中国大学MOOC: Pick up the signal words used to indicate this organization. (1) Whether you decide to set up your own business consultancy or to be employed in a consultancy firm depends very much on your
中国大学MOOC: Pick up the signal words used to indicate this organization. (1) Whether you decide to set up your own business consultancy or to be employed in a consultancy firm depends very much on your
As a ________, she helps business people overcome difficulties. A: consultant B: consultancy C: consultanting
As a ________, she helps business people overcome difficulties. A: consultant B: consultancy C: consultanting
According to Mr Beeston, consultancy is criticised because A: it introduces unnecessary changes. B: it has become too complicated. C: it doesn’t always work.
According to Mr Beeston, consultancy is criticised because A: it introduces unnecessary changes. B: it has become too complicated. C: it doesn’t always work.
Which kind of company is favored by most employees in this field A: Commercial banks. B: Some financial institutions. C: Consultancy companies. D: Some dot-coms.
Which kind of company is favored by most employees in this field A: Commercial banks. B: Some financial institutions. C: Consultancy companies. D: Some dot-coms.
How does Carolyn describe her consultancy？（） A: It aims to help companies of a particular size. B: It offers advice and practical assistance. C: It concentrates on certain specialities.
How does Carolyn describe her consultancy？（） A: It aims to help companies of a particular size. B: It offers advice and practical assistance. C: It concentrates on certain specialities.
What does he say about how the situation has developed recently A: Demand for consultants has increased. B: There are more specialised services available. C: The cost of consultancy has been reduced.
What does he say about how the situation has developed recently A: Demand for consultants has increased. B: There are more specialised services available. C: The cost of consultancy has been reduced.
Why did Carolyn set up her own consultancy？（） A: She wanted to work independently B: She wanted to work on a greater variety of projects. C: She felt she could do better than the company she worked for
Why did Carolyn set up her own consultancy？（） A: She wanted to work independently B: She wanted to work on a greater variety of projects. C: She felt she could do better than the company she worked for
Nothing succeeds in business books like the study of success. The current business-book boom was launched in 1982 by Tom Peters and Robert Waterman with In Search of Excellence. The trend has continued with a succession of experts and would-be experts who promise to distil the essence of excellence into three (or five or seven) simple rules.The Three Rules is a self-conscious contribution to this type of writing； it even includes a bibliography of “success studies”. Michael Raynor and Mumtaz Ahmed work for a consultancy, Deloitte, that is determined to turn itself into more of a thought-leader and less a corporate repairman. They employ all the tricks of the success books. They insist that their conclusions are “measurable and actionable”-guides to behaviour rather than analysis for its own sake. Success authors usually serve up vivid stories about how exceptional businesspeople stamped their personalities on a company or rescued it from a life-threatening crisis. Messrs Raynor and Ahmed are happier chewing the numbers： they provide detailed appendices on “calculating the elements of advantage” and “detailed analysis”.The authors spent five years studying the behaviour of their 344 “ exceptional companies” only to come up at first with nothing. Every hunch (直觉) led to a blind alley and every hypothesis to a dead end. It was only when they shifted their attention from how companies behave to how they think that they began to make sense of their voluminous material.Management is all about making difficult tradeoffs in conditions that are always uncertain and often fast-changing. But exceptional companies approach these tradeoffs with two simple rules in mind, sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously. First： better before cheaper. Companies are more likely to succeed in the long run if they compete on quality or performance than on price. Second： revenue before cost. Companies have more to gain in the long run from driving up revenue than by driving down costs.Most success studies suffer from two faults. There is “the halo (光环）effect”, whereby good performance leads commentators to attribute all manner of virtues to anything and everything the company does. These virtues then suddenly become vices when the company fails. Messrs Raynor and Ahmed work hard to avoid these mistakes by studying large bodies of data over several decades. But they end up embracing a different error： stating the obvious. Most businesspeople will not be surprised to learn that it is better to find a profitable niche(隙缝市场）and focus on boosting your revenues than to compete on price and cut your way to success. The difficult question is how to find that profitable niche and protect it. There, The Three Rules is less useful.
Nothing succeeds in business books like the study of success. The current business-book boom was launched in 1982 by Tom Peters and Robert Waterman with In Search of Excellence. The trend has continued with a succession of experts and would-be experts who promise to distil the essence of excellence into three (or five or seven) simple rules.The Three Rules is a self-conscious contribution to this type of writing； it even includes a bibliography of “success studies”. Michael Raynor and Mumtaz Ahmed work for a consultancy, Deloitte, that is determined to turn itself into more of a thought-leader and less a corporate repairman. They employ all the tricks of the success books. They insist that their conclusions are “measurable and actionable”-guides to behaviour rather than analysis for its own sake. Success authors usually serve up vivid stories about how exceptional businesspeople stamped their personalities on a company or rescued it from a life-threatening crisis. Messrs Raynor and Ahmed are happier chewing the numbers： they provide detailed appendices on “calculating the elements of advantage” and “detailed analysis”.The authors spent five years studying the behaviour of their 344 “ exceptional companies” only to come up at first with nothing. Every hunch (直觉) led to a blind alley and every hypothesis to a dead end. It was only when they shifted their attention from how companies behave to how they think that they began to make sense of their voluminous material.Management is all about making difficult tradeoffs in conditions that are always uncertain and often fast-changing. But exceptional companies approach these tradeoffs with two simple rules in mind, sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously. First： better before cheaper. Companies are more likely to succeed in the long run if they compete on quality or performance than on price. Second： revenue before cost. Companies have more to gain in the long run from driving up revenue than by driving down costs.Most success studies suffer from two faults. There is “the halo (光环）effect”, whereby good performance leads commentators to attribute all manner of virtues to anything and everything the company does. These virtues then suddenly become vices when the company fails. Messrs Raynor and Ahmed work hard to avoid these mistakes by studying large bodies of data over several decades. But they end up embracing a different error： stating the obvious. Most businesspeople will not be surprised to learn that it is better to find a profitable niche(隙缝市场）and focus on boosting your revenues than to compete on price and cut your way to success. The difficult question is how to find that profitable niche and protect it. There, The Three Rules is less useful.
Directions: In this section, you are going to read a passage with 10 statements attached to it. Each statement contains information given in one of the paragraphs. Identify the paragraph from which the information is derived. You may choose a paragraph more than once. Each paragraph is marked with a letter. Answer the questions by marking the corresponding letter on Answer Sheet 2. Corporate culture instilled online A) At its most basic, the Internet is a wonderful way to communicate. Hit that"send button and off goes the email to everybody in the firm and beyond. No wonder companies find it a perfect way to talk to their staff. No wonder it is so useful-but also so dangerous- when staff want to talk to each other. B) Over and over again, the Internet’s uses turn out to go beautifully with current trends.As companies become more fragmented and their workers more geographical dispersed, managers need a way to rally the troops. In particular, they need a way to build a corporate culture: that intangible something that binds employees together and teaches them to understand instinctively the defining qualities of the business and the appropriate way to respond to any issue that confronts them. The Internet provides the means to do this. C) In a stable, slow-growing, and well-established company, a common culture may be easy to maintain. But few companies today can afford to be stable or slow-growing. Instability and speed make culture-creation harder. In many companies, for instance, the sales or the maintenance people rarely come into the office. A quarter of IBMS workforce, for instance, is now mobile-they spend at least 80 percent of their time off-site, usually working from home or on the road. Key people may be based in key markets abroad, a day’s air travel away from the main office. D) You need also consider mergers (公司合并) , which create a need to persuade a new bunch of employees to abandon one corporate need for another. As companies outsource (外包) more and more activities, too, they look for ways to teach their subcontractors to share their values. And the faster things change, the more important it becomes to explain to employees what is happening, and why. E) How to do it?“In a rapidly changing and geographically distributed organization”，says Michael Morris， a social psychologist at Stanford's Graduate School of Business, “you don't have the option of the drink after work.”But you do have the Internet. More than any previous technology, it allows companies to ensure that every employee has access to the corporate news, views, and vision. F) Some companies use it to teach their employees (as well as suppliers and customers) their ethical code. Boeing. for instance, offers an online“ethics challenge”where employees can test their moral instincts on such delicate issues as “acceptance of business” and“the minister drops a hint”. Such applications are a way to spread a common approach throughout an organization. G) The Internet is also a way for bosses to tell staff where they want the business to go. For example, at Ford, which claims to have the world’s largest intranet, 170,000 staff around the world are emailed a weekly “let’s chat” note from Jac Nasser, the chief executive. A purpose-built newsroom maintains a website upgraded several times a day,and available to Ford’s employees around the world. H) Not only does the Internet allow managers to talk to their staff: it lets them track whether the staff are at least pretending to listen. William Nuti, president of Europe, the Middle East, and Africa for Cisco Systems, a high-tech giant, produces a monthly video to send to his staff explaining where the business is going. What happens if the staff don't choose to watch? Well, the Internet allows you to track who opens an email and when. “I know everyone who clicks on it, and those who throw it away, and I make phone calls to people, saying it's important you watch this.” Unsurprisingly, Mr. Nuti’s viewing figures are high. I) But all this communication from on high can sometimes cause problems. SAP, a German business-software giant, is another company with an elaborate communications system. It allows material to be broadcast on the car radios of workers on the road, for example. The company found that middle managers objected to the chairman emailing all employees. Their authority had rested partly on their role as a source of information, and without it they felt exposed. As so often with internet-driven changes, the implications of what appeared to be simple,time-saving innovation turned out to be more complex and politically sensitive. That sensitivity becomes more acute as communications become increasingly bottom-up as well as top-down. At Siemens, a large German company, Chittur Ramakrishnan, the chief information officer, has noticed a “ very significant number of emails to top management. The idea of going through a secretary to get an appointment has changed. People can send emails to anyone and expect a response. It is very democratizing.” J) Despite all these, companies find all sorts of routine tasks can be done online with greater efficiency and less expense, As a result, “B2E”-business-to-employee applications are flourishing. They may be the biggest growth area for Internet applications over the next couple of years. They include many tasks involving staff matters, the creation of an internal job market, and training. One of the strengths of the Internet over previous systems is that it can be used to provide services to everyone in a company. K) A growing number of companies now have a“corporate portal”: a centralized home page with links to various services and items of information to attract the staff to keep looking in. Click, and there is a map of each floor of the office; click again, and there are photographs and personal details about who sits where. Elsewhere on the page there may be links to the online services of the human resources department, or the day's news clippings(剪报), or a page allowing workers to order office supplies or find telephone numbers. L) The good thing about such pages is that they are accessible not only to employees in head office, but also to people in distant subsidiaries, on the road, or at home. Increasingly, employees can personalize their page, so that if they are working in the marketing department they do not receive a flood of news clippings on irrelevant subjects. Companies with lots of old computer systems can use the home page as the entrance to a network designed to pull all the old systems together. M) Next, there is the prospect of turning the corporate workforce into a marketplace. It is an advertiser’s dream: a stable group of people with regular pay and a known employer. Why not, for instance, offer a link from the page that informs an employee of her holiday entitlements to a travel company with which the company already does corporate business, and which will offer discounts on leisure travel? Why not charge local restaurants for the occasional advertisement? N) Indeed, this is already starting to happen. For instance, Exult, a consultancy to which BP subcontract much of its human resources work, is discussing just such a proposition with companies offering financial services. But how will businesses feel about encouraging their staff to hunt for a home loan when they should be finishing a presentation? Alan Little, Exults head of global client relationships, replies robustly that, if employees can work from home at the weekend on their company laptop, then surely they should be allowed to book their holidays from the office on a weekday. They should be judged by results. 1 The Internet does a better job than any other technology in helping employees get the news and views of their organizations. 2 Employees can find information or services of their interest by following the links on the home page of the company. 3 Emails from chairman sent directly to all staff may meet with opposition from middle managers. 4 The Internet provides companies with a way to establish a corporate culture that units all their employees. 5 The internet allows the employers to let their staff know the development direction of their companies. 6 It is more difficult for many companies to create and maintain a common culture as their employees are becoming more mobile. 7 Employees will hopefully become customers of service or products advertised on the home page of the company. 8 Managers are able to know whether their staff are listening or watching what they have sent to the staff online. 9 The booming applications of business to employees result from the improved efficiency and lower costs of performing daily tasks online. 10 The home page of a company can be used as an entrance to a network integrating all old computer systems.
Directions: In this section, you are going to read a passage with 10 statements attached to it. Each statement contains information given in one of the paragraphs. Identify the paragraph from which the information is derived. You may choose a paragraph more than once. Each paragraph is marked with a letter. Answer the questions by marking the corresponding letter on Answer Sheet 2. Corporate culture instilled online A) At its most basic, the Internet is a wonderful way to communicate. Hit that"send button and off goes the email to everybody in the firm and beyond. No wonder companies find it a perfect way to talk to their staff. No wonder it is so useful-but also so dangerous- when staff want to talk to each other. B) Over and over again, the Internet’s uses turn out to go beautifully with current trends.As companies become more fragmented and their workers more geographical dispersed, managers need a way to rally the troops. In particular, they need a way to build a corporate culture: that intangible something that binds employees together and teaches them to understand instinctively the defining qualities of the business and the appropriate way to respond to any issue that confronts them. The Internet provides the means to do this. C) In a stable, slow-growing, and well-established company, a common culture may be easy to maintain. But few companies today can afford to be stable or slow-growing. Instability and speed make culture-creation harder. In many companies, for instance, the sales or the maintenance people rarely come into the office. A quarter of IBMS workforce, for instance, is now mobile-they spend at least 80 percent of their time off-site, usually working from home or on the road. Key people may be based in key markets abroad, a day’s air travel away from the main office. D) You need also consider mergers (公司合并) , which create a need to persuade a new bunch of employees to abandon one corporate need for another. As companies outsource (外包) more and more activities, too, they look for ways to teach their subcontractors to share their values. And the faster things change, the more important it becomes to explain to employees what is happening, and why. E) How to do it?“In a rapidly changing and geographically distributed organization”，says Michael Morris， a social psychologist at Stanford's Graduate School of Business, “you don't have the option of the drink after work.”But you do have the Internet. More than any previous technology, it allows companies to ensure that every employee has access to the corporate news, views, and vision. F) Some companies use it to teach their employees (as well as suppliers and customers) their ethical code. Boeing. for instance, offers an online“ethics challenge”where employees can test their moral instincts on such delicate issues as “acceptance of business” and“the minister drops a hint”. Such applications are a way to spread a common approach throughout an organization. G) The Internet is also a way for bosses to tell staff where they want the business to go. For example, at Ford, which claims to have the world’s largest intranet, 170,000 staff around the world are emailed a weekly “let’s chat” note from Jac Nasser, the chief executive. A purpose-built newsroom maintains a website upgraded several times a day,and available to Ford’s employees around the world. H) Not only does the Internet allow managers to talk to their staff: it lets them track whether the staff are at least pretending to listen. William Nuti, president of Europe, the Middle East, and Africa for Cisco Systems, a high-tech giant, produces a monthly video to send to his staff explaining where the business is going. What happens if the staff don't choose to watch? Well, the Internet allows you to track who opens an email and when. “I know everyone who clicks on it, and those who throw it away, and I make phone calls to people, saying it's important you watch this.” Unsurprisingly, Mr. Nuti’s viewing figures are high. I) But all this communication from on high can sometimes cause problems. SAP, a German business-software giant, is another company with an elaborate communications system. It allows material to be broadcast on the car radios of workers on the road, for example. The company found that middle managers objected to the chairman emailing all employees. Their authority had rested partly on their role as a source of information, and without it they felt exposed. As so often with internet-driven changes, the implications of what appeared to be simple,time-saving innovation turned out to be more complex and politically sensitive. That sensitivity becomes more acute as communications become increasingly bottom-up as well as top-down. At Siemens, a large German company, Chittur Ramakrishnan, the chief information officer, has noticed a “ very significant number of emails to top management. The idea of going through a secretary to get an appointment has changed. People can send emails to anyone and expect a response. It is very democratizing.” J) Despite all these, companies find all sorts of routine tasks can be done online with greater efficiency and less expense, As a result, “B2E”-business-to-employee applications are flourishing. They may be the biggest growth area for Internet applications over the next couple of years. They include many tasks involving staff matters, the creation of an internal job market, and training. One of the strengths of the Internet over previous systems is that it can be used to provide services to everyone in a company. K) A growing number of companies now have a“corporate portal”: a centralized home page with links to various services and items of information to attract the staff to keep looking in. Click, and there is a map of each floor of the office; click again, and there are photographs and personal details about who sits where. Elsewhere on the page there may be links to the online services of the human resources department, or the day's news clippings(剪报), or a page allowing workers to order office supplies or find telephone numbers. L) The good thing about such pages is that they are accessible not only to employees in head office, but also to people in distant subsidiaries, on the road, or at home. Increasingly, employees can personalize their page, so that if they are working in the marketing department they do not receive a flood of news clippings on irrelevant subjects. Companies with lots of old computer systems can use the home page as the entrance to a network designed to pull all the old systems together. M) Next, there is the prospect of turning the corporate workforce into a marketplace. It is an advertiser’s dream: a stable group of people with regular pay and a known employer. Why not, for instance, offer a link from the page that informs an employee of her holiday entitlements to a travel company with which the company already does corporate business, and which will offer discounts on leisure travel? Why not charge local restaurants for the occasional advertisement? N) Indeed, this is already starting to happen. For instance, Exult, a consultancy to which BP subcontract much of its human resources work, is discussing just such a proposition with companies offering financial services. But how will businesses feel about encouraging their staff to hunt for a home loan when they should be finishing a presentation? Alan Little, Exults head of global client relationships, replies robustly that, if employees can work from home at the weekend on their company laptop, then surely they should be allowed to book their holidays from the office on a weekday. They should be judged by results. 1 The Internet does a better job than any other technology in helping employees get the news and views of their organizations. 2 Employees can find information or services of their interest by following the links on the home page of the company. 3 Emails from chairman sent directly to all staff may meet with opposition from middle managers. 4 The Internet provides companies with a way to establish a corporate culture that units all their employees. 5 The internet allows the employers to let their staff know the development direction of their companies. 6 It is more difficult for many companies to create and maintain a common culture as their employees are becoming more mobile. 7 Employees will hopefully become customers of service or products advertised on the home page of the company. 8 Managers are able to know whether their staff are listening or watching what they have sent to the staff online. 9 The booming applications of business to employees result from the improved efficiency and lower costs of performing daily tasks online. 10 The home page of a company can be used as an entrance to a network integrating all old computer systems.