Topic 1
Globalization is the tendency for the world economy to work as one until, led by large international companies doing business all over the world.
We can see advantages and disadvantages.
• Globalization increases the power of governments.
• Competition between China, India and the West will increase employment everywhere.
• The great advantage of globalization is that it increases competition among companies. Companies and firms have to be careful and have to order their affairs so that they compete in a global market. But that is outweighed by a large number of disadvantages.
• Globalisation could lead to big employment problems in the West.
• Globalisation lowers people’s living standards.
• Globalisation prevents governments from controlling their welfare systems.
• Globalisation creates cross-cultural problems.
Topic 3
A brand can be a name a term or a symbol. It is used to differentiate a product from competitor’s products. The brand guaranteed a certain quality level. Brands should add value to products. It’s a synergy effect whereby one plus one equals three. But customers must believe they get extra value for money.
We need new brands because customers want new brands. They want choice they want a selection of different products. They like to rely on quality levels guaranteed by company. They like to trust products. Its makes shopping so much caser for them. Also the like to identify with brands.
Topic4
There are different types for brands. There are what we refer to as the stand alone brands or individual brands. They require separate marketing support. There’s also the corporate support. There’s also the corporate branding or family brands, for example, Levis. Also there are Luxury classic brands. Luxury brands are a brand associated with expensive high quality products. Classic brand is a famous brand with a long history. For ex, Levis, which has been established for over a 100 years and is world- famous, is a classic brand.
Brand stretching is using a successful brand name to launch a product in a new category. For ex, Mars has successfully produced ice creams branded with the names of its Mars and Sinkers candy bars. These are all “sweet tooth products”.
Topic 5
Nowadays we can views a problem of counterfeiting. Counterfeiter is a person who copies goods in order to trick people. It may be profitable for counterfeiters but not for producers and government. The most famous products that can be counterfeit are products of famous brands.
As brand become well-known, we’ve seen a big increase in counterfeit activity. The better-known brand name, the more people want to rip it off.
For example, CK. He is famous the New York fashion designer. He, like most other internationally-known fashion designer, had problems with counterfeiters selling poor-quality merchandise bearing his brand name.
In the past CK took a relatively passive approach to the counterfeit problem. Now the company has got tougher by establishing a network of employees and external specialists to uncover copyright abuse.
The fake goods, mostly T-shirts, jeans and baseball caps, not only reduce the company’s own sales but damage its brand image by linking it to poor quality merchandise.
Topic 6
Traveling by air you have to have a lot of problems. When you arrive to airport the fight can be delayed. It is because of poor weather or the crew has gone on strike.
The other problem is overcrowding and queuing at the airport. People are frustrated and get angry. Passengers are compelled to queue up expecting check in.
But also there are a lot of problems on the board. For example, some people want on aisle, some people want a window, some people want sit next to their partners. It’s not always possible to give everyone the exact seat they want. There can be non stop talking persons or children who irritate other passengers. There is no smoking police on the board and sometimes smoking-related person suffer from it because they become nervous. Some persons can suffer from air sick.
Another problem is downgrading. Sometimes an airline company have to downgrade passengers to a lower class (from First to Business). The opposite thing is an upgrade.
There are also problems with baggage. Passenger’s baggage may have been lost or damaged on flight.
Topic 7
Advertising company is an organizations program of advertising activities over a particular period with specific aims, for example, an increase in sales.
TV advertising is the most glamorous but the other media are not to be ignored: radio, cinema, the press.
Nowadays millions of people are influenced by TV commercials. Many famous actors, sportsmen and sportswomen endorse different goods – from napkins to cars. Large companies spend a lot of money on commercials. There is actually not much difference between Colgate and Blendax toothpaste. The purpose of advertising is to persuade consumers that the product of one company is better than the same product of another company.
The world or outdoor advertising, billboards, transport and street furniture is about 6% of all the world’s spending on advertising. But it has doubled its market share in resent years. Particularly attractive to the new advertises is street furniture, the fastest growing segment of the outdoor market.
Friends and colleagues are often our most reliable sources of information. Word of mouth is usually free. All the advertiser can do is hope that it is positive.
People think advertising is a waste of money. It is not at all. Advertising is one of many ways in which manufacturers persuade customers to buy their product. In today’s world people are bombarded with advertising. We haven’t got time to make judgments on which can of tomatoes is the best one for me, or which brand of coffee gives me the best flavor. So when we are shopping and we see product of well known company on the shelf we will remember it. It is front of mind. For example, Person needs a coffee, he sees Jacobs and think: “I have seen that, that is good, isn’t it” – and he just buy it. It is a automatic response, he don’t spend more than 2 or 3 seconds making a choice.
Topic 8
The world of outdoor advertising, billboards, transport and street furniture is about 6% of all the world’s spending on advertising. But it has doubled its market share in resent years.
Adding to its attractions has been a revolution in the quality of outdoor displays. Famous architects are designing arty bus shelters and kiosks with backlit displays. Backlighting, introduced in Europe, and plastic poster skins have mostly important color and contrast.
Movement is possible too. Disney advertised its 101 Dalmatians video on bus shelters with the sound of puppies barking.
Particularly attractive to the new advertises is street furniture, the fastest growing segment of the outdoor market.
Nowadays millions of people are influenced by TV commercials. Many famous actors, sportsmen and sportswomen endorse different goods – from napkins to cars. Large companies spend a lot of money on commercials. There is actually not much difference between Colgate and Blendax toothpaste. The purpose of advertising is to persuade consumers that the product of one company is better than the same product of another company.
Topic 9
Three quarters of people feel anxious about job interviews but one should bear in mind that this nervousness can make them lose the job before they get it. To impress an interviewer you may do:
1. find out about the job. Before the interview try to read a company annual report and press-release to show your enthusiasm for the job.
2. you could go to the company maybe a few days before the interview, talk to the receptionist, get a company newspaper – you can always pick up literature on the products maybe you’ll be involved in.
3. dress code. Interviewers don’t like candidates who don’t look smart. If you don’t know the dress code of a company you want to apply for, you should stick to a formal dress style.
4. CV (curriculum vitae). As CV provides the company with the first impression about a candidate, it should be well written, a badly written CV can turn out to be a missed opportunity to get a job, and which is ever important, it should be concise. That’s why try not to ramble. A CV should emphasize the most important information for the position you are seeking, that’s why highlight one or two top skills, leaving the rest for the interview.
Topic 10
Investing thousands of pounds in the recruitment and training of each new graduate recruit may be just the beginning. Choosing the wrong candidate may leave an organization paying for years to come. A great number of people don’t come up to expectations, that’s why the task of an interviewer is to see everything the candidate is capable of and not to hope that he will change much in the years to come.
The first point to bear in mind at the recruitment stage is that people don’t change. Intelligence levels decline modesthy, but change little over their working life. The same is true of abilities, such as learning languages and handling numbers. Such features of people’s characters as anxiety, low self-system don’t change during people’s lives.
But it should be born in mind that the best candidate is the candidate who will turn out to be a stedy performer. And there is always a danger to hire a person who doesn’t quite deliver, but you can’t do anything about it.
Key questions usually asked during the interview are as follows: What do you like most and least about your present job? What your strength and weaknesses are?
The interview is the talk, where doubts are expressed, questions are put and possible mistakes are eliminated. So during the interview you must do it all.
Topic 11
International trade it is a trade between the states and the country, it is a trade into international market. It is not easy to break into international market today. International trade is developing very fast. In developing countries free trade is growing deregulation, open borders, low customs tariffs are its characteristic features. At the same time both developed and especially, developing countries practice protectionism especially for infant or for strategic industries. Protectionism- the idea that a government should try to help an industries in its country by taxing foreign goods that compete with it, limiting the number that can be imported.
If you want break into international market, you should get prepared for it properly. First of all, you should carry out a through market survey. One must also comply with all export restrictions and regulations. If you want buyers to place orders with you, you should quote real prices and think over a system of discount. Think of the methods of payment it can be a LC (letter of credit), banker’s draft, bank transferee. Shipping terms are determined in Incoterms (International commercial terms). And of course, much depends on you negotiation skills.
Free trade it is absence of trading restrictions, liberalization of trade. There are no customs tariffs, customs procedure are simplified. Free trade is good but not for all, for the country-exporter free trade is good. Because it can make the goods without any problems. But for the country-importer free trade is bad, because people will buy import goods, and our country will lost there profits.
Topic 12
Being first is not often very important. You will have success if you can make a great deal of money out of good new ideas. In today’s business world innovators are often swept away by large corporations because they don’t have exceptional skill. The success of large corporations is based on their depth of technical expertise, their marketing skills. These characteristics and timing enable them to develop the innovative concept far more effectively than the innovators themselves. For example, Berkey produced the first handheld electronic calculators. But today the calculators we use are made by Casio. Our video recorder comes from Matsushita but its innovator was Ampex. But also we can see company, that are founded by true innovators. For example, Disney, Ford, Sony company.
Topic 13
Sole trader
One person sets up and runs the company. The person provides all the capital and has unlimited liability for business debts, even if this means selling personal assets.
Limited company.
In limited company the capital is divided into shares, which are held by shareholders. Shareholders have limited liability but they can vote at the Annual General Meeting to elect the Board of Directors.
There are two type of LC:
1) In a private limited company all share holders must agree before any shares can be bought or sold.
2) In a public limited company shares are bought and sold freely, for example on the stock exchange.
Partnership.
A group of people provide the capital, set up the company and manage it together. There are two types of partnerships:
1) Partners in an unlimited partnership are like sole traders – if the business fails they are fully liable for all debts and may even have to sell personal assets.
2) In a Limited partnership there can be sleeping partners who do not participate (Участвует) in management of the company. Sleeping partners have limited liability – in the event of bankruptcy they only lose their investment not their personal assets.
Topic 14
The current buzzword in working world is flexibility. This has a number of related meanings. One type of flexibility has existed for some time in the form of flextime or flextime where people can choose when they work within certain limits. Then there is the flexible working of the company whit some of its staff hot-desking particularly those who are home working teleworking or telecommuting and only need to come into the office occasionally.
The third type of flexibility is where employees are recruited on short contracts to work on specific project maybe pat-time. Perhaps the organization only has a core staff and outsourcers or contracts out work from outside as and when required. Some management experts say that this is the future with self-employment as the norm and portfolio workers who have a number of different clients.
Some companies see clearly that the quality of office that you give somebody affects their performance. I want to consider the SOL Company. It’s a company in which people work when they like and flexibility is being strongly tested. The owner abolished territorial space such as individual office and desks and organized a communal area similar to a social club. It has a colorful play ground, a nursery a billiard table, modern art kitchen corners, staff sits anywhere. Open plan offices are built around the idea that people should be able to bump into each others and manage each other’s conversations in a very informal way.
Companies tend to use hot-desking that includes home-working. Working at home you can concentrate at work.
Topic 15
Money is always looking for places where it will be most profitable and earn the greatest return on investment. People are ready to risk expecting to make a huge profit. They buy bands shares. It will give them a capital gain if they sell them. But if the company goes bankrupt they may lose all their money.
The higher the risk of your investment not being repaid, the more you will want to pay back in return on investment. Venture capitalists invest in many different start-ups, knowing that most will fail, but that a few will do reasonable well and one or two will hit the jackpot, paying back all the money they lost on unprofitable projects and much more, Of course many people want to get high and quick profit. For this they try make their money work.
In early 90-s there was a real boom on the Russian financial market. Many companies appeared, which offered a guaranteed interest if 100 percent and more. The shares sold well and were a great success. It was a real speculative explosion. People expecting to make a huge profit were ready to risk .They bought popular shares in rash. The others followed suit. The confidents in the market were great.
Financial pyramids did not produce anything but were interested in financial speculation only. Soon the market collapsed. The companies had gone bankrupt. They refused to take their security and pay interest. Many investors lost their money.
But such occasions were not only in Russia.
But in present day Russia Investors are protected from stock-market crash or economic recession much better. The Fund on Protection of Investors Rights is functioning which is able to take legal action to help the investors to recover their money in case a company goes bankrupt.
Topic 16
Corruption – the crime of giving or receiving money, gifts in exchange for doing something illegal that helps another person or company.
The alternatives for the word bribe are many and varied: kickback, sweetener, backhander, baksheesh. In law court they all are called illicit payments by the judge and commissions by a defendant. Using special slush funds to bribe political parties is called as sleaze by journalists.
In Berlin there is a group that is carried out surveys in different countries trying to find out how they are fighting corruption.
Denmark, Finland and Sweden have become the “cleanest” countries. They have moved New Zeland from the top position. The most corrupt countries are Nigeria, Bolivia, Columbia and Russia. Some economics think that corruption in the Third World is the product of global companies which use kickbacks to buy overpriced contracts. They divert (отвлекать) money from industry, education and healthcare which leads to impoverishment (обнищание) in developing countries.
Topic 17
The company is coming to changes when share is falling, costs is rising, the product range is too complex. The best of the sales force were leaving, productivity was dropping and you became selling uneconomically, while the worst were hanging. It all delicate task, not just because it involved cutting jobs but because it also meant pay cuts for some who stayed.
The company won’t be around in the future if its management would hang on to weakness for whatever reason – tradition, sentiment, or their own management weakness. The company must renewing itself, leaving the past behind, adapting to change.
So, recent years have seen massive restructuring. Companies downsized and delayed, getting rid of levels of middle-management in order to become leaner, flatter, supposedly more efficient organization.
An organization should not change incrementally, but should be done, not just in manufacturing but in all the process that contribute to what an organization does. It calls business process re-engineering, or BPR.
One of problem of this process is redundancies. The people remaining would probably feel demoralized, wondering when the next wave of change was going to come and whether it would be their turn to be thrown out. You must bring people into the change process. Start with reality. Get all of the facts out. Give people the rational for change, laying it out in the clearest most dramatic terms. When everybody gets the same facts, they’ll generally come to the same conclusion.
You can lose it your men and women see changes as a threat. But if they are provided with the educational tools and are encouraged to use them – they see change as an opportunity. Because the major asset of a company it’s there people. A company’s accumulated knowledge and experience is part of company culture and is increasingly seen as a key to success.
The leaders must have enormous energy and the ability to energize and invigorate others, to stimulate and relish change.
Resistance to change is the most natural of human reactions and is based on uncertainty and on fear – fear of losing your job, fear of not being able to cope with a new situation. It’s based on lack of trust in the decision-makers and it’s based on a complete feeling of lack of control over the situation.
Topic 18
Strategy is a plan or series of plans for achieving an aim, especially relating to the best way for an organization to develop. It must be formulated in terms of resource allocation. Resources or assets can be physical, technological and human.
The job of every company is to allocate its capital in the most judicious way. They should invest in the most profitable activities or products for which they have appropriate resources, or for which they can realistically acquire or develop the resources.
A company might have the “strategy” of entering the market for becoming successful. But it’s hard because there are dominated key players. They put up barriers preventing new companies from entering it.
I want to say some words about the developing of strategy for a large company. First the management should think about the assets of the company and what’s unique about those assets, what markets they know about and what market are growing and which of those markets can make the best use of their assets. Then they consider all these things and then they develop the strategy, which consists of three simple steps:
The first one is to operate better.
The second step is to look at the assets they have and see which ones they should keep and which ones they should dispose of.
And then the third step is to stick together all their businesses, so that they are able to use each other’s assets.
The strategies of large companies are trends towards more focus on people, towards more teamwork. The strategy should be clear and define a unique goal. The example of such strategy is Coca-Cola’s. they are going to focus on their product, on international markets, and they are going to focus on distribution and promotion.
Topic 19
Merger is an occasion when two or more companies, organizations join together to form a larger company. By combining two or more companies with good management teams, you automatically build up the strength of your management and you do it quickly. You can also widen your customer base and have more distribution channels. Study after study of past merger waves has shown that two out of every three deals have not worked. Success in the future will depend more than ever on the merged companies ability to create added value. And that will depend mainly on what happens after the deal has been done. Mergers can fail on a number of levels in terms of their benefit to the shareholder, customers, employee and business partners. Here if you don’t keep the people you have done a tremendous disservice to your shareholders.
Takeover is the act of getting control of a company by buying more than half of its shares.
Alliance is an agreement between two or more organizations to work together.
Topic 20
Culture – is the ideas, beliefs, and customs that are shared and accepted by people in a society or it’s the attitudes or beliefs that are shared by a particular group of people or in a particular organization.
As the world gets smaller, we need to learn more about each other’s values, beliefs, habits and expectations. Culture is the way we do things around here. “Here” may be a country, a region, a company.
There’re can be stereotypes, it may be at one extreme, or it may just not to be true. Sometimes there are maybe more variety in people’s behaviour within a culture than between people of two different cultures. Neighbouring countries or regions, or two companies in the same industry consider themselves to be very different in comparison with each other.
Cross-cultural issues are connected with variations in behaviour across different cultures and, of course, they relate to the business world. There are some examples:
• Does religion play a role in business life?
• Is there hierarchy in companies, and what is the distance between managers and the people who work for them?
• How formal are the relations between employees, taking into account levels of formality in language and behaviour?
• What is the relation of work to private life of people? Do they invite colleagues to their houses or prefer contacts in the office? Do spouses attend certain types of company events?
Topic 22
Leader and manager are seems to have the same meanings, but it isn’t so. The word “manager” is associated with controlling, keeping people in the dark, wasting their time on trivia, breathing down their necks. The word “manager” has too often come to be synonymous with control – cold, uncaring, passionless. But we never associate passion with the word “manager” and we have never seen the leader without it. The manager usually sticks to established channels. As for leaders they don’t stick to established channels, they are open, straight with people. They go up, down and around their organizations to reach people. One of the things about leadership is that you can not be moderate, balanced, thoughtful, careful articulator of the policy.
Managers are the people who can make the number dance. But the world will belong to passionate, driven leaders — people who not only have enormous amounts of energy but who can energize those whom they lead.
Leaders and managers are both made and born. Of course, you have basic qualities but you re-invent yourself as you go into new situation. So people who were never leaders at school become the great business leaders of our time. So mostly the leaders and managers are made but you have to use what you are born with.
Nowadays there are different styles of managing. One of them is authoritarian. It is ruthless, formal. Such manager is uncaring, he breaths down the necks of his employees, he can be aggressive when they cant manage their targets. Another style is democratic one. A manager of this style is open, balanced person. He is thoughtful to his employees.
So most of leaders can be managers, but not every manager can be a leader.
Topic 23
Companies welcome different strategies which help them gain a competitive advantage. So some of them become cost-leaders. There a firm sets out to become the low-cost producer in its industry. The firm has a broad scope and serves many industry segments, and may even operate in related industries. The firms breadth is often important to its cost advantage. Cost advantage depends on the structure of the industry and on factors such as technology, access to raw materials. The others become differentiators whose main target is consumers looking for particular product attributes. The firm chooses a segment or a group of segments in the market and tailor their strategy to serving them to the exclusion of others. Differentiation can be based on some factors such as product itself, the delivery system, the marketing approach and others.
The third kind of strategy is focus. This strategy is quite different from the others because it based on narrow competitive scope within an industry. The focusers concentrate on one particular segment and try to find competitive advantage by satisfying the needs of buyers in that segment better than anyone else.
These are the available choices that a commercial organization has if it wants to compete effectively and not get “stuck in the middle”.