Scarica Inglese PERFEZIONAMENTO e più Sintesi del corso in PDF di Lingua Inglese solo su Docsity! INGLESE PERFEZIONAMENTO 2012 8 - The Dell Theory of Conflict Prevention. Two countries won’t fight a war against each other as long as they are both part of the same global supply chain. Glenn Neland, vice president for procurement at Dell, said that if a major supply chain member in Asia decide to start a fight with its neighbor will distrupt the suplly chain, because following the evolution of supply chain you will se the prosperity and stability, like Singapore, Japan and Korea; they feel part of something bigger than their own business. 9 – Logistics. Reading 1: Manufacturing companies can produce according to pull or push strategies. With the pull straregy, when picies are removed from stock, replacements are automatically ordered from suppliers; an important strategy is Just In Time, developed by Toyota in the 1950s, replacing picies only when is useful. Also known as important pull strategies are lean production and stockless production. On the countrary, the push strategy is when production is based on estimates of future demand, planning the production lead time. Reading2: ? 10 – Quality. The Total Quality Management (TQM), is a simple principle: companies have to do thing right, the first time and everytime, they have to provide costumers with goods and services that satisfy their needs. Goods should have no defects and services should be perfect. TQM includes also marketing, sales, purchasing, design and the other business activities. The organization must make use of the knowledge and ecperience of its entire staff to identify and correct faulty systems and processes. Doing things right, the costs will be reduced. 11 – Products. A product is anything that can be offered to a market that satisfy a need. Most Manufacturers divide their products into product lines, that are groups of closely related products; costumers’ needs and markets are constantly evolving, and different products are generally at different stages of their life cycles. Products are branded, a brand is a name or a symbol, that distinguishes products and services from competitors; brand help to create a relationship of trust with customers. Each year ‘INTERBRAND’ publishes an annual list the best global brands, usually the best one is Coca – Cola. 12 – Marketing. [Product life cycle: Introduction; Growth; Maturity; Decline]. In the past, the organizations focused their energies on changing customers’ minds to fit the product. Today companies change their product to fit customers’ requests, so adapting their goods. Today marketing is not a function, but a way of doing business, US companies typically make two kinds of mistake: some get caught up in the excitement of making new creations, others become absorbed in the competition of selling things. Both approaches could prove fatal to a business. The real goal of marketing is to own the market, not just to make or sell products. 13 – Advertising. Advertising informs consumers about the existence and benefits of products and services, and persuade them to buy them. Most companies use advertising agencies to produce their advertising for them: so they give to agency a statement of the objectives of the advertising campaign (brief), and agency publishes on newspapers, magazines, TV, Radio, mails, cinema, etc… It’s always difficult to know jow much to spend on advertising, usually, a company spend as much as it’s competitive. The best way of advertising has always been word – of – mouth advertising, for example a person that tells her friends about a new product. 14 – Banking. When American house prices began to fall in 2007, many ‘subprime’ borrowers, defined as those with poor credit ratings and so a high risk of default, stopped paying their mortgages, as their debt was greater than the value of their house. MBS and CDO began a process called securitization: financial assets like morgages which produce a cash flow are pooled and converted into securities that are then sold to investors, so banks and the other financials institutions had the security of payments on the underlying mortgages, but many subrprime borrowers stopped paying and many banks lost billions of dollars on their MBSs, some went bankrupt. 15 – Venture Capital. If you are starting a business, you have to get capital from investiors, giving them a business plan. A good business plan has to contains ten standard elements: 1. Executive summary: a one-page summary of what the business plan is about. 2. Financial analysis: gives details of the business’s performance, the minimum level of sales required and make projections for the future revenue. 3. Implementation plan: describes sales and marketing and operational strategies. 4. Customer profile: gives informations about customers like interests, lifestyile etc… 5. Competition: specifies the existing competitors to your product, reviews their strenghts and weaknesses. 6. Competitive advantage: describes sustainable competitive advantage the new business has over its competitors. 7. Market opportunity: describes what the companyto do, the target market, its needs. 8. Product or service: describes its features and benefits for the customers, comparing to other products of competitors. 9. Management team: gives information about founders, directors, advisors etc… 10.Appendix: curricula vitae of resumes of the managers, and any other necessary documents. 16 – Bonds. Companies finance their activities by way of internally generated cash flows. If they need to raise more money they can borrow money, usually by issuing bonds. Companies generally use an investment bank to issue their bonds and to find buyers. Bondholders get back their original investment on a fixed maturity date and receive their interest payments. Bonds are generally safer than stocks or shares, but in the medium or long time, shares pay a higher return than bonds. For companies, the advantage of debt financing over equity is that bond interest is tax deductible. If tax revenue is insufficient, governments also issue bonds to raise money. But when the crisis occurred in 2008, Keynesiasism suddenly came back. Governments poured huge amounts of money into the economy and Monetarists continued to argue that this will lead to massive inflation in the future. 24 – corporate social responsibiliy. "Profits and social responsability" The function of a business is to make profits. Milton Friedman said that any corporate action inspired by social responsability is "unbusinesslike". For Friedman only people can have responsabilities and not corporations. In a free enterprise a corporate executive is an employee of the owners of the business. He has direct responsability to his employers. To say that corporate executive has a social responsability is to say that he has to act in some way that is not in the interest of his employers. Friedman doesn't seem to consider the possibility that stockholders might prefer lower dividends but live in a society with less pollution or less unemploymet and fewer social problems. According to this approach, business managers have responsabilities to all the groups of people that have a link to the company. This will include employees, suppliers, customers and stockolders.. Proponents of the stakeholder approach believed that all these groups should be represented on a company's board of directors. 25 – Efficiency and employment. Sono da studiare gli esercizi che ci sono sul libro. 26 – Exchange rates. An exchange rates is the price at which one currency can be exchanged for another (how many euros are needed to buy a pound). After World War II, the levels of most major currencies were fixed against the US dollar, and the dollar was pegged against gold. This fixed exchange rates could only be adjusted with the ageement of the International Monetary Fund. This system of gold convertibility ended in 1971. In most western countries exchange rates are determined by supply and demand. If there are more buyers of a currency than sellers, its price will rise. In theory, exchange rates should give purchasing power parity (PPP). In other words, the cost of a selection of goods and services would be the same in different countries. So if the price level in a country increase because of inflation, its currency should depreciate. This doesn't happen because rates are influenced by currency speculation. Governments and central banks sometimes try to change the value of their currency. They intervene in exchange markets, using their foreign currency reserves to buy their own currency to rise its value. But speculators have much more money than a government has in its reserves. 27 – International trade. In the international trade can be used two opposite policies: free trade, that means imports and exports of goods and services without any government restrictions and Protectionism, that means restricting imports thank to trade barriers such us tariffs and quotas. Trade barriers are government policies of regulation that restrict international trade. A tariff is a tax charged on imports while a quota is a maximum quantity of goods that can be imported into a country. Countries can have to different abilities: Absolute advantage means a country's ability to produce goods at a lower cost than any other country; or Comparative advantage that means a country's ability to produce particular goods more efficiently than some other countries. At the end, there are two different types of industry: an infant industry is one that is in a early stage of deelopment and which cannot survie competition from foreign companies; a strategic industry is one that is important to a country's economy. 28 – Economics and ecology. The Stern Review asserts that most the consequences of global warming will not appear before the year 2100. So, future generations will bear most of the costs of global warming and they will have to be ready to pay and reduce this costs. So costs and benefits of the future should be discounted at a rate equal to the rate of return of capital in that period. It is hard to predict future return of capital, so the Stern Review decide to evaluate the welfare effect of global warming for each future generation. The welfare approach to discounting is based on the assumption that future generations will be richer than current generations. By investing in technologies to reduce the impact of climate change in the distant future, we redistribute wealth from the poor current generations to the wealthy future ones.