Учебно-методическое пособие для студентов минск 2010 ббк утверждено на заседании

Reading 2

1. Discuss these questions.

1. What does quality mean for you?

2. What do you think quality means for business people?

2. Now read the article. Say what quality meant in the past. What does quality mean for business people nowadays?

New-Style Quality

The aim should be to provide a product consistently

and make it the best you can.

The term ‘quality’ is one of the most misused in the business world. What exactly does it mean? Our grandparents would have been in no doubt. Quality meant excellence: a thing was the best of its kind, and that was that. A Stradivarius violin had quality, a tinker’s fiddle did not. In business, however, the word has acquired a very different meaning. As defined by the American statistician Edward Deming some 50 years ago, quality means consistency, a lack of defects.

Around 1970, it is said, a group of investment analysts visited a world-famous UK engineering company. They asked the questions of their trade: about profit margins, stock controls and balance sheets. The company’s executives seemed honestly puzzled. They did not see the point of all this, they said. Their products were the finest in the world. Why all these detailed questions about numbers?

Rolls Royce, the company in question, duly went bust in 1973. The trouble with old-style quality, it seemed, was that it encouraged supply-driven management. The engineers would make the product to the highest possible standard and price it accordingly. If the public was so uncultured that they turned it down, so much the worse for the public. And so old-style quality got a bad name in business circles. It was all very well for artists to produce masterpieces. The job of companies was to please the market.

Further damage to old-style quality was done by the rise of Japan. When Japanese cars, toys and television sets first reached the market in the US and UK, local manufacturers considered them cheap trash. In the beginning, they were. But under the teaching of Edward Deming, the Japanese were learning about the second definition of quality. Western customers then began to realise that while Japanese cars might be tin cans, they did not keep breaking down, as did British and American cars.

In time of course, Japanese cars stopped being tin cans, and became stylish and comfortable vehicles instead. That is, they achieved old-style quality as well. As western manufacturers discovered to their cost, that was in some respects the easy bit. New-style quality was harder.

Quality has a third meaning: that of value for money. To qualify for that meaning, a product must be of certain standard; and it should convey a sense, not of outright cheapness, but of being sold at a fair price.

The US fast foods group McDonald’s, for instance, talks of its ‘high quality food’. But at 99c or 99p, its hamburgers are as close to absolute cheapness as any person in the developed world could desire. They are also highly consistent. Eat a McDonald’s anywhere around the world and the results will be roughly similar. But as anyone who has eaten a really good American hamburger knows, a McDonald’s is also a long way from quality in its original sense.

From the Financial Times

3. Here is given the summary of the article you have just read. It contains five actual mistakes. Find and correct them.

According to the article, quality used to mean that a product was well-made and high-priced. Nowadays, quality has a different meaning for business people. It means a product is reliable and does not have things wrong with it. In 1980, a group of analysts visited Rolls Royce. They asked many questions about finance, but few about quality. It is not surprising that Rolls Royce went bankrupt; they sold their cars too cheaply in their markets.

The old-style idea of quality became popular with business people because it emphasised the importance of good production methods. The Japanese learned a lot from Edward Deming. Their products sell well in western markets because they are low-priced. The US company, McDonald’s, sells products which are cheap and excellent value for money. According to the writer of the article, McDonald’s hamburgers are the best in the world.

4. Complete the definition below.

Nowadays, high quality products have three essential features:

1. ……………………………………………………………..

2. ……………………………………………………………..

3. ……………………………………………………………..

5. Discuss these questions.

1. Why were the Rolls Royce executives ‘puzzled’ when the analysts asked their questions?

2. According to the writer, what mistake caused Rolls Royce to go bankrupt?

3. What advantage did Japanese cars have compared with British and American cars?

Translation

a) Translate the following passage into Russian paying attention to business vocabulary:

The theme of total quality management is simple: ‘The burden of quality proof rests … with the makers of the part.’ In other words, workers, not managers, are responsible for achieving standards of quality. This is a revolution in management thinking, because quality control departments and formal control systems no longer have primary control responsibility. Companies that really want to improve quality are urged to stop inspecting every part and to get rid of their quality control departments. These companies are then told to train the workers and trust them to take care of quality.

This approach can give traditional executives several sleepless nights as their traditional means of control vanish. Total quality control means a shift from a bureaucratic to a clan method of control. Total quality uses clan methods to gain employees’ commitment.

b) Translate the following passage into English using your active vocabulary:

Менеджер-собственник небольшой организации обычно контролирует трудовой процесс посредством личных наблюдений, оперативно принимая решения о корректировке курса. По мере роста организации – процесс контроля усложняется.

Менеджмент должен оказывать работникам помощь в осуществлении контроля над процессом труда. Качество контроля зависит от руководителя.

Контроль есть власть. Системы контроля неизбежно вносят коррективы в распределение власти между различными группами внутри организации.

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