Unit 1 (1)
It must be admitted that e-mail is hard to beat as a transmitter of documents and data. It forces the sender to carefully think through their arguments and express themselves logically. It allows you to reply swiftly to a host of different questions when time is short. You don’t have to worry about journey times or travel costs, unreliable postage or engaged phones or voice mail.
E-mail is a marvellously economical tool for keeping in touch with far-flung commercial contacts; you can send them a note at your leisure, 24 hours a day. It is also a terrific method of discreetly and directly pitching to someone powerful. It certainly beats trying to get a meeting or even reach them on the phone.
Unit 1 (2)
Email might just be responsible for the productivity increases that economists tell us are the key to rising prosperity. But it could also be sending us all mad.
The truth is that business is generally best done face to face, and if that is impossible, then speaking via the phone. But too many of us now hide behind silent, typed communications. The trouble is that the recipient of an e-mail does not hear a tone of voice or see a facial expression; nor can the sender modify their message halfway through, sensing that it is causing offence. When you read an e-mail, you cannot tell the mood of the e-mailer.
A permanent written form is deadly if you are feeling impetuous and emotional. Too often I have made the mistake of sending an irritable response, which will have festered and angered the other end much more than a difficult telephone exchange. Spoken words fade, but e-mail is forever.
Unit 2 (1)
This [luxurious] image is especially important in new markets, such as China and India, he says. In common with other luxury-goods makers, he is intent on capturing consumers in those markets who aspire to the same sense of the Italian lifestyle as do customers in more mature markets. ‘A luxury-goods company has to have control of its image,’ he says. ‘For Tod’s, the thing is to communicate this tradition, the generations of work that have gone into our products. For us, it’s an absolute priority.’
To achieve it, one must put quality before quantity, and one must maintain the group’s traditions even as it globalises, which it has been doing fairly relentlessly in the past decade.
The challenge is to marry tradition with modernity in a way that not all Italian luxury-goods and fashion producers have managed. Tod’s has done it, Mr Della Valle says, by maintaining one key vision: ‘We’re a luxury-goods company, not a fashion company.’
Unit 2 (2)
Mr. Della Valle says that the goal in the next five years is ‘to complete the globalisation’ of Tod’s, for which he has been laying the groundwork. ‘I’d like Tod’s to be much bigger than it is now, without diluting the brand,’ he says.
He expects China and India to account for as much as 25 per cent of revenues by then, because the growth potential is much higher than in more traditional markets. ‘There is a much bigger appetite for luxury goods in those markets than in mature markets, and day by day more people are coming into this market.’
But as for China as a competing producer, Mr. Della Valle is sceptical about its ability to produce luxury goods. ‘It lacks the structure of small companies, the tradition, the concept of excellence’ that Italian luxury-goods producers have inherited and which they must maintain as a competitive advantage, he says. “Made in Italy” doesn’t necessarily mean expensive goods,’ he says. ‘It means excellent goods.’
Unit 3 (1)
1Now, like so many things in China, the old notion of guanxi is starting to make room for the new. Businesspeople – local and foreign – are tapping into emerging networks that revolve around shared work experiences or taking business classes together. Networking that once happened in private rooms at smart restaurants now goes on in plain view – at wine tastings for the nouveau riche, say, or at Davos-style get-togethers such as the annual China Entrepreneurs Forum held annually at China’s Yabuli ski resort. By tapping into these informal groups, Western companies can theoretically improve their understanding of the marketplace, hire the best talent, and find potential business partners.
2Guanxi goes back thousands of years and is based on traditional values of loyalty, accountability, and obligation-–the notion that if somebody does you a favor, you will be expected to repay it one day. One of Asia’s most successful businessmen, Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing, has used his guanxi particularly astutely over the years, in the process winning valuable licenses and permission to build huge real-estate developments. Playing the guanxi game is still imperative, especially for foreign investors.
Unit 3 (2)
Multinational companies, of course, provide rich opportunities for networking, too. Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide holds an annual party for former employees, many of whom now work for the company’s clients, including Lenovo, Johnson & Johnson, and solar-panel maker Suntek. McKinsey has plenty of alumni who have moved into senior posts at major companies and start-ups. “Obviously, they became a valuable network for us,” says Andrew Grant, who runs the firm’s China practice in Shanghai.
Unit 4 (1)
[Carlos] Slim puts his success down to his admiration for his father Julián – who emigrated from the Lebanon aged 14 and made his fortune investing in property in the 1910-17 Mexican revolution – and to American oil billionaire Jean Paul Getty. Slim learned of Getty’s business acumen as a young boy and has gone on to mirror his ability to make money.
Aged 11, he invested in government saving bonds, keeping a detailed ledger to track all of his purchases. By 15, he had bought a very small shareholding in Banco Nacional de México – then the largest bank in Mexico, and one to which he has recently been linked with buying, as the current owner Citigroup looks to divest some of its assets.
While studying civil engineering at university in Mexico City, he realised the way to make money was from investing in companies, and so set up on his own as a stockbroker on graduation, working 14-hour days.
Unit 4 (2)
Eight years later, in 1990, came the second major turning point in Slim’s career when Mexico decided to privatise its national telecoms company. Slim went head to head with America’s Southwestern Bell, France Telecom and as many as 35 other domestic investors, but managed to seize control of Telmex.
Some 90 per cent of the telephone lines in Mexico are today operated by Telmex. But it is the low-cost mobile phone network América Móvil, which he also controls, which has grown to be the most substantial part of his empire, opening up other parts of Latin America to mobile telephony. It now operates in 11 countries, including Brazil, Ecuador and Guatemala.
Many commentators believe that his recent buying spree is part of a desire to replicate what he did in Mexico in the 1980s on a world stage, taking advantage of the global recession by investing in distressed assets at knock-down prices while he can.
Unit 5 (1)
There is a culture of respect and recognition, and there is training specifically on teamwork, a quality prized by the company. Marriott even uses psychometric testing to assess how well managers align to its nine core organisational competencies. Staff say that senior managers truly live the values of the organisation (71%), help them fulfil their potential and motivate them to give their best every day (71% and 70%, both top scores). They say the managers are excellent role models and regularly show appreciation, winning positive scores of 69% and 75% respectively, results bettered in both cases by only one other firm.
The company, where the average length of service for general managers is 17 years, likes to promote from within. Its performance review process creates a development plan for every member of staff and identifies their training needs. On-the-job training is a key feature of development, and there are NVQ programmes [National Vocational Qualification] for accredited qualifications, with staff saying this training is of great benefit to them (72%).
Unit 6 (1)
Insurance companies that cover such large risks need a secondary market where they can place them. Re-insurers assume this function. Sharing the load among several carriers helps to spread the risks. The diversification effects achieved by spreading risks across different regions and classes of business allows re-insurers to balance their portfolios and realise a level of capital efficiency that enables them to cover their clients’ risks – and ultimately those of the insured – at a reasonable price.
Extreme losses in the past show just how important the re-insurer’s role is. One of the biggest loss events in the history of insurance was on September 11, 2001. The attack on the World Trade Center in New York was a prime example of the complexity of today’s risks, with an accumulation of losses across a range of insurance classes such as fire, business interruption, liability, life and health, and compounded by significant capital market losses.
Unit 9
First, she looked into 'angel' networking clubs, which provide entrepreneurs with access to large numbers of wealthy individuals interested in investing in early-stage ventures. However, she turned down a number of these for reasons of cost: they were charging £1,500 ($2,488) just to submit a business plan.
Eventually, she settled on London Business Angels, through which she could pitch to roughly 100 'angels'.
She also hedged her bets by securing a place on gateway2investment (g2i), a four-day programme to help ambitious entrepreneurs hone their pitching techniques, delivered by financial advisers Grant Thornton and backed by the London Development Agency.
Through LBA, Saha disco