Основы менеджмента на английском языке текстовый контент, средства организации и способы смысловой обработки. Учебное пособие

1.Reference Overall Singular Purpose («Mission») or Desired Result from System. During planning, planners have in mind (consciously or unconsciously) some overall purpose or result that the plan is to achieve. For example, during strategic planning, it's critical to reference the mission, or overall purpose, of the organization.

2.Take Stock Outside and Inside the System. This «taking stock» is always done to some extent, whether consciously or unconsciously. For example, during strategic planning, it's important to conduct an environmental scan. This scan usually involves considering various driving forces, or major influences, that might effect the organization.

3.Analyze the Situation. For example, during strategic planning, planners often conduct a «SWOT analysis». (SWOT is an acronym for considering the organization's strengths and weaknesses, and the opportunities and threats faced by the organization.) During this analysis, planners also can use a variety of assessments, or methods to «measure» the health of systems.

4.Establish Goals. Based on the analysis and alignment to the overall mission of the system, planners establish a set of goals that build on strengths to take advantage of opportunities, while building up weaknesses and warding off threats.

5.Establish Strategies to Reach Goals. The particular strategies (or methods to reach the goals) chosen depend on matters of affordability, practicality and efficiency.

6.Establish Objectives Along the Way to Achieving Goals. Objectives are selected to be timely and indicative of progress toward goals.

7.Associate Responsibilities and Time Lines With Each Objective. Responsibilities are assigned, including for implementation of the plan, and for achieving various goals and objectives. Ideally, deadlines are set for meeting each responsibility.

8.Write and Communicate a Plan Document. The above information is organized and written in a document which is distributed around the system.

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9. Acknowledge Completion and Celebrate Success. This critical step is often ignored – which can eventually undermine the success of many of your future planning efforts. The purpose of a plan is to address a current problem or pursue a development goal. It seems simplistic to assert that you should acknowledge if the problem was solved or the goal met. However, this step in the planning process is often ignored in lieu of moving on the next problem to solve or goal to pursue. Skipping this step can cultivate apathy and skepticism in your organization.

Assignments

A1. Look through the TEXT 2 and state its main problem. A2. Finish the presented sentence according to the text logic:

1.To explain, inputs to the system include…

2.Outputs are tangible …

3.The complexity of the various phases …

4.During planning, planners have in mind …

5.Objectives are selected …

A3. Comment on the following typical phases in management: take stock outside and inside the system; establish goals; associate responsibilities and time lines with each objective.

TEXT 3

Business Planning

A business plan is a formal statement of business goals, reasons they are attainable, and plans for reaching them. It may also contain background information about the organization or team attempting to reach those goals.

Business plans may target changes in perception and branding by the customer, client, taxpayer, or larger community. When the existing business is to assume a major change or when planning a new venture, a 3 to 5 year business plan is required, since investors will look for their investment return in that timeframe

Business plans appear in many different formats, depending on the audience for the plan and complexity of the business. However,

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most business plans address the following five topic areas in one form or another.

1.Business summary – Describes the organization, business venture or product (service), summarizing its purpose, management, operations, marketing and finances.

2.Market opportunity – Concisely describes what unmet need it will (or does) fill, presents evidence that this need is genuine, and that the beneficiaries (or a third party) will pay for the costs to meet this need. Describes credible market research on target customers (including perceived benefits and willingness to pay), competitors and pricing.

3.People – Arguably the most important part of the plan, it describes who will be responsible for developing, marketing and operating this venture, and why their backgrounds and skills make them the right people to make this successful.

4.Implementation – This is the how-to section of the plan, where the action steps are clearly described, usually in four areas: start-up, marketing, operations and financial. Marketing builds on market research presented, e.g., in a Market Opportunity section of the plan, including your competitive niche (how you will be better than your competitors in ways that matter to your target customers). Financial plan includes, e.g., costs to launch, operate, market and finance the business, along with conservative estimates of revenue, typically for three years; a break-even analysis is often included in this section.

5.Contingencies – This section outlines the most likely things that could go wrong with implementing this plan, and how management is prepared to respond to those problems if they emerge.

In many cases, an organization will already have in its possession some of the information needed for preparing a business plan. For example, in the case of nonprofits, grant proposals often contain some of this information.

There are numerous benefits of doing a business plan, including:

– To identify an problems in your plans before you implement those plans.

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–To get the commitment and participation of those who will implement the plans, which leads to better results.

–To establish a roadmap to compare results as the venture proceeds from paper to reality.

–To achieve greater profitability in your organization, products and services – all with less work.

–To obtain financing from investors and funders.

–To minimize your risk of failure.

–To update your plans and operations in a changing world.

–To clarify and synchronize your goals and strategies.

Assignments

A1. Write down 10 main-idea sentences from the text.

A2. Make up your own business-plan according to the directions in TEXT 3.

A3. Make up a presentation about Business Planning.

Theme 2.4. STRATEGIC PLANNING

TEXT 1

Strategic planning is an organization's process of defining its strategy, or direction, and making decisions on allocating its resources to pursue this strategy.

Strategic planning is a process and thus has inputs, activities, outputs and outcomes.

Inputs – data is gathered from a variety of sources, such as interviews with key executives, review of publicly available documents on the competition or market, primary research (e.g., visiting or observing competitor places of business or comparing prices), industry studies, etc. This may be part of a competitive intelligenceprogram.

Activities – include meetings and other communication among the organization's leaders and personnel to develop a common under-

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standing regarding the competitive environment and what the organization's response to that environment (its strategy) should be.

The output of strategic planning includes documentation and communication describing the organization's strategy and how it should be implemented, sometimes referred to as the strategic plan.

Outcomes. Whilst the planning process produces outputs, as described above, strategy implementation or execution of the strategic plan produces Outcomes. These outcomes will invariably differ from the strategic goals. How close they are to the strategic goals and vision will determine the success or failure of the strategic plan.

Approaches used in strategic planning:

1)Goals-based planning is probably the most common and starts with focus on the organization's mission (and vision and/or values), goals to work toward the mission, strategies to achieve the goals, and action planning (who will do what and by when).

2)Issues-based strategic planning often starts by examining issues facing the organization, strategies to address those issues and action plans.

3)Organic strategic planning might start by articulating the organization's vision and values, and then action plans to achieve the vision while adhering to those values. Some planners prefer a particular approach to planning, appreciative inquiry.

Assignments

A1. Translate from Russian language: вложения, ресурсы, ре-

зультаты, производительность.

A2. Give the definition to following terms: goals based planning, issues-based strategic planning, organic strategic planning.

A3. Learn the definitions of the given notions and categories: inputs, activities, outputs.

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TEXT 2

Strategic planning is the process of deciding on the goals of the organization, on changes in these goals, on the resources used to attain these seals, and on the policies that are to govern the acquisition, use and disposition of these resources.

The word strategy is used here in its usual sense of deciding on how to combine and employ resources. Thus strategic planning is a process having to with the formulation of long-range, strategic, policytype plans that change the character or direction of the organization. In an industrial company, this includes planning that affects the goals of the company, policies of all types (includingpolicies as to management control and other processes); the acquisition and disposition of major facilities, divisions, or subsidiaries, the markets to be served and distribution channels for serving them; the organizationstructure (as distinguished from individual personnel actions); research and development of new product lines (as distinguished from modifications in existing products and product changes within existing product lines); sources of new permanent capital, dividend policy, and so on. Strategic Planning decisions affect the physical, financial, and organizational framework within which operations are carried on.

Strategic Planning Process

The traditional concept of the strategic planning process is one that is rational and deterministic, and orchestrated by senior managers. There are several steps in strategic planning process:

1.The first step is to establish objectives, the results expected, what is to be done and where the primary emphasis is to be placed.

2.The second step is to establish planning premises, i.e. assumptions about the anticipated environment. These premises can be classified as external and internal, qualitative and quantitative and controllable, non controllable. External premises can be classified into: general environment, (economic, technological, political, social and ethical conditions); the product market; and the factor market,

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(location of factory, labor, and materials etc). Internal premises include capital investment, sales forecast and organization structure. Some premises can be quantified while others may be qualitative. Some premises are controllable, such as expansion into a new market, adoption of a research program or a new site for the headquarters. Non-controllable premises include population growth, price levels, tax rates, business cycles etc. The semi controllable premises are the firm’s assumptions about its share of the market, labor turnover, labor efficiency, and the company’s pricing policy.

3.The third step in planning is to identify alternative courses of

action.

4.The fourth step is to evaluate them by weighing the various factors in the light of premises and goals.

5.The fifth step is adopting the plan.

6.The final step is to give meaning to plans by putting in numbers and preparing budgets.

Approaches to Strategic Planning. The three broad approaches to strategic planning can be summarized as follows:

1.Rational planning involves identifying and understanding gaps between previously established goals and past performance, identifying the resources needed to close these gaps, distributing those resources and monitoring their use in moving the organization closer towards its goals. This approach assumes the environment is predictable and the organization can be effectively controlled. Clearly, such an approach is not advisable if the business environment is complex and unpredictable.

2.Incrementalism means moving from one strategy to the next, depending on the unfolding of events beyond the control of managers. Incrementalism assumes that managers cannot forecast or enforce the developments essential to developing a pre-ordained strategy and therefore must continually adjust. Future developments are likely to be random so that there is little scope to learn from past experiences.

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Thus, in contrast to rational planning which emphasizes intended strategies, incrementalism is based on emergent strategies.

3. Organizational learning also emphasizes the need for making continuous adjustments. However, these adjustments need not be random. Rather, managers must keep making incremental adjustments to rational plans as they attempt to move the organization toward its goals. Though they may be unable to foresee the future, managers must not allow their organization to drift aimlessly. The role of top management is to encourage all employees to continuously challenge the status quo, generate ideas for improving the status quo, conduct experiments to see which of these ideas are most fruitful and then try to disseminate knowledge gained from these experiments throughout the organization.

Strategic planning has become a crucial exercise for the top management of enterprises because of the greater turbulence in environments in which such enterprises operate. Decisions to expand or dissatisfy quite often emerge from the exercise of strategic thinking companies when large turnover and operating in diverse fields usually have a separate department which is involved in the process of evaluating the changes in environment and its implication for the enterprise. It is also involved in the valuation of new opportunities. Since organization continuously interact with their environment and since only the top management can take decisions, which have farreaching long-term implications on the organization, the top management continuously, scans the environment for possible opportunities, Thus only few individuals are involved in this process.

Assignments

A1. Make up a logical chart of the text.

A2. Finish the presented sentence according to the text logic:

1)Thus strategic planning is a process …

2)Strategic Planning decisions affect …

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3)The third step in planning is to …

4)Rational planning involves …

5)The role of top management is …

A3. Describe the following terms by your own: top management, strategic thinking, incremental adjustments, internal premises, external premises.

A4. Describe the main idea of the text in 10 sentences.

TEXT 3 Strategic map

A strategy map is a diagram that is used to document the primary strategic goals being pursued by an organization or management team. It is an element of the documentation associated with the Balanced Scorecard, and in particular is characteristic of the second generation of Balanced Scorecard designs that first appeared during the mid-1990s. The first diagrams of this type appeared in the early 1990s, and the idea of using this type of diagram to help document Balanced Scorecard was discussed in a paper by Drs. Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton in 1996.

The strategy map idea featured in several books and articles during the late 1990s by Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton. Their original book in 1996, «The Balanced Scorecard, Translating strategy into action», contained diagrams which are later called strategy maps, but at this time they did nor refer to them as such. Kaplan & Norton's second book, The Strategy Focused Organization, explicitly refers to strategy maps and includes a chapter on how to build them. At this time, they said that «the relationship between the drivers and the desired outcomes constitute the hypotheses that define the strategy». Their Third book, Strategy Maps, goes into further detail about how to describe and visualise the strategy using strategy maps.

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The Kaplan and Norton approach to strategy maps has:

‒An underlying framework of horizontal perspectives arranged in a cause and effect relationship, typically Financial, Customer, Process and Learning & Growth

‒Objectives within those perspectives. Each objective as text appearing within a shape (usually an oval or rectangle).

‒Vertical sets of linked objectives that span the perspectives. These are called strategic themes.

‒Clear cause-and-effect relationships between these objectives, across the perspectives. The strategic themes represent hypotheses about how the strategy will bring about change to the outcomes of the organisation.

Across a broader range of published sources, a looser approach is sometimes used. In these approaches, there are only a few common attributes. Some approaches use a more broad causal relationships between objectives shown with arrows that either join objectives together, or placed in a way not linked with specific objectives but to provide general euphemistic indications of where causality lies. For instance, Olve and Wetter, in their 1999 book Performance Drivers, also describe early performance driver models, but do not refer to them as strategy maps.

The purpose of the strategy map in Balanced Scorecard design, and its emergence as a design aid, is discussed in some detail in a research paper on the evolution of Balanced Scorecard designs during the 1990s by Lawrie & Cobbold.

Assignments

A1. Compress the text information in the form of annotation (abstract), summary, key-words, key-predicates.

A2. Compile the text of the synopsis with the help of square brackets markers.

A3. Find in the text connectors and put down the list. A4. Make up your own strategic map.

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