‘Grammar’ point
►The examples below are taken from ‘Theory-2 Point’ and ‘Case Point’:
No one can do much on their own.
You can’t build a company as successful as Microsoft has become without making enemies.
Gross margins for the year were 42.9%, compared with 38.0% last year, and the selling and administrative expenses were 30.2% of full year revenues, compared with 29.5% last year.
►Translate the examples into Russian and explain:
Why is ‘their’ used in the first example while the subject of the sentence is in singular and therefore requires ‘his’ or ‘her’?
Is it correct to say ‘everybody can do much on their own’ and ‘everybody can do much on his/her own’ without a change in meaning?
Is it correct to use ‘twice (three/four… times) as successful as’ in the second example?
What is the difference between ‘compare with’ and ‘compare to’, if any?
Is it correct to replace ‘compared with’ with ‘compared to’ in the third example without a change in meaning?
►Translate into English using the expressions from ‘Summary Point’:
Менеджер, который обладает способностью развивать таланты и использовать их по назначению, во много раз превосходит своих коллег (во много раз успешнее других менеджеров).
Работа лидера требует в десятки раз больше стойкости и гибкости.
В текущем году в четыре раза больше товаров с треском провалились (потерпели фиаско) на рынке, чем за последние пять лет.
►Fill in the blanks with ‘to’, ‘with’ or both:
The business press compared his attempt to turn the company around ___ fighting fire with fire.
I prepared a detailed report comparing our firm’s accounting practices ___ those of our main rival.
Compared ___ the last year’s sales figures, our current turnover has risen dramatically.
‘PREPOSITION’ POINT
►Fill in the blanks with the correct prepositions:
Karen joined the company ___ a sales manager, and within a year she managed to bring ___ $8 million.
At the meeting we came ___ ___ a good decision to accelerate our sales.
This year’s sales revenue is no different ___ the previous year’s.
The participative leadership style relies ___ effective team work and calls ___ good interpersonal relations.
In the early 1980s he set ___ creating a new sort of business.
The whole story began when he stumbled ___ a vacancy in a local newspaper.
To prevent the firm from falling ___, we agreed to be taken over by our rival.
It is Sam Shepard who has been credited ___ dividing the company ___ five separate and autonomous profit centers thus turning the whole business ___.
After some ineffective attempts to increase the customer base, MusicM switched ___ mp3 players ___ personal computers.
Warren Bennis wrote a lot ___ how the true leadership works in practice.
After the implementation of ‘No Walls, No Ceilings’ program, the majority of the line managers started complaining ___ ethics committee ___ the way they are treated by the top managers.
Mrs. Yakamoto’s ability to draw ___ past experiences to make educated guesses in the face ___ uncertainties proved quite successful in finding solutions ___ a great many problems.
To get promoted to national sales manager, one has to have the drive ___ hard work and self-discipline, flair ___ communication and creativity and talent ___ leadership.
A genuine leader, not to mention a true manager, must keep in mind that no one can do much ___ their own and take all decisions ___ their own without asking others for help.
One of the best ways to create leaders ___ many levels in an organization is to spot the talents, put them in the right places, and encourage them to make decisions ___ reference ___ anyone else.
___ successful job performance this company provides stock option to any employee regardless of his position.
He is obsessed ___ the idea to make it ___ the top.
There is a shortage ___ suppliers of virgin pulp.
Leaders who are jealous ___ their followers do not inspire loyalty.
Even corporate executives might be able to admit ___ their weaknesses and ask ___ help without feeling inadequate.
‘BATTLE’ POINT
►Team up with your classmate and start to develop your arguments about the four popular myths about leadership:
‘You say everyone can be a leader? That’s not true.’
‘You say leaders deliver business results? Not always.’
‘You say people who get to the top are leaders? Not necessarily.’
‘You say leaders are great coaches? Rarely I think.’
‘If you don’t want to remain stuck in middle management start networking. Other things being equal, what is going to give you an edge?’
‘Getting bogged down in the day-to-day functions of your job is as dangerous as not reaching out widely enough to build an extensive personal networking.’
See ‘Battle Point’ in unit 2 for instructions.
‘CASE-2’ POINT
Lafley
(1) A.G. Lafley is proud of the fiscal year that Procter & Gamble recently completed. It's his fourth year on the job as CEO, and P&G's sales topped $50 billion—the best results in the history of the company, which was founded in 1837. "I'm thrilled because the year reflects the great work of P&Gers around the world," he says. "It shows that our strategies are working, that we're leveraging our core strengths, and that our leadership is focused." According to Lafley, this triangle of success at P&G—strategy, core capability, and leadership—is at the heart of the company's ability to "deliver consistently strong results."
(2) Lafley has been credited with turning P&G around since taking the helm of the consumer-products giant in 2000. In addition to superlative earnings, P&G has seen its stock price double. The ingredients for Lafley's success include a laser-like focus on innovation and on building the company's bevy of billion-dollar brands like Crest, Pampers, and Tide. He has also given considerable emphasis to nurturing talent, instituting leadership programs aimed at everyone from P&G's top 100 managers worldwide to the company's new hires. Lafley notes, in what could be a company mantra, that "our assets at P&G are our people and our brands."
(3) When Lafley was named CEO, the company was in a slump because of low earnings and low morale. It had lost focus on the basics. Lafley's inspirational leadership style, which emphasizes listening, coaching, and results, and his attention to fundamentals—treating the consumer as boss and focusing on P&G's big brands, top markets, and key customers—are being hailed for their "revolutionary" impact. As one analyst told Fortune magazine last spring: "In the eighteen years that I've followed Procter, I have never seen the company this good."
(4) Crest and Pampers, for example, have regained market share after losing their number one positions in the United States several years ago to Colgate-Palmolive and Kimberly-Clark, respectively. Crest won back the top spot recently by introducing teeth-whitening products and by acquiring the battery-powered SpinBrush, now the nation's best-selling toothbrush. Retailing for around five dollars, SpinBrush accounted for $160 million in sales last year and is the subject of an HBS case study.
(5) "SpinBrush is a wonderful example of the kind of innovation I've been pushing hard," says Lafley. "While P&G is very good at developing, qualifying, and commercializing innovation, we're not necessarily any better than others at creating it. So when we learned about a toothbrush that an entrepreneur had made from a spinning toy he had developed, we realized that this was a simple, elegant, low-cost, and high-value innovation that was conceptually and strategically right for us." An initiative launched by Lafley calls upon P&G to find half of its new products outside its walls, up from 20 percent four years ago and about 35 percent today.
(6) Lafley has also pushed for aggressive target marketing of P&G's mature brands such as Tide, which was developed in 1946 as the country's first synthetic laundry detergent. Today, Tide is available in dozens of differentiated product offerings around the world, including Tide with Bleach, Clean Rinse Liquid, and now Tide with a touch of Downy.
(7) Lafley, who oversaw the breakthrough development of Liquid Tide in 1984, is proud that most of P&G's growth in recent years has come from core products that are household names around the globe. "I really believe you should play to your strengths," he says. "Our business is very simple. It commits us, first and foremost, to improving the everyday lives of consumers."
(8) Despite P&G's successes, Lafley is well aware of the dangers that can loom on any operation's horizon. He has talked publicly, for instance, about the limitations faced even by a company that has more than 100,000 employees in 80 countries and that sells its products in 160 nations. "The biggest thing I worry about is that we'll make an acquisition or expand into a new market that stretches our capabilities beyond what we can really handle," he observes.
(9) So far, Lafley's instincts have been right on the money. His decisions to purchase Clairol in 2001 for $5 billion and Germany's Wella in 2003 for $7 billion—P&G's largest acquisitions ever—are already paying off by making the company's beauty-care division one of the most profitable beauty-care operations in the world.
(10) A history major at Hamilton College, Lafley initially planned on a career as a professor. He started a Ph.D. program in medieval and Renaissance history at the University of Virginia before leaving to enlist in the U.S. Navy. After several years of running grocery and specialty stores at a U.S. base near Tokyo, Lafley became "hooked" on merchandising and enrolled at Harvard Business School.
(11) MBA in hand, he arrived at P&G at the age of thirty as an assistant brand manager for Joy dishwashing detergent. A variety of other assignments followed, such as helping turn around P&G's beauty products business in Japan and building the company from the ground up in China. After twenty-seven years, he still can't imagine a better place to work. "I feel honored and lucky to be part of such an extraordinary organization."
Makihara
(1) In Japan, a land especially mindful and respectful of tradition, certain enterprises have long held a special place in society, and none more so than Mitsubishi. Its origin goes back to the 1870s, when three sailing ships transported raw materials to Japanese manufacturers and carried exports to markets overseas. In the decades that followed, Mitsubishi not only grew into Japan's most famous, prestigious, and powerful collection of companies (or keiretsu), offering a wide array of products and services, but in the early nineties, Mitsubishi Corporation, the general trading company within that group, reached the top of the Fortune Global 500—"the world's biggest company"—with revenues of more than $170 billion.
(2) That said, the Japanese economy was showing signs of serious weakness at the beginning of the last decade of the 20th century. Management practices such as lifetime employment guarantees that had long been lauded were instead being called into question. Japan's reliance on industrial policy had already triggered a backlash in the United States with cries of unfair trade practices. With its emphasis on size and not market share, Mitsubishi Corporation may have topped the Fortune charts, but profitability was another story altogether, with earnings a minuscule percentage of sales.
(3) In this environment of change, Mitsubishi Corporation was ready to select a new leader in 1992. The choice was Makihara, who had just returned from a posting in New York City as head of U.S. operations. Thirty-six years earlier, he had started out in the company's marine products department, watching over the export of salmon and crab.
(4) Makihara's credentials were far from traditional by Japanese standards. Although his late father had been a Mitsubishi manager and his wife was the great-granddaughter of the company's founder, Makihara had been born in England and had studied for a year at St. Paul's, a prep school in New Hampshire, before graduating Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard College in 1954. In a system where career advancement could often be hindered by assignments outside Japan, he had spent more than twenty years in positions that took him not only to New York but to London, Seattle, and Washington, D.C., where his perfect English and cosmopolitan outlook helped make him a very effective representative of Mitsubishi abroad.
(5) The significance of Makihara's appointment was not lost on the business press. "With U.S.-Japan relations at an all-time low," wrote Business Week, "his U.S. experience [worked to his advantage]. He argues against the closed world of the keiretsu."
(6) Makihara had a full agenda when he took office. "Much of Japan's growth in the past decade had been based on a bubble economy," he explains. "The Japanese economy depended on bank loans instead of equity, creating the illusion that money was in infinite supply. That led Mitsubishi and other Japanese companies to make bad investments. I decided we should do something about them immediately." As a result, Makihara's initial order of business was to write down those losses, improve his finance department with the help of a Wall Street private equity firm, and make it a matter of policy to pay closer attention to managing the balance sheet.
(7) Makihara then turned his attention to improving Mitsubishi's ability to compete in the world economy. Under the rubric of a program known as "Sound Global Enterprise," he undertook a series of wide-ranging initiatives that permeated every corner of the company, from improving corporate governance and restructuring the corporation to improving the management of human resources. "The CEO has to elicit ideas by talking to employees at every level of the organization," says Makihara, who instituted an open-door policy to make good on what was then a revolutionary idea among Japanese executives.
(8) Emphasizing the importance of adopting new technologies, he named himself chief information officer, provided every worker with a laptop computer, and joined the board of IBM. To expand Mitsubishi's horizons, he pressed for the development of new business in emerging markets such as China and Southeast Asia. "Having taken these and other actions," observed HBS professor emeritus Michael Yoshino, "Makihara-san laid the foundation for Mitsubishi's transformation into a 21st-century company."
(9) At the end of his term as president and CEO in 1998, Makihara became Mitsubishi Corporation's chairman for six years, a position that enabled him to be a strong voice in the halls of the nation's government and in international business affairs. As vice chairman of the Keidanren, Japan's most influential business organization, he specialized in trade issues. At the same time, he fostered understanding and cooperation with the United States as chairman of the Japan-U.S. Business Council and through his work with other prominent citizens of Japan, Europe, and North America who served on the Trilateral Commission.
(10) Sitting in Cambridge last June before receiving a Harvard Medal in recognition of his efforts on behalf of the University in Asia, Makihara remembers his surprise twelve years ago when he was called "unexpectedly" into the CEO's office and named his successor."I thought I was going to be put in charge of corporate planning," he says with a smile. With admirable prescience and wisdom, however, Mitsubishi Corporation clearly got the right person for the right job.
►Case task:
Compare the styles of leadership. For each of these two business leaders, find out:
Problems facing their organisation before they took leadership
Solutions put in place by the leader
The style of leadership used
‘TRANSLATION-2’ POINT
►Translate into Russian:
Surviving the ordeal
(1) Vodafone has lowered its revenue outlook for the year in the face of the economic downturn. The mobile phone group particularly flagged up Spain as a problem area; it lost business there as large numbers of immigrant construction workers – who had been Vodafone customers – left the country when the housing market slowed.
(2) Vodafone’s shares dropped, wiping 12.5 billion euros off the company’s worth. The rest of the European telecoms sector also suffered including Spain’s Telefonica. Vodafone, which is the world’s largest mobile company in terms of revenue, operates in 65 countries and has almost 270 million customers.
(3) Recently it has made a determined effort to get into faster-growing emerging markets – Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Africa and the Asia Pacific region. Expansions include Turkey, India, Qatar and Ghana.
►Translate into English:
Vodafone пошел антикризисным курсом
(1) Крупнейший мировой оператор сотовой связи британский Vodafone во второй раз за последние четыре месяца снизил прогноз годовой выручки: из-за финансового кризиса спрос на мобильные падает. Vodafone намерен провести сокращение издержек на 1 млрд. фунтов – или 1,2 млрд. евро.
(2) В первом полугодии финансового года чистая прибыль компании сократилась на 35% до отметки 2,7 млрд. евро. Впрочем, в истории компании были и более тяжелые времена.
(3) Чтобы не допустить их повторения, руководство Vodafone объявило о проведении в жизнь новой стратегии, которая заключается в привлечении новых клиентов и наращивании объема наличности. Поэтому в Европе, где продажи падают, Vodafone будет сокращать издержки, а вместо этого вкладывать деньги в повышение эффективности работы в развивающихся странах. Там рынок сотовой связи еще на насыщен и спрос на такие услуги по-прежнему высок. Исключение составляет Турция, где компания за шесть месяцев потеряла более 2 млрд. евро.
‘CHECK’ POINT
►Question/Answer session:
What leadership styles do you know? Characterize each of them.
How would you instruct management leaders in true leadership skills mentioned in this unit?
What are the differences between managers and leaders, if any?
‘Personal networking is an afterthought for many busy managers. When you work 60-80 hour weeks, the easiest thing to eliminate from your schedule is your alumni meeting, the annual golf fundraiser and your scuba diving course. But these networks allow you to meet a diverse group of like-minded professionals. They also are a way to develop important social skills for many professionals and may be the first place you turn to when you start thinking about changing careers.’ Comment on this opinion.
Networking is a requirement for business leaders in today’s competitive environment. “Other things being equal, what is going to give you an edge? It’s the relationships that you have that allow you to augment what you know and allow you to take the ‘what you know’ and actually to translate it into practice, into something the organization can use. It makes all the difference.” Comment on this opinion.
In Leaders: The Strategies for Taking Charge, Warren Bennis lists four competencies that leaders need to develop:
Forming a vision which provides people with a bridge to the future;
Giving meaning to that vision through communication;
Building trust, ‘the lubrication that makes it possible for organizations to work’;
Searching for self-knowledge and self-regard. In this context, Bennis says: ‘I think a lot of the leaders I’ve spoken to give expression to their feminine side. Many male leaders are almost bisexual in their ability to be open and reflective… Gender is not the determining factor.’
Comment in detail on each competency.
1 Let it stick in your mind: In the early/late 1990s
2 Let it stick in your mind: Be different from… in…= Differ from… in…