Scarica inglese perfezionamento e più Appunti 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 neighbour will distrupt the supply chain, because following the evolution of supply chain you will see 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 strategy, 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. TOTAL QUALITY MANAGEMENT (TQM) is a management approach designed to improve the production quality of goods and services. Japanese adopted it to revive their ‘post-war industry. Following the success of the Japanese, many American companies began to use it. TQM provides customers with products and services that satisfy their needs. Goods should have no defects and services should be perfect. TOM includes also marketing, sales, purchasing, design and the other business activities. Company or organization should always do the right things and they should continuously improve quality, in all the business's activities. 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. Because customers' needs and markets are costantly involving, companies are always looking to the future, and re evaluating their product mix. 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. Customers have an image of the brand in their minds, e.g. Nike, Apple ete. Some companies include their name in all their products, e.g. Philips, Virgin, Yamaha. Other companies do individual branding and give each product its own name (Pampers Gillette, Duracell are producted by the same company). Every year is published a list of Best Global Brands ( for example in the early 2000s Coca- Cola won). Brand value comes from customer loyalty: they will continue to buy the products. 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 how much to spend on advertising, usually, a company spend as much as it°s competitive. People might choose to look at posters in the street or on a public transport or look at the ads in newspapers, but many other ads interrupt them when they're doing something else, like read a web page, listen to the radio or watch a TV programme. 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 mortgages 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. If interest rates rise they have to consume less. Similarly if people are worried of losing their jobs they start to saving money and consume less, which leads to a fall în demand, a fall in production and employment. Investment is closely liked to consumption. If supply exceds demand, prices should fall, and encourage people to start buying again. This is the internal theory of the business cycle. There are also external theories linked to scientific advances, natural disasters, elections or political shocks an so on.. "Keynesianism and monetarism" The major macroeconomic argument for the last 60 years has been whether governments can effectively intervene in the business cycle and move economies away from recessions more quickly then would otherwise happen. Classical economic theory argued that economies tended towards an equilibrium in which all resources were used. The great depression of the 1930s demonstrated that the market system doesn't lead to full employment. Keynes adfirmed that market forces could produce an equilibrium with high unemployment. Classical economic theory said that in the long run excess savings would cause interest rates to fall and investment to increase; Keynes answered that "in the long run, we are all dead". He recommended governmental intervention in the economy to counteract the business cycle. During a recession governments could increase their expenditur or decrease taxation, so as to boost economy and increase output, investment consumption an so on. In the 19505 monetarist economists began to say that Keynesian policy had negative effects in the long term. They insisted that money is neutral, so in the long run increasing money supply will only change the price level and have no effect on output or employment. Monetarism believed that since governments aren't able to foresee a coming recession more quickly than the companies, their fiscal measures usually only begin to take effect when the economy is already recovering. 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.