English for Master’s Course = Английский для магистрантов. Учебное пособие

2. Using introductory phrases

Be aware that intonation is also critical here and can affect the meaning very significantly.

Example: I’m afraid, that would be beyond our budget.

Task 11. Read the instructions. After that, make up a dialogue, work in pairs, one of you is supposed to “manage an angry customer”. Use the given tips:

DEALING WITH ANGRY CUSTOMERS

A day in the life of a businessperson can be filled with joy and satisfaction or it can be frustrating and stressful. When things go wrong, some people lose control. Holding emotions in check and reacting professionally under fire are not always easy. It is particularly difficult to be nice to people who are not being nice to you.

So, what do you do to keep your cool when the customer is chewing you out? Most of the time, it is not even your fault. It could be that the problem was with a product or a service delivered by someone else in your organization. You’re getting the blame because the unhappy person found you first, and it’s not pleasant. When faced with angry people, there are four key steps that will help diffuse the situation.

Step one is to apologize. “But,” you say, “It’s not my fault.” It doesn’t matter who’s to blame; apologize anyway. As a representative of your company, you have a responsibility to see that things go well. Your willingness to be accountable will have a positive effect. After all, it takes two to have an argument. If one of you refuses о be disagreeable you can’t have a disagreement. You are not accepting blame – you are simply saying, “I’m sorry about the problem.” You are wasting your breath unless you apologize with complete sincerity so be sure that your tone of voice matches your words.

Step two is to sympathize with the irate customer. Let the person know that you can identify with his feelings. Say that

you understand the frustration of receiving a faulty product or poor service. The angry person begins to feel better as soon as his reaction is validated.

Step three is to accept responsibility for the situation. Be accountable to the customer. Let him know that you intend to do whatever it takes to make things right. You can’t help what has already happened, but you will come up with a solution to the problem or you will find someone who can.

The last step is to take action. Decide what you can do and tell the customer. You will replace the defective or incorrect product as quickly as possible. If the issue as poor service, deliver better service. Whenever you can offer a bonus of some sort of waive fees, the tiger before you is transformed into a pussycat.

Use the acronym “ASAP” to remember these four steps for calming upset customers. Each letter stands for part of the process.

A is “apologize.”

S represents “sympathize.”

A stands for “accept responsibility.” P means “prepare to take action.”

Nothing will be solved by becoming argumentative and reactionary. Instead, diffuse the client’s anger by being apologetic and sympathetic and focus on positive steps that will resolve the situation. Before you know it, your adversaries will become your allies.

Oh yes, remember to smile. It will make everyone feel better and behave better. (http://www.sideroad.com/Customer_Service_Basics/dealing- angry-customers.htvil )

KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT

PRE-READING TASK

Comment on the quotes and discuss the following:

1.What do you remember about knowledge management from your management course?

2.Is KM different from any other kind of management? If so, in what way?

3.What is meant by ‘knowledge economy’?

4.Does ‘knowledge’ equal ‘information’?

Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est

Knowledge is power, Lat.

We do not just get knowledge, we get knowledge packaged up as concepts and perceptions.

Edward De Bono, Psychologist

Vocabulary and Word Study

Task 12. Read and analyze the words. Make sure you know their meanings:

Task 13. Match the following words with their definitions. There is one odd definition:

Reading and Speaking

KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT

Knowledge Management (KM) can be viewed as a conceptually complex, evolving, broad umbrella of issues and viewpoints. It comprises a range of practices used by organizations to identify, create, represent, and distribute knowledge for reuse, awareness and learning. It has been an established discipline since 1995 with a body of university courses and both professional and academic journals dedicated to it.

KM programs are typically tied to organizational objectives and are intended to achieve specific outcomes, such as shared intelligence, improved performance, competitive advantage, or higher levels of innovation.

KM attempts to manage the process of creation (or identification), accumulation and application of knowledge across an organization. It, therefore, aims to bring under one set of practices various strands of thought and practice relating to:

•intellectual capital and the knowledge worker in the knowledge economy

•the idea of the learning organization

•various enabling organizational practices, such as Communities of Practice and corporate Yellow Page directories for accessing key personnel and expertise

•various enabling technologies such as knowledge bases and expert systems, help desks, corporate intranets and extranets, Content Management, wikis and Document Management.

A key distinction made by the majority of knowledge management practitioners is between tacit and explicit knowledge. The former is often subconscious, internalized, and the individual may or may not be aware of what he or she knows and how he or she accomplishes particular results. At the opposite end of the spectrum is conscious or explicit knowledge – knowledge that the individual holds explicitly and consciously in mental focus, and may communicate to others. In the popular form of the distinction tacit knowledge is what is in our heads, and explicit knowledge is what we have codified.

It is also common to distinguish between the creation of “new knowledge” (i.e., innovation) vs. the transfer of “established knowledge” within a group, organization, or community. Collaborative environments such as communities of practice or the use social computing tools can be used for both creation and transfer. Knowledge may be accessed, or captured, at three stages: before, during, it, or after knowledge-related activities.

Ad Hoc Knowledge Access

One alternative strategy to encoding knowledge into and retrieving knowledge from a knowledge repository such as a database is for individuals to access experts on an ad hoc basis, as needed, with their knowledge requests. A key benefit of this strategy is that the response from the expert individual is rich in content and contextualized to the particular problem being addressed and personalized to the particular person or people addressing it.

Knowledge Management Enablers

Historically, there have been a number of technologies ‘enabling’ or facilitating knowledge management practices in the organization, including expert systems, knowledge bases, various types of Information Management, software help desk tools, document management systems and other IT systems supporting organizational knowledge flows.

The advent of the Internet brought with it further enabling technologies, including e-learning, web conferencing, collaborative software, content management systems, corporate ‘Yellow pages’ directories, e-mail lists, wikis, blogs, and other technologies. Each enabling technology can expand the level of inquiry available to an employee, while providing a platform to achieve specific goals or actions. The practice of KM will continue to evolve with the growth of collaboration applications, visual tools and other technologies.

Since its adoption by the mainstream population and business community, the Internet has led to an increase in creative colla-boration, learning and research, e-commerce, and instant information.

Knowledge Management Roles and Organizational

Structure

Knowledge management activities may be centralized in a Knowledge Management Office, or responsibility for knowledge management may be located in existing departmental functions, such as the Human Resource (to manage intellectual capital) or IT departments (for content management, social computing etc.). Different departments and functions may have a knowledge management function and those functions may not be connected other than informally.

Knowledge Management Reasons of Failure or Success

There is no established evidence as to the reasons behind failure and success of KM initiatives in organizations. Some argue that a failure to sustain investment is one factor, but it can equally be argued that if knowledge management delivered on its promises investment would continue. As with many management initiatives, particularly those which a heavy IT basis (as is the case in KM) frequent questions are raised as to the level of consultation before a program is started and these are linked to issues of cultural change and willingness to share and collaborate with colleagues. However there is no evidence that KM, in all these respects is any different from other management initiatives.

Task 14. Choose the correct answer (a, b, c) for questions 1–5:

1.What does knowledge management include?

a)a system of getting an education at schools, colleges, universities;

b)a number of types of preserving different knowledge storage;

c)companies’ experience of systemizing and structuring knowledge for the benefit of the organization.

2.Why do different companies use KM programs?

a)to reach a particular result in a certain sphere of communication, performing, innovating and etc.;

b)to get out of that chaos of information they have;

c)to be more prestigious at the labour market.

3.What is the difference between tacit and explicit knowledge?

a)tacit knowledge is something we can see; explicit knowledge is unreal, it is something living in our heads;

b)tacit knowledge is being kept in the database; explicit knowledge is being fixed only in the books and instructions;

c)explicit knowledge is something we have codified and tacit knowledge is featured by having an ideal form.

4.How do we accept knowledge?

a)by reading and then learning it by heart;

b)by three steps: before, during and after the process of learning knowledge;

c)by special techniques of learning information.

5.How did the Internet influence on our lifestyle?

a)people got access to enormous storage of knowledge;

b)people have become interested in learning and searching e-commerce and instant information;

c)people have become active users of the Internet and began to create a new content.

Task 15. Retell the text answering the following questions:

1.How can we define Knowledge Management?

2.What do people use KM for?

3.What is the distinction between the tacit and explicit knowledge?

4.What stages do we go through while accepting knowledge?

5.Does KM have an alternative strategy of encoding knowledge?

6.How does the Internet help to encode knowledge?

7.What are the role and organizational structure of KM?

8.Is KM a positive or a negative invention?

Task 16. Fill in the blanks with an appropriate form of a given word from the text:

Task 17. Imagine that you work for a big company. You need to get a piece of special information. Where would you go? Who would you look for? Try to tell the whole way in details you’re going to get the information. Use the words from the text you’ve read:

Reading and Speaking

Task 18. Before reading try to explain the following statements and word combinations:

1.“…knowledge workers increasingly need to be responsible for their own growth and learning.”

2.“…individual employee effectiveness necessarily leads to better organizational effectiveness.”

3.“…promote free exchanges away from a centralized policed knowledge repository that is additional to ordinary work.”

4.“Just-in-time Canvassing.”

5.“Perception…visualization…interpreting.”

6.“…inference…”

7.“Weblogs and wikis are emerging as important elements of some organizational ‘bottom-up’ PKM systems.”

PERSONAL KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT

Personal knowledge management (PKM) is a concept that has grown out of a combination of knowledge management (KM) and personal information management (PIM) and cognitive human abilities.

More particular, the Personal KM is focused on helping an individual be more effective – to work better. While the focus is the individual, the goal of the movement is to enable individuals to operate better in groups and in corporations as well. This is as opposed to the traditional view of KM, which appears to be more centered on enabling the corporation to be more effective by “recording” and making available what its people know.

A core focus of PKM is ‘personal inquiry’, a quest to find, connect, learn and explore.

PKM is a response to the idea that knowledge workers increasingly need to be responsible for their own growth and learning. They need processes and tools by which they can evaluate what they know in a given situation, and then seek out ways to fill the gaps when needed. This frequently implies technology, but one can be good at PKM without much in the way of special tools.

The nice thing about PKM is that the “what’s in it for me” factor is taken care of immediately, so you get quicker individual buy-in. The difficult thing is how to you show a traditional company that individual employee effectiveness necessarily leads to better organizational effectiveness.

PKM has recently been linked to social bookmarking, blogging or k-logs. The idea is individuals use their blogs to capture ideas, opinions or thoughts and this ‘voicing’ will encourage cognitive diversity, promote free exchanges away from a centralized policed knowledge repository that is additional to ordinary work.

Some organizations are now introducing PKM ‘systems’ with some or all of four components:

• Just-in-time Canvassing (выявление мнения других) – templates and e-mail canvassing lists that enable people looking for experts or expertise to identify and connect with the appropriate people quickly and effectively

•Knowledge Harvesting (сбор, накопление знаний) – software tools that automatically collect appropriate knowledge residing on subject matter experts’ hard drives rather than waiting for it to be contributed to central repositories

•Personal Content Management – taxonomy processes and desktop search tools that enable employees to organize, subscribe to, publish and find information that resides on their own desktops

•Personal Productivity Improvement – ‘knowledge fairs’ and one-on-one training sessions to help each employee make more effective personal use of the knowledge, learning and technology resources available to them, in the context of their own work

PKM Skills

Skills associated with personal knowledge management.

•Reflection. Continuous improvement on how the individual operates.

•Manage learning. Manage how and when the individual learns.

•Information literacy. Understanding what information is important and how to find unknown information.

•Organizational skills. Personal librarianship (библиотековедение). Personal categorization and taxonomies (систематизация).

•Networking with others. Knowing what your network of people knows. Knowing who might have additional knowledge and resources to help you

•Researching, canvassing, paying attention, interviewing and observational ‘cultural anthropology’ skills (культурная антропология – сравнительное исследование культурных общностей или обществ; изучение влияния географических, исторических, социальных и психологических факторов на развитие культуры, ее характерные черты и специфику ее изменения).

•Communication skills. Perception, intuition, expression, visualization, and interpreting.

•Creative skills. Imagination, Pattern-recognition, appreciation, innovation, inference.

•Understanding of complex adaptive systems.

•Collaboration skills. Coordination, synchronization, experimentation, cooperation, and design.