
- •Interrogative noun clauses Who’s That Man?
- •Didn’t he apologize for _______?
- •Do you know _______?
- •Text ¹ 2 Market Study
- •Questions about the story
- •For discussion
- •Texts for reading and discussion
- •1. Starting to trade
- •Marketing Defining marketing
- •2. The centrality of marketing
- •1D Comprehension
- •Product policy
- •1A Discussion
- •1A Reading
- •3. Products and brands
- •4. It pays to advertise
- •It pays to advertise
- •2. The marketing mix
- •The role of advertising
- •Does the fact that it pays to advertise seem obvious to you? Explain your answer.
- •Figure 1.1.: gross margin
- •Paragraph 3: aura
- •3. Users of both competitive brands and of our product.
- •Born in 1946, we offer 52 years of experience
- •Unit VI business communication
- •Higher management
- •Rules of Writing
- •Increase your vocabulary
- •Means of communication
- •4 Abilities
- •5 Experience
- •Increase your vocabulary
- •Writing
- •Text 6 designing a sales letter
- •Manufactures of Quality Office Equipment since 1940
- •The layout of a business letter
- •23 Nelson Square
- •Velkotex Ltd
- •Prefixes of negation
- •Indicative Subjunctive
- •Verbs used with the subjunctive
- •Indicative vs subjunctive
- •Indicative Subjunctive
- •Infinitives with “seem” and “appear”
- •By Russsell Hotten
- •Sources
- •Козлова Любовь Константиновна Business English
- •220007, Г. Минск, ул. Московская, 17.
Company structure
Most organizations have a hierarchical or pyramidal structure, with one person or a group of people at the top, and an increasing number of people below them at each successive level. There is a clear line of chain of command running down the pyramid. All the people in the organization know what decisions they are able to make, who their superior (or boss) is (to whom they report), and who their immediate subordinates are (to whom they can give instructions).
Some people in an organization have colleagues who help them: for example, there might be an Assistant to the Marketing Manager. This is known as a staff position: its holder has no line authority, and is not integrated into the chain of command, unlike, for example, the Assistant Marketing Manager, who is number two in the marketing department.
Yet the activities of most companies are too complicated to be organized in a single hierarchy. Shortly before the First World War, the French industrialist Henry Fayol organized his coal-mining business according to the functions that it had to carry out. He is generally credited with inventing functional structure, including (among others) production, finance, marketing, sales and personnel or staff departments, This means, for example, that the production and marketing departments cannot take financial decisions without consulting the finance department.
Functional organization is efficient, but there are two standard criticisms. Firstly, people are usually more concerned with the success of their department than that of the company, so there are permanent battles between, for example, finance and marketing, or marketing and production, which have incompatible goals. Secondly, separating functions is unlikely to encourage innovation.
Yet for a large organization manufacturing a range of products, having a single production department is generally inefficient. Consequently, most large companies are decentralized, following the model of Alfred Sloan, who divided General Motors into separate operating divisions in 1920. Each division had its own engineering, production and sales departments, made a different category of car (but with some overlap, to encourage internal competition), and was expected to make a profit.
Businesses that cannot be divided into autonomous divisions with their own markets can simulate decentralization, setting up divisions that deal with each other using internally determined transfer prices. Many banks, for example, have established commercial, corporate, private banking, international and investment divisions.
An inherent problem of hierarchies is that people at lower levels are unable to make important decisions, but have to pass on responsibility to their boss. One solution to this is matrix management, in which people report to more than one superior. For example, a product manager with an idea might be able to deal directly with managers responsible for a certain market segment and for a geographical region, as well as the managers responsible for the traditional functions of finance, sales and production. This is one way of keeping authority at lower levels, but it is not necessarily a very efficient one. Thomas Peters and Robert Waterman, in their well-known book In Search of Excellence, insist on the necessity of pushing authority and autonomy down the line, but they argue that one element – probably the product – must have priority; four-dimensional matrices are far too complex.
A further possibility is to have wholly autonomous, temporary groups or teams that are responsible for an entire project, and are split up as soon as it is successfully completed. Teams are often not very good for decision-making, and they run the risk of relational problems, unless they are small and have a lot of self-discipline. In fact they still require a definite leader, on whom their success probably depends.