- •Vocabulary Commentary
- •All yours Manufacturing companies are increasingly using the Internet to give customers the impression of personal service. But true customisation needs new production techniques as well
- •Vocabulary
- •Can Bayer Cure Its Own Headache? Shareholders would like it to shed everything but health care
- •Vocabulary
- •«Байер» перестраивается
- •Nokia's next act Can the Finnish giant stay on top in an age of commodity phones and stalling sales?
- •Vocabulary
- •Canon Cutting Edge By trimming down to four product lines, it's making record profits
- •Halfway down a long road Carlos Ghosn's efforts to meld Nissan with Renault have become the stuff of management legend. But the alliance faces some daunting challenges
- •Can Ford Fix This Flat?
- •Vocabulary
- •Vocabulary
- •A Challenge From the Nimble Newcomers
- •Mergers & Acquisitions Will the latest cycle of European mergers produce better results?
- •Vocabulary
- •Vocabulary Commentary
- •Independent directors at big public companies need to be tougher
- •Vocabulary
- •Vocabulary
- •U r Sakd
- •Is there a nice way?
- •Simon London finds the post of chief operating officer falling prey to a new breed of executive with greater powers and access to the boss
- •The Bottom Line on Options
- •Unit 13 Consolidation
- •Will ceOs Find Their Inner Choirboy?
- •Пролетая над Таити
- •Vocabulary
- •Useful Words and Phrases
- •«Нортел»
- •The Numbers Game Companies use every trick to pump earnings and fool investors. The latest abuse: "Pro forma" reporting"
- •Vocabulary
- •Unit 15
- •I swear… Oaths are only a small step in the business of cleaning up American companies
- •Something must be done
- •Vocabulary
- •Holier Than Thou European sanctimony over American accounting scandals is misplaced
- •Et, the extra-territorial
- •Vocabulary
- •Revenge of the Bean Counters No longer frail in the face of fraud, accounting firms are thriving on new u.S. Laws that give them real clout
- •Half Measures
- •Bad for cfOs, Good for Investors
- •Хранители прозрачности или слуга двух господ
- •Unit 16
- •Up from the ashes Amid a global wave of business failures, American firms are more likely to get a second chance. Unfair competition, or a lesson for Europeans?
- •Eurotunnel vision
- •Vocabulary
- •Var crash
- •Vocabulary
- •Европа уходит за рубеж
- •Goldman's German revolution
- •Have Fat Cats Had Their Day?
- •Unit 18
- •Stronger foundations New proposals for regulating banks are both a step in the right direction and evidence of how hard it is to monitor the riskiness of the banking system
- •Vocabulary
- •Vocabulary
- •Английский характер
- •Unit 19
- •Conflicts, conflicts everywhere Was America wrong to scrap the laws that kept commercial and investment banking apart?
- •Vocabulary
- •Care To Buy Some David Bowie Bonds
- •In Europe, securitization is the hottest way to raise cash
- •Beautifying Branches
- •Instead of axing their branches, banks are inventing new ways to make money out of them
- •Slippery
- •Coffee, Tea, or Mortgage?
- •Life Branches?
- •The world's biggest retailer edges into financial services
- •Гросс-банки сокращаются
- •Feeding Frenzy
- •Tough Questions for aig's Auditors Regulators are probing if PwC let the financial shenanigans slip through
- •Watchdogs with Eyes Wide Shut As investigators pore over the books of aig, it's becoming clear that for years regulators failed to detect lapses
- •Goldman's German Revolution
- •Another Year, Another Scandal
- •Digging out at Allianz The German financial-services giant is back in the black — but still struggling
- •A Dedicated Enemy of Fashion Most companies claim to run their business for the long term. Nestle is one of the few that really does
- •More Pain, Waiting for the Gains Drastic action as gm's cash pile runs down
- •«Морган Стэнли» увольняет сотрудников, чтобы оставшиеся лучше работали
Simon London finds the post of chief operating officer falling prey to a new breed of executive with greater powers and access to the boss
It may be too early to put them on the endangered species list but chief operating officers are a breed that, like butterflies and songbirds, you just do not see as often as you once did.
For every handful of companies that appoints a COO to take the strain off an over-worked chief executive — recent examples include Sprint, the telecoms group, and Wrigley the chewing-gum maker — a slightly larger handful abolishes the position.
Julie Wulf, an assistant professor at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania, said: "Statistically, companies are less likely to have chief operating officers than they were a decade ago."
She and Professor Raghuram Rajan, of Chicago University business school, say the most likely explanation is that chief operating officers are falling victim to "delayering," the process by which companies reduce the number of steps between the top and bottom of the organisational ziggurat.
The theory that the CEO, the ultimate boss, seems to be shouldering more responsibility for direct oversight of the business is strengthened by their finding that the average big-company chief executive had seven people reporting to him or her at the end of the 1990s against four in 1986. This was not because companies were getting bigger; the average number of employees per company fell slightly over that time.
Jeffrey Immelt, chairman and chief executive of General Electric, exemplifies the trend. When Denis Nayden quit as GE Capital chairman last year, he was not replaced. Instead, the heads of its four business units report directly to Mr. Immelt. Mr. Immelt said then: "The reason for doing this is simple — I want more direct contact with the financial services teams." Thus a management layer was removed and the CEO gained a net three additional reports.
Where GE goes, other US companies are sure to follow. But is it healthy that today's chief executives are increasing what management theorists call their "span of control"?
Opinions are mixed. While management lore is that the best chief executives are steeped in operational detail, countless CEOs owe their downfall, at least in part, to a tendency to "micro manage." Steve Milunovich, technology analyst at Merrill Lynch, believes Sun Microsystems is in danger of falling into this trap.
Last week he called for the troubled computer companv to recreate the COO's position to counter the influence of Scott McNealy, chairman chief executive and founder. Prof Wulf believes that many companies have found a compromise in which the CEO is closer to the action, yet divisional managers have more decision-making authority.
She says these managers are more likely to be appointed "officer" of the corporation in companies that have eliminated the position of COO. This suggests they inherit at least some of their former boss's authority.
Technology could be helping to create this new status quo. "Enterprise resource planning" systems of the kind many US companies implemented in the 1990s make it easier for CEOs to get information about the performance of individual business units.
But such systems also let divisional managers get the information needed to make informed decisions without having to rely on the corporate bureaucracy.
That said, delayering and CEO aggrandisement are not the only factors behind the increased "span of control" today's CEOs enjoy. Another part of the explanation is the proliferation of "C-suite" executive positions.
For example, a decade ago it was rare to find the chief information officer reporting directly to the CEO. Today, after years in which ГТ spending has accounted for nearly half of all capital spending by US corporations, the CIO is a more powerful figure. Similarly, US companies are more likely to have chief marketing officers, chief human resource officers, chief competitive officers and chief learning officers.
In some cases these are new positions. In others they are old jobs with new titles and additional status. In other words, if delayering is destroying the natural habitat of COOs, the evolution of new C-level positions has increased competition for scarce resources. The most precious resource of all remains the ear of the CEO; the species perched right at the top of the organisational food chain.
The Financial Times
Note
ziggurat - зд. (многоуровневая) пирамида
Exercise 7. Translate the text in writing.