International corruption

Corruption – the crime of giving or receiving money, gifts in exchange for doing something illegal that helps another person or company.

The alternatives for the word bribe are many and varied: kickback, sweetener, backhander, baksheesh. In law court they all are called illicit payments by the judge and commissions by a defendant. Using special slush funds to bribe political parties is called as sleaze by journalists.

In Berlin there is a group that is carried out surveys in different countries trying to find out how they are fighting corruption.

Denmark, Finland and Sweden have become the “cleanest” countries. They have moved New Zeland from the top position. The most corrupt countries are Nigeria, Bolivia, Columbia and Russia. Some economics think that corruption in the Third World is the product of global companies which use kickbacks to buy overpriced contracts. They divert (отвлекать) money from industry, education and healthcare which leads to impoverishment (обнищание) in developing countries.

Topic 18 Suggestions for managing the changes effectively

There is nothing permanent except changes in this world. A lot of companies all over the world has downsized and delayered recently, the BPR has taken place. It is a well known fact that any changes especially bold ones bear threat for psychology of a man. Personnel working under new management and during BRP always expect to be taken out in short term and to become a redundant workforce, that's why resist changes.

Resistance to change is the most natural of human reactions and is based on uncertainty (неопределенность) and it’s based on fear – fear of losing your job, fear of perhaps, not being able to cope with a new situation. It’s based on lack of trust in the decisions-makers and it’s based on a complete feeling of lack of control over the situation. All of those are very natural reactions, and the way to manage resistance is not completely ignore it but actually to manage it as if it were natural.

However experienced managers are able to cope with the situation like that. They give reorganization rationale, explain their vision and lay everything out in clear and impressive language.

Such behavior not only helps to avoid clashes between management and workforce but also invigorates the workers, so they relish changes. It leads to the fact that the company starts expanding, makes new acquisitions, resolves the problem of redundancy, and creates new job opportunities.

Topic 19 What is strategy? The base of successful strategy.

Strategy is one of the most important means for achieving of stated aims. In business it’s very important to be able to risk, that is to know when to buy shares, and when to dispose of them. A good entrepreneur should be able to merge small companies not being afraid to expand his business.

Besides he should be able to concentrate and to drive business rationally. A person who won’t make attempts of mergers will be likely to stay without profits. Large-scale projects require serious actions, costs and efforts.

I want to say some words about the developing of strategy for a large company. First the management should think about the assets of the company and what’s unique about those assets, what markets they know about and what market are growing and which of those markets can make the best use of their assets. Then they consider all these things and then they develop the strategy, which consists of three simple steps:

The first one is to operate better.

The second step is to look at the assets they have and see which ones they should keep and which ones they should dispose of.

And then the third step is to stick together all their businesses, so that they are able to use each other’s assets.

The strategies of large companies are trends towards more focus on people, towards more teamwork. The strategy should be clear and define a unique goal. The example of such strategy is Coca-Cola’s. they are going to focus on their product, on international markets, and they are going to focus on distribution and promotion.