Utopia. Globalization generates risks for business. Team building. Delighting customers, страница 2

  This article is about Japanese venturers who hope to be the business. According to the text of the article these venturers hope to develop the small business centre of Japan’s economy. There are the main ingredients needed to foster venture businesses – risk money, a structural framework and an entrepreneur-friendly culture. The reason why there is a business chance for these venturers is “social structure is changing as a result of the Internet”, says Hiroshi Mikitani, 34-year-old founder of Rakuten Ichiba, Japan’s most popular Internet shopping mall. Masao Horiba, founder and chairman of Horiba, a leading manufacturer of measuring instruments says that “Japan’s venture capital sector is like a brand new race track”. The money flows in that business and it is really useful to venture in that sector of Japanese economy.

Text at p. 79, article B

   This article is about the development of Italian economy and its small business especially and how Italians start their business. Few of them start it with bank support and government’s guarantee schemes. There is the Youth Entrepreneurship Agency in Italy. It helps venturers to start their business and give them some project of starting their business. In southern Italy, more poorer area than other ones the problems of financing businesses are able to get over only with the help of voluntarily repayable from future profits. There is a lot of experience of starting businesses in Italy because businesses learn from past mistakes and the government help each new venturer to start his business.

Text at p. 86, Delighting customers

This article from Financial Times is about delighting customers in the increasingly competitive service sector. The delighted customer is the aim of companies nowadays. Here are some problems with it. According to the text of an article “the more customers are promised, the greater the risk of disappointment”. That’s why delays in answering calls, being cut off in mid-conversation or left waithing for long periods are taken place. In the text there are some examples of how difficult delighting of customers is for British Airways staff. It’s difficult to delight customer over delays caused by weather, unclaimed luggage and technical problems. It’s difficult to answer calls having a volume of them. According to this article, there are some ways of inducing customer delight: under-promising and over delivering (saying that a repair will be carried out within five hours, but getting it done within two), replacing a faulty product immediately, throwing in a gift voucher as an unexpected thank you to regular customers, and always returning calls, even when they are complaints.

Text at p. 94, Handling a disaster

This article is about handling a disaster and its main idea is on epigraph of it which is saying about “moments that build or destroy reputations”. The text from Financial Times tells us about a disaster with Swissair’s flight 111, which has plunged into the sea off Nova Scotia. There were many victims of this tragedy. They were the family members of dead passengers. The reputation of Swissair Company walked on the razor’s edge after few days after the tragedy. The family members’ calls went unanswered; the flow of information was inadequate etc. New York’s Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and TWA portrayed Swissair as the company that could do nothing right. And then $20000 were given for each family by Swissair to cover immediate expenses. Mr Giuliani praised the airline, and favourable headlines flowed. And so this article is about how it is difficult to manage with tremendous problems of the business in different crisis situations.

Text at p. 102, article A

The title of the article from the Guardian is “Who would you rather work for?” It tells us about some interesting statistic facts about women, who are more efficient and trustworthy then men, who are rather egocentric and more likely to steal credit for work done by others. Management Today magazine made a research and the conclusions was that women have become role models for managers. According to this text and the research, in Britain more than 61% of surveyed said men didn’t make better bosses than women. According to author’s opinion, most people, of either sex, would rather ask for a rise from a man.

Text at p. 103, article B

This text is a continuation of the last text about women who make better bosses. Although the beginning of the article from the Guardian is about male bosses are more preferably according to Royal Mail special delivery and business psychologist John Nicholson, the next part of it is about advantages of female bosses. Here are some different opinions on that subject. But the author is on women’ side saying that they are also considerably more common than they used to be and according to information group Experian the author also adds that women are no longer scarce in the boardroom – they occupy a third of the seats round the conference table. And according to Sonia Neil, a former secretary at Marks and Spencer, women either find it awkward to give you work or they try to assert themselves by giving you really menial tasks and men never do that.