D Oral Work

1. Argue for or against the following debating theme:

‘If one is to succeed in business, it is essential to learn the art of giving a bribe, therefore high principles and business success are incompatible.’

2. Role Play

You are the Sales Director of an educational publishers. One of your firm’s best-selling books is an English language course book giving the foreign student a thorough grounding in the elements of the language. This textbook is doing particularly well in Asian markets at present. Recently, you and your Managing Director went on an Asian sales tour, and in one of the countries you visited, the two of you met an official in the Ministry of Education. During the meeting, this man mentioned that it might be possible to get your textbook used throughout the country’s secondary school system, but he hinted that he expected some sort of bribe from you for his co-operation.

Instructions

Working in groups of three, students should take roles and enact the discussion which took place between the Sales Manager, Managing Director and Ministry of Education official.

E Writing Exercises

1. Discuss some of the ways in which a business executive might have to compromise his personal ethics for the sake of his company’s interests.

2. You are the chairman of a company, based in Birmingham, England, which markets cutlery in the UK and overseas. You have recently learned, to your surprise, that your sales department has been operating a ‘slush fund’. From this fund, secret payments have been made to individuals setting up deals or who have, however indirectly, contributed to the winning of a contract. You are very upset to learn about the existence of this fund, especially since the frequency and size of such payments seem to have increased greatly in the last two years. Accordingly, you call your Marketing Manager, Mr Sherwood, to give him a piece of your mind and tell him that these questionable payments must cease immediately. To your surprise he does not agree with you…

Write the dialogue that takes place between yourself, as Chairman, and the Marketing Manager.