Менеджеры и менеджмент (Executives and Management). Коломейцева Е.М - 8 стр.

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T a s k 5. Read, translate and discuss the following text.
Meet David Kwok, a 1987 graduate of the University of California at Los Angeles. With a major in cognitive sci-
ence, David works for a company called The Princeton Review that prepares students to take college and graduate
school admission tests. At the age of 31, David directs fifty to sixty instructors at Princeton Review’s Los Angeles of-
fice. "My academic training in artificial intelligence didn’t really prepare me for my biggest job challenge – understand-
ing and motivating people," says David. "For instance, nothing at UCLA really emphasized how to get people psyched
up. For me, people are the unknown part of the equation that determines how effective I am in my job. Other tasks, like
scheduling or customer relations, give me very few headaches. What I’ve learned is that when things go wrong, it’s
almost always a people problem. I’ve worked hard to make our teaching staff feel like a small family and to learn tech-
niques for getting them motivated. But it’s been on-the-job training for me. I didn’t learn any of this in school." David
Kwok has learned what most managers learn very quickly: A large part of the success in any management job is devel-
oping good inter-personal or people skills. Lawrence Weinbach, chief executive at the accounting firm of Arthur An-
dersen & Co., puts it this way: "Pure technical knowledge is only going to get you to a point. Beyond that, interpersonal
skills become critical." Although practicing managers have long understood the importance of interpersonal skills to
managerial effectiveness, business schools were slower to get the message. Until the late-1980s, business school curric-
ula focused almost singularly on the technical aspects of management, emphasizing courses in economics, accounting,
finance, and quantitative techniques. Course work in human behavior and people skills received minimal attention rela-
tive to the technical aspects of management. Over the past decade, however, business faculty have come to realize the
importance that an understanding of human behavior plays in determining a manager’s effectiveness, and required
courses on people skills have been widely added to the curriculum.
Recognition of the importance of developing managers’ interpersonal skills is closely tied to the need for organiza-
tions to get and keep high-performing employees. For instance, the chief executive of Chrysler Corporation, Robert
Eaton, sees his workforce as an asset that provides his company with a sustainable competitive advantage. "The only
way we can beat the competition is with people," say Eaton. "That’s the only thing anybody has. Your culture and how
you motivate and empower and educate your people is what makes the difference." The head of Starbucks, the rapidly
growing Seattle-based coffee retailer, concurs: "Our only sustainable competitive advantage is the quality of our work-
force. "A study of 191 top executives at six Fortune 500 companies sought an answer to the question: Why do managers
fail? The single biggest reason for failure, according to these executives, is poor interpersonal skills. The Center for
Creative Leadership in Greensboro, North Carolina, estimates that half of all managers and thirty percent of all senior
managers have some type of difficulty with people. Consistent with these findings are surveys that have sought to de-
termine what skills college recruiters consider most important for the job effectiveness of MBA graduates. These sur-
veys consistently identify interpersonal skills as most important. We have come to understand that technical skills are
necessary, but insufficient, for succeeding in management. In today’s increasingly competitive and demanding work-
place, managers can’t succeed on their technical skills alone. They also have to have good people skills. This book has
been written to help both managers and potential managers develop those people skills.
T a s k 6. Sum up the main points of the following text and make up a few questions on the basis of the
given information.
What Managers Do
Let’s begin by briefly defining the terms manager and the place where managers work –the organization. Then
let’s look at the manager’s job; specifically, what do managers do?
Managers get things done through other people. They make decisions, allocate resources, and direct the activities
of others to attain goals. Managers do their work in an organization. This is a consciously coordinated social unit,
composed of two or more people, who functions on a relatively continuous basis to achieve a common goal or set of
goals. On the basis of this definition, manufacturing and service firms are organizations and so are schools, hospitals,
churches, military units, retail stores, police departments, and local, state, and federal government agencies. The people
who oversee the activities of others and who are responsible for attaining goals in these organizations are managers (al-
though they’re sometimes called administrators, especially in not-for-profit organizations).
Managers – Individuals who achieve goals through other people.
Organization – a consciously coordinated social unit, composed of two or more people, that functions on a rela-
tively continuous basis to achieve a common goal or set of goals.
Management Functions
In the early part of this century, a French industrialist by the name of Henri Fayol wrote that all managers perform
five management functions: They plan, organize, command, coordinate, and control. Today, we have condensed those
down to four: planning, organizing, leading, and con-trolling. If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get
you there. Since organizations exist to achieve goals, someone has to define those goals and the means by which they
can be achieved. Management is that someone. The planning function encompasses defining an organization’s goals,
establishing an overall strategy for achieving those goals, and developing a comprehensive hierarchy of plans to inte-
grate and coordinate activities. Managers are also responsible for designing an organization’s structure. We call this
function organizing. It includes the determination of what tasks are to be done, who is to do them, how the tasks are to
be grouped, who reports to whom, and where decisions are to be made. Every organization contains people, and it is

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