Focus on Management

Part 2

Английский язык в сфере менеджмента

Часть 2

Уровень C1

Учебник

ebooks@prospekt.org

Информация о книге

УДК 811.111(075.8)

ББК 81.2Англ-9

П54

Рецензенты:

Караулова Ю. А., кандидат юридических наук, заместитель декана факультета управления и политики, доцент кафедры английского языка № 6 МГИМО МИД России;

Ускова Т. В., кандидат филологических наук, доцент, доцент кафедры публичного и международно-правового обеспечения национальной безопасности факультета комплексной безопасности ТЭК РГУ нефти и газа имени И. М. Губкина.

Учебник предназначен в первую очередь для студентов старших курсов бакалавриата, обучающихся по направлению подготовки «Государственное и муниципальное управление», а также для широкого круга лиц, желающих улучшить свои языковые навыки. В основе учебника лежит компетентностный подход к изучению иностранного языка для уровней профессионального владения B2–C1.

Целью авторов является формирование, развитие и закрепление профессионально ориентированных иноязычных коммуникативных компетенций, необходимых выпускникам вузов. Особое внимание уделяется умению работы с аутентичными текстами, их переводу, реферированию, а также участию в дискуссиях, подготовке докладов к конференциям. При создании учебника была использована методика CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning). Каждая часть содержит четыре урока, состоящих из аутентичных текстов, вопросов и упражнений к ним, заданий для самостоятельной работы.

Соответствует требованиям федерального государственного образовательного стандарта высшего образования.

Текст публикуется в авторской редакции.

УДК 811.111(075.8)

ББК 81.2Англ-9

© Полякова А. Н., Ломакина О. О., 2025

ПРЕДИСЛОВИЕ

Учебник «Английский язык в сфере менеджмента. Часть 2. Focus on Management. Part 2 — Уровень C1» создан в качестве базового учебника по аспекту язык профессии — менеджмент для студентов старших курсов бакалавриата Факультета управления и политики МГИМО МИД России, обучающихся по направлениям подготовки «Государственное и муниципальное управление», а также всех лиц, желающих развить иноязычные компетенции в области языка профессии.

Структура учебника охватывает наиболее актуальные темы, включенные в международную повестку в сфере управления: стратегический менеджмент (изучаются вопросы разработки и эффективного внедрения стратегии организации), антикризисное управление (рассматриваются актуальные вопросы поликризиса и пермакризиса, этапы преодоления кризисов и роль антикризисного управляющего), управление с учетом социально значимых целей организации (вопросы ESG, гринвошинга, импакт-инвестирования) и операционный менеджмент (этапы развития и новые подходы с учетом быстроменяющейся среды).

Учебник содержит аутентичные тексты — выдержки из аналитических статей последних лет ведущих авторов и авторитетных изданий в сфере управления, бизнеса и экономики. Учебные тексты сопровождаются не только переводом базовых терминов и лексических единиц на русский язык, но и комментариями к ним. Закреплению навыков информационно-аналитической работы и перевода способствуют предлагаемые к текстам упражнения, а также раздел с дополнительными материалами Further Practice и приложение Translation Tips, которое содержит теоретические выкладки и примеры моделей перевода. В данном учебнике используется методика CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning), которая позволяет объединить изучение иностранного языка и изучение дисциплины, в данном случае менеджмента.

Учебник соответствует государственному стандарту вузовского образования и учебным программам.

В соответствии со статьей 1274 «Свободное использование произведений в информационных, научных, учебных или культурных целях» части четвертой Гражданского кодекса Российской Федерации от 18 декабря 2006 г. № 230-ФЗ авторы учебника приводят в своей работе в качестве аутентичных материалов правомерно использованные произведения и отрывки из них в объеме, оправданном и обоснованном поставленными целями, задачами и методикой, с обязательным указанием имени автора, произведения которого используются, и источника заимствования.

Unit 1. EXECUTIVE LEADERSHIP AND STRATEGY

DISCUSSION

• In groups, think of senior management concerns in the 21st century.

• What role does leadership have in developing and setting a strategy?

Read the extract and then answer the questions below.

The challenge of developing or reestablishing a clear strategy is often primarily an organizational one and depends on leadership. With so many forces at work against making choices and tradeoffs in organizations, a clear intellectual framework to guide strategy is a necessary counterweight. Moreover, strong leaders willing to make choices are essential.

In many companies, leadership has degenerated into orchestrating operational improvements and making deals. But the leader’s role is broader and far more important. General management is more than the stewardship of individual functions. Its core is strategy: defining and communicating the company’s unique position, making trade-offs, and forging fit among activities. The leader must provide the discipline to decide which industry changes and customer needs the company will respond to, while avoiding organizational distractions and maintaining the company’s distinctiveness. Managers at lower levels lack the perspective and the confidence to maintain a strategy. There will be constant pressures to compromise, relax trade-offs, and emulate rivals. One of the leader’s jobs is to teach others in the organization about strategy — and to say no.

Strategy renders choices about what not to do as important as choices about what to do. Indeed, setting limits is another function of leadership. Deciding which target group of customers, varieties, and needs the company should serve is fundamental to developing a strategy. But so is deciding not to serve other customers or needs and not to offer certain features or services. Thus, strategy requires constant discipline and clear communication. Indeed, one of the most important functions of an explicit, communicated strategy is to guide employees in making choices that arise because of trade-offs in their individual activities and in day-to-day decisions.

Improving operational effectiveness is a necessary part of management, but it is not strategy. In confusing the two, managers have unintentionally backed into a way of thinking about competition that is driving many industries toward competitive convergence, which is in no one’s best interest and is not inevitable.

Managers must clearly distinguish operational effectiveness from strategy. Both are essential, but the two agendas are different. The operational agenda involves continual improvement everywhere there are no trade-offs. Failure to do this creates vulnerability even for companies with a good strategy. The operational agenda is the proper place for constant change, flexibility, and relentless efforts to achieve best practice. In contrast, the strategic agenda is the right place for defining a unique position, making clear trade-offs, and tightening fit. It involves the continual search for ways to reinforce and extend the company’s position. The strategic agenda demands discipline and continuity; its enemies are distraction and compromise.

Strategic continuity does not imply a static view of competition. A company must continually improve its operational effectiveness and actively try to shift the productivity frontier; at the same time, there needs to be ongoing effort to extend its uniqueness while strengthening the fit among its activities. Strategic continuity, in fact, should make an organization’s continual improvement more effective.

A company may have to change its strategy if there are major structural changes in its industry. In fact, new strategic positions often arise because of industry changes, and new entrants unencumbered by history often can exploit them more easily. However, a company’s choice of a new position must be driven by the ability to find new trade-offs and leverage a new system of complementary activities into a sustainable advantage.

What Is Strategy? by Michael E. Porter. Harvard Business Review

https://archive.org/stream/harvard-business-review-michael-e-porter-what-is-strategy-harvard-business-school-press-1996/%28Harvard%20Business%20Review%29%20Michael%20E%20Porter%20-%20What%20is%20strategy_%20-Harvard%20Business%20School%20Press%20%281996%29_djvu.txt

1. What does the term STRATEGY imply?

2. Why are strategy and operational effectiveness often confused?

3. What factors may cause a company to change its strategy?

READING 1

Read and speak on the main issues of the article.

All Business Strategies Fall into 4 Categories

by Jerome Barthelemy

The problem with strategy frameworks is that although they can help you determine whether a given opportunity is attractive or whether a particular strategy is likely to work, they generally don’t help you in the task of identifying the opportunity or crafting the strategy in the first place. As the legendary strategy expert Gary Hamel put it: “The dirty little secret of the strategy industry is that it doesn’t have any theory of strategy creation.”

To help fill the gap, this article introduces a categorization of potential strategies, based on an in-depth analysis of the strategy/creativity literature. In essence, all strategies fall into four groups, ordered here from the least to the most creative.

1. Adaptations of successful strategies from your industry.

A standout example of this approach is Shein, a Chinese company that has pushed the fast fashion concept to its limit. While traditional fast fashion companies such as Zara and H&M launch about 500 new items every week, Shein introduces 1,000 new items every day. Shein’s items are also 30–50% cheaper than the ones offered by its competitors. And unlike those companies, Shein does not have “brick and mortar” stores. It only sells its items through its app and its website. It also relies far more extensively on artificial intelligence, both upstream (to detect trends) and downstream (to optimize production). The formula has been extremely successful.

Rocket Internet is an even more extreme example. This German company “creatively imitates” successful online retailers and marketplaces. So far, it has launched more than 100 new companies. Most of them are active in Latin America, South East Asia, India, China, Africa, and the Middle East. They include Jumia, an online retailer that is currently operating in 11 African countries. While its leaders used Amazon’s “everything store” strategy as a template, they tailored it to African markets.

The deputy head of customer service explained this approach: “We have Amazon as our target so we try to do things as Amazon. However, the business environment and the challenges here do not allow us to fully operate Amazon’s business model and therefore we have to modify a whole lot of things in other to fit this environment.” For instance, there are many infrastructural challenges in Africa. Due to the lack of reliable third-party logistics providers, Jumia was forced to create its own fleet of vehicles. Because access to the Internet is limited in rural areas, Jumia had to set up a team of sales agents equipped with tablets to help customers place orders.

2. Importing strategies from other industries.

Executives and entrepreneurs rarely look beyond the confines of their industry. This is a pity because a strategy that has helped exploit an opportunity or neutralize a threat in another industry can often be a source of inspiration. Analogies are easy to make when there are strong similarities between two industries. When Hubert Joly was appointed CEO of Best Buy in 2012, the U.S. retailer was in trouble. While consumers would still use its stores as a source of information and advice about products, they would make their purchases on Amazon. Best Buy had become Amazon’s showroom, which caused its revenues and profits to drop sharply.

Four years later, the Wall Street Journal reported: “Best Buy has accomplished what many once considered impossible. It successfully fought off an attack from Amazon.com.” This turnaround owes a lot to the “store-within-a-store” strategy that Joly started implementing in 2013. It was based on the insight that Best Buy was the only consumer electronics retailer with a national presence left in the U.S. Unlike Apple, companies such as Samsung, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, LG or Sony did not have their own stores, but they needed a place to showcase their products and engage with consumers. The “store-within-a-store” gave them the opportunity to set up branded shops within Best Buy stores in exchange for a fee.

While renting retail space was a breakthrough innovation in consumer electronics retail, it is common in department stores. French department store Le Bon Marché pioneered this model in 1852.

Analogies are more difficult to make when two industries are very different. Hilti is a European tool manufacturer. In the mid-2000s, it was in trouble because the market for tools had become commoditized. Its leaders quickly realized that neither lowering the price nor improving the quality of tools would be sufficient to restore its profitability.

The solution they came up with was inspired by leasing, a business model familiar to the world of heavy machinery and vehicles, but traditionally quite far removed from retail goods. Instead of buying tools, customers would pay a monthly subscription fee to get tools on demand. Hilti’s Tools On Demand program meant that customers would not need to make large upfront investments, and would also be able to access the latest tools.

3. Combining strategies from multiple different industries.

In many cases, new strategies can also be created by grafting additional features drawn from other strategies onto the existing strategy. A good example is Spotify. Launched in 2008, it has grown to number over 500 million users in 2023, outperforming Apple Music by a factor of five. In addition to providing on-demand music, the Swedish streaming company enables users to connect with other users and artists. They can view the music their friends are listening to. They can share playlists and follow artists. In other words, Spotify has simply combined conventional music streaming and social networking in a single service.

In other instances, entrepreneurs select features from two or more existing strategies, while dropping other features, to create something new. Take the Huffington Post, launched in 2005. As its founder Arianna Huffington wrote at the time: “The Post is a new Internet publishing venture that will combine a breaking news section with an innovative group blog where some of the country’s most creative minds will weigh in on topics great and small, political and cultural, important or just plain entertaining.”

Thus, the Huffington Post combined journalism and blogging in a single media enterprise. It kept many key features of newspapers (e.g., professional journalists, original reporting, rigorous fact-checking procedures). But it also dropped some features traditionally associated with newspapers (e.g., publishing a print version) and replaced them with some of the features of blogs (notably continuous updating). The Post combined the best features of both worlds.

4. Strategies created from scratch.

The three types of strategy described so far essentially import or combine strategic features that already exist. The fourth and final category consists of novel strategies developed from first principles. As Elon Musk said, “boil things down to their fundamental truths and reason up from there as opposed to reasoning by analogy.”

This involves a three-step process: (1) challenging conventional thinking, (2) breaking problems into their fundamental principles (i.e., their most basic elements or truths) and (3) creating new solutions from scratch. Musk famously used this process to come up with Space X’s affordable and reusable rockets. His original plan was to buy second hand rockets in Russia, but they were too expensive. Using first principles thinking, he wondered why rockets are so expensive (step 1). After breaking them down into their components, he noticed that the cost of materials was only two percent of the total price (step 2). Therefore, he decided to buy materials (such as aluminum alloys, titanium and carbon fiber) on the commodity market and build his own rockets (step 3).

First principles thinking does not only apply to products. Airbnb disrupted the hospitality industry by enabling individuals to rent their homes to other individuals. The idea that hosts would agree to rent their homes to strangers and that guests would be willing to stay in the home of strangers was game-changing. It was initially met with skepticism.

But the founders of Airbnb did not use analogical reasoning to craft their strategy. In the late 2000s, conventional thinking in the hospitality industry was that accommodation was synonymous with hotels (step 1). Airbnb’s founders challenged this assumption and identified two fundamental truths. First, travelers need a place to stay. Second, some people have spare rooms or properties (step 2). Building on these two principles, they created a platform that disrupted the hotel industry by connecting travelers who look for a more authentic (and often less expensive) experience than hotels with hosts who are willing to rent their spare rooms or properties (step 3). Ironically, Airbnb’s strategy is now used as an analogy by executives and entrepreneurs in many different industries (e.g., the Airbnb of fashion).

• • •

The demands of the various categories differ. Adapting a familiar strategy only requires knowledge of a single industry. To successfully import or combine strategies requires familiarity with contexts other than one’s own, and the larger the number of industries with which you are familiar, the more you are likely to identify strategies that can be used as sources of inspiration. But the kind of creativity needed for the fourth category requires on top of that the capability to deeply reflect on what you know.

Harvard Business Review, 2024.

Jérôme Barthélemy is Executive Vice-President, Dean for Post Experience Programs, Corporate Programs and Relations and Professor of Strategy and Management at ESSEC Business School. He is the author of Myths of Strategy (Kogan Page, 2023)

AFTER READING ACTIVITIES:

I. Answer the following questions:

1. What categories of business strategies does the author focus on?

2. Which of the above-mentioned business strategy category is the best one in your opinion? Give your arguments.

3. What are the benefits of borrowing experience and practices from other industries in the course of strategy development?

4. What does it take to create a strategy from scratch?

5. What does it take to craft a good viable strategy?

II. Comment on the underlined sentences.

III. Write a summary of the text.

IV. Do further research on the topic and report your findings back to class.

LANGUAGE STUDY

Ex. 1. Study the following words and expressions as well the Russian equivalents to them. Explain the meaning of the following words and expressions in English. In class make up sentences with the above words and expressions.

1. crafting the strategy — разработка стратегии

2. in-depth analysis — глубокий, тщательный, всесторонний анализ

3. exploit an opportunity — использовать возможность

4. turnaround — выход из кризиса, положительное изменение

5. commoditized — коммодитизированный, ставший массовым товаром

6. leasing — лизинг

7. upfront investments — первоначальные инвестиции

8. novel strategies — новая стратегия

9. from scratch — с нуля

10. reflect on — обдумать

Ex. 2. Translate the sentences into Russian paying attention to the underlined parts.

1. Strategic management is defined as the process of evaluation, planning, and implementation designed to maintain or improve competitive advantage.

2. The