Growing a business. Развитие бизнеса. The Great Game of Business. Money, страница 10

5. Is it that easy to work with numbers and understand them?

6. What problems did Ben & Jerry face?

7. What kind of information should an owner of a business get? (M. Reich)

8. When did Cocolat begin to become a real business?

9. Why is it necessary to do accounting (Ben & Jerry)?

10. What is the truest expression of a company’s position?

11. Why did Y. Chouinard have to start learning about finance, accounting and a lot of that stuff?

12. Why is it so important for the employees to get access to the total information? (J. Stack)

13. What is there at their disposal to be aware of all the data?

14. What do people have to take into consideration when looking at the screen of their computer terminal?

15. What characterizes Springfield Remanufacturing?

16. What was its track record when it was bought from the parent company?

17. What for do employees need the knowledge of numbers?

18. SRC workers know exactly the profit and loss of every piece they perform, don’t they?

19. What is the great game of business at SRC comprised of?

20. What is an income statement, and what does it tell?

21. What does a balance sheet show?

22. What is the third paper necessary for financial reporting?

23. In what way do financial statements help to run a business successfully?

24. How does SRC work with their numbers?

25. What’s the use of feedback between accounting department and the employees?

26. What was the result of “playing a game” with numbers?

27. Running and operating a business does not mean every owner needs a degree in accounting, does it?

28. When is it necessary to introduce a special accounting department, in the opinion of Y. Chouinard, A. Medrich?

29. What problems does a growing business encounter (Esprit)?

30. Explain the words of S.Tompkins: “…. Perhaps the most difficult time for us was moving away from the “Mom and Pop” business…

31. What kind of crisis did SRC face in its development? How did it cope with it?

32. When do numbers become the most powerful tool for a company to survive and grow?

b) Translate into Russian.

1....we had people employed in the business who weren’t doing production, for the first time, weren’t either doing production or selling over the counter. There began to be more of an accounting function.

2. When a business is growing quickly, the only way to get a handle on it is through accounting, budgeting, and financial analysis.

3. People begin to realize that you cannot beat this system (accounting system), with the exception of performance, that you have to perform to beat it.

4. We have arrived at a plateau in the US company to realize that we are no longer a small business, but we are a medium sized business, and we have to attend to focusing on a different form of business controls to see that everybody is owing down the same stream and that we are not a whole bunch of free-wheeling, free booting departments without a kind of central control.

5. On January we were notified that General Motors was going to shorten up their inventories, so we met with a severe cancellation, 50 000 man-hours were cut out of the schedule and really became the first bump in the road that we had had since we started our business.

6. They tried to take a look at those expenses that were not people related. … We tied up some loose cash and some overheads that were not people related.

IV Speaking

Characterize the SRC’s experience of playing the great game of business by beating the numbers, improving revenues, cutting costs and so making the company profitable.

V Writing

Express your opinion on the following (300 – 500 words):

“… Numbers, by themselves, are an abstraction. But numbers in the hands of motivated workers who are trusted and well informed may be the most powerful tool a company has in its quest to survive and grow” (P. Hawken)