Английский для экономистов (учебник английского языка) - Денис Шевчук

Managing director

– company director responsible for the day-to-day running of a company. Second in the hierarchy only to the chairman, if there is one; the managing director is the company’s chief executive.

Manager

– a person controlling or administrating a business or part of a business.

Ex. 1. Do you know the meaning of the following derivatives? Show it with the help of your own sentences.

to manage; manageable; management; manager; manageress; managerial.

Translate the following sentences. Pay attention to the words in italics.

1. The reserved the right to make managerial decision.

2. What you need is advice from your bank manager.

3. I wish you could manage the time to come and to talk to us.

4. Private banks are being nationalized, and are to be managed with workers’ participation.

5. They are part of my management team.

6. The baby can be greatly influenced by the parents’ management.

7. She has been working as the manageress of a bookshop.

8. It is perfectly manageable task to tackle systematically.

Ex. 2. Write down a synonym for each of the words on the left. Choose the one on the right. In what do they differ?

Ex. 3. The following words can be classified into 5 groups. What are they? Show the difference in their meaning with the help of your own sentences.

Choice, have, solve, dilemma, own, profit, posses, variant, cope with, to process, option, tackle, problem, handle, return, predicament, gain, alternative.

Ex. 4.Match the definitions with the words given below.

fee, executive, insure, skill, capacity, profile, applicant, charisma, ensure, guideline, superior.

1. Ability to do something well.

2. Short biographical or character sketch.

3. Payment made for professional advice or services.

4. Person or body with managerial or administrative responsibility.

5. Make certain.

6. Secure compensation in the event of loss or damage by advance regular payments.

7. In a higher position; of higher rank.

8. Principle directing action.

9. Power to certain, receive, experience, or produce.

10. The ability to attract, influence, and inspire people by your personal qualities.

11. Someone who formally asks to be given something, such as a job or a place at a college or university.

Ex. 5. Give the Russian equivalents to the following.

Involved in management; production oriented; impose regulations, ever-more-complex environment; encompasses both science and art; business executives; code of conduct; develop the body of knowledge; with respect to the second criterion; the issue is much less clear-out; is consistent with their interest; self-interest or concern for others; decision-making machinery; cross-cultural skills; consulting fee; character attributes; compare against the places set earlier; authority.

Ex. 6. Translate the following text into Russian in written form.

People working for a company are referred as its workforce, employees, staff, or personnel and are on its payroll.

In some context, especially more conservative ones, employees and workforce refer to those working on the shopfloor of a factory actually making things. Similarly, staff is sometimes used to refer only to managers and office-based workers. This traditional division is also found in the expressions white-collar and blue-collar.

Another traditional division is that between management and labor.

Personnel departments are usually involved in finding new staff and recruiting them, hiring them, or taking them on, in a process of recruitment. Someone recruited is a recruit, or in American English only, a hire.

They are also involved when people are made to leave the organization, or fired. These responsibilities are referred to, relatively informally, as hiring and firing. If you leave the job voluntarily, you quit.

Middle-managers are now most often mentioned in the context of re-engineering, delaying, downsizing, or rightsizing: all these expressions describe the recent trend for companies to reduce the numbers of people they employ, often by getting rid of layers of managers from the middle of hierarchy.

An organization that has undergone this process is lean and its hierarchy is flat.

Read the text once again and in turn explain, in your own words, the meaning of the following terms:

1. workforce, employee, staff, personnel, a recruit, a hire, layer, labour.

2. white-collar, blue-collar.

3. to recruit, to employ, to hire.

4. to fire, to quit, to get rid of.

Do you know any other synonyms to the words given above?

LET’S READ AND TALK

TEXT 1 

ART OR SCIENCE? 

Management is the art and science of making appropriate choices. To one degree or another, we are all involved in managing and are constantly making decisions concerning how to spend or use our resources.

Like most things in our modern, changing world, the func–tion of management is becoming more complex. The role of the manager today is much different from what itwas one hundred years, fifty years or even twenty-five years ago. At the turn of the century, for example, the business manager's objective was to keep his company running and to make a profit. Most firms were production oriented. Few constraints affected management's decisions. Governmental agencies imposed little regulations on business. The modern manager must now consider the environment in which the organisation operates and be prepared to adopt a wider perspective. That is, the manager must have a good understanding of management principles, an appreciation of the current issues and broader objectives of the total economic poli–tical, social, and ecological system in which we live, and he must posses the ability to analyze complex problems.

The modern manager must be sensitive, and responsive tothe environment – thatis he should recognize andbe able to evaluate the needs of the total context in which his business functions, and he should act in accord with his understanding.

Modern management must posses the ability to interact in an ever-more-complex environment and to make decisions that will allocate scarce resources effectively. A major part of the manager’s job will be to predict what the environment needs and what changes will occur in the future.

Organizations exist to combine human efforts in order to achieve certain goals. Management is the process by which these human efforts are combined with each other and with material resources. Management encompasses both science and art. In design–ing and constructing plans and products, management must draw on technology and physical science, of course, and, the behavioral sciences also can contribute to management. However much you hear about «scientific management» or «management science», in handling people aid managing organizations it is necessary to draw on intuition and subjective judgment. The science por–tion of management is expanding, more and more decisions can be analyzed and programmed, particularly with mathematics. But although the artistic side of management may be declining in its proportion of the whole process it will remain central and critical portion of your future jobs. In short:

• Knowledge (science) without skill (art) is useless, or dangerous;

• Skill (art) without knowledge (science) means stagnancy and inability to pass on learning;

Like the physician, the manager is a practitioner. As the doctor draws on basic sciences of chemistry, biology, and physiology, the business executive draws on the sciences of mathematics, psychology, and sociology.

1. The function of management is becoming more complex. Why?

2. What must management possess nowadays?

3. Management encompasses both science and art. In what can we see it?

TEXT 2 

PRINCIPLES OF THE MANAGEMENT

Different scholars offer different sets of principles of management. The most famous are the following fourteen. But the main principle should be read as follows: «there is nothing rigid or absolute in management affairs, it is all a question of proportion». Accordingly if you view the following list of these principles as a set of important topics and sometimes applicable guidelines for managers, you will be keeping close to the spirit in which they were originally suggested.

1. Division of work. Within limits, reduction in the number of tasks a worker performs or the number of responsibilities a manger has can increase skill and performance.

2. Authority. Authority is the right to give orders and enforce them with reward or penalty. Responsibility is accountability for results. The two should be balanced, neither exceeding nor being less than the other.

3. Discipline. Discipline is the condition of compliance and commitment that results from the network of stated or implied understandings between employees and managers. Discipline is mostly a result of the ability of leadership. It depends upon good supervisors at all levels making and keeping clear and fair agreements concerning work.

4. Unity of command. Each employee should receive orders from one superior only.

5. Unity of direction. One manager and one plan for each group of activities having the same objective is necessary to coordinate, unify, and focus action.

6. Subordination of individual interests to general interest. Ignorance, ambition, selfishness, laziness, weakness, and all human passion tend to cause self-serving instead of organization-serving behavior on the job. Managers need to find ways to reconcile these interests by setting a good example and supervising firmly and fairly.

7. Remuneration of personnel. Various methods of payment may be suitable, but amounts should reflect economic conditions and be administered to reward well-directed effort.

8. Centralization. Like other organisms, organizations need direction and coordination from a central nervous system. But how much centralization or decentralization is appropriate depends upon the situation. The degree of centralization that makes best use of the abilities of employees is the goal.

9. Scalar chain (line of authority). The scalar chain is the chain of command ranging from the top executive to the lowest ranks. Adhering to the chain of command helps implement unity of direction, but sometimes the chain is too long, and better communications and better decisions can result from two or more department heads solving problems directly rather than referring them up the chain until a common superior is reached.

10. Order. Both equipment and people must be well chosen, well placed, and well organized for a smooth-running organization.

11. Equity. Kindliness and justice will encourage employees to work well and be loyal.

12. Stability of tenure of personnel. Changes in employee assignments will be necessary, but if they occur too frequently they can damage morale and efficiency.

13. Initiative. Thinking through a plan and carrying it out successfully can be deeply satisfying. Managers should set aside personal vanity and encourage employees to do this as much as possible.

14. Esprit de corps. Build teamwork.

1. Dwell on the importance of each principle in the work of a manager. Try to exemplify your answer.

TEXT 3 

SCIENTIFIC MANAGEMENT

No one has had more influence on managers in the 20th century than Frederick W.Taylor, an American engineer. He set a pattern for industrial work which many others have followed, and although his approach to management has been criticized, his idea are still of practical importance.

Taylor founded the school of Scientific Management just before the 1914-18 war. He argued that work should be studied and analyzed systematically. The operations required to perform a particular job could be identified, then arranged in a logical sequence. After this was done, a worker’s productivity would increase, and so would his/her wages. The new method was scientific. The way of doing a job would no longer be determined by guesswork and rule-of-thumb practices. If the worker followed the prescribed approach, his/her output would increase.

Taylor’s solutions to the problems were based on his own experience. When he was with Bethlehem Steel, Taylor criticized management and workers. He conducted many experiments to find out how to improve their productivity. He felt that managers used not the right methods and the workers did not put much effort into their job. They were always ‘soldiering’ – taking it easy. He wanted both groups to adopt a new approach to their work. The new way was as follows:

1. Each operation of a job was studied and analyzed;

2. Using the information, management worked out the time and method for each job, and the type of equipment to be used;

3. Work was organized so that the worker’s only responsibility was to do the job in the prescribed manner;

4. Men with the right physical skills were selected and trained for the job.

The weakness of his approach was that it focused on the system of work rather than on the worker. With this system a worker becomes a tool in the hands of management. Another criticism is that it leads to de-skilling – reducing the skills of workers. And with educational standards rising among factory workers, dissatisfaction is likely to increase. Finally, some people think that it is wrong to separate doing from planning. A worker will be more productive is he/she is engaged in such activities as planning, decision-making, controlling and organizing.

1. Give some information about F.W Taylor and his contribution to management.

2. Speak for and against his principles.

TEXT 4 

MANAGEMENT BY OBJECTIVES

Management by objectives (MBO) is a system which was first described by Peter Drucker in 1954. Since then, MBO has attracted enormous interest from the business world, and its principles have been applied in many of the world’s largest companies.

P. Drucker emphasized that an organization and its staff must have clear goals. Each individual must understand the goals of the enterprise he/she works for, and must make contribution to them. It is also vital that the individual knows what his/her manager expects of her. An individual must know what sort of results he/she is expected to achieve.

If an organization uses MBO approach, it must pay careful attention to planning. A special feature of MBO is that the subordinate participates with the manager in developing objectives.