Management at different levels

It is useful to think of management as being divided into three levels.

Supervisory managers are persons who directly oversee the efforts of those who actually perform the work. Most supervisory managers have titles like supervisor, fore­man, leadman, or office manager. Department heads at universities are typically considered to be supervisory' managers because they oversee the activities of profes­sors, who actually do the jobs of research and teaching. At Wendy's the person responsible for a particular store is a supervisory manager.

Middle managers are managers above the supervisory level but subordinate to the firm's most senior executives. These persons might be department managers, division directors, area managers, or plant managers. Wendy's has a number of levels of middle managers; for example, a district manager may have charge of ten restaurants.

Division or area managers may be responsible for a number of district managers.

Top managers are the organization's most senior executives. They usually include the chairman of the board and the president, along with vice-presidents who are responsible for major subdivisions of the oorganization. Top managers are responsible for providing the overall direction of the firm.

In summary, a manager is anyone, at any level of the organization, who directs the efforts of other people wherever a group of people work together to achieve results, a manager is usually present. A manager is the catalyst who makes things happen. The manager establishes goals, plans operations, organizes various resourc­es — personnel, materials, equipment, capital — leads and motivates people to perform, evaluates actual results against the goals, and develops people for the organization. To be effective, a manager must possess and continually develop several essential skills.

There are three categories of skills important to a manager's overall effectiveness.

The relative significance of each skill varies according to form of management, but the best managers recognize that they must develop and practise each of the managerial skills to be effective in accomplishing organizational and personal goals. They dare not concentrate their efforts on only one of these skills, even though it may be the most important one at their lev­el in the organization. It is the combination of skills that is vital to managerial success.

WHAT IS MARKETING?

Itis impossible to speak about marketingwithout understanding what "needs and wants" mean. So let's begin with the definition of needs and wants. A needoccurs when a person feels physiologically deprived of basic necessities like food, clothing, and shelter. A wantis a felt need that is shaped by a person's knowledge, culture, and personality. So if you feel hungry, you have developed a basic need and desire to eat something. Let's say you then want to eat an apple or a candy bar because, based on your past experience and personality, you know these will satisfy your hunger need. Effective marketing, in the form of creating an awareness of good product at convenient locations, can clearly shape a person's wants.

The American Marketing Association, representing marketing professionals in the United States and Canada, states that "marketing is the process of planning and executing the conception, pricing, promotion, and distribution of ideas, goods, and services to create exchanges that satisfy individual and organizational objectives."Many people incorrectly believe that marketing is the same thing as advertising or personal selling. This definition shows marketing to be a far broader activity. Further, this definition stresses the importance of beneficial exchanges that satisfy the objectives of both those who buy and those who sell ideas, goods, and services—whether they be individuals or organizations.

To serve both buyers and sellers, marketing seeks (1) to discover the needsand wantsofprospective customers and (2) to satisfy them. Theseprospectivecustomers include both individuals buying for themselves and their households and organizations that buy for their own use (such as manufacturers) or for resale (such as wholesalers and retailers.Thekey to achieving these two objectives is the idea of exchange, which is the trade of things of value between buyer and sellerso thateach is better off after the trade.

Formarketing to occur, at least four factors are required: (1) two or moreparties (individuals or organizations) with unsatisfied needs, (2) desire and ability ontheir part to be satisfied, (3) a way for the parties to communicate,and (4) something to exchange.

THE PARIS CLUB

Debt reschedulingis a form of debt reorganization in which debtors and creditorsnegotiate to defer payments of a principal and interest falling due in aspecified interval for repayment on a new schedule. Some countries find it almostimpossible to service their external debts. Recently, reschedulingexternal debts has become a widely accepted practice. Debtrescheduling occurs at the Paris club for government and private debt owed to official creditors and at the London Club for debt owed to commercialcreditors.

The Paris Club is an informal forum where countries experiencing difficultiesin paying their debts to governments and private institutions meet with their creditors to restructure these debts. The name might be quite misleading because in reality the Paris Club is not a club, nor is it a formal international organization. It has no offices, no secretariat, and above all, no charter. The Paris Club is an ad hoc institution with no legal status.

In part, the Paris Club's confidentiality policy has prevented it from becoming known to a wider public. Creditors refrain from releasing any information pertaining to their assessment of a given debtor's economic and financial situation or to the scope of debt relief granted. The onset of the international debt crisis in the early 1980s, however, brought public attention to the Paris Club and to its contribution to resolving the balance-of-payment disequilibria experienced by a growing number of developing countries and by some Central and Eastern European countries.

Over the years, the Paris Club has become a key instrument in implementing the international debt strategy. This strategy rests on two main pillars: internal reform and structural adjustment, supplemented by external financial assistance in the form of fresh money and debt relief. Despite the public's recent discovery of the Paris Club, this forum has existed since 1956, when Argentina agreed to meet in Paris with official creditors to find a mutually acceptable basis for rescheduling payments due on officially supported export credits. In the late 1950's and 1960's, Brazil, Chile, and Turkey sought similar Paris Club reschedulings. Since 1980, 54 countries have rescheduled the total of 186 debt agreements.

9. THE KINDS OF BANKS AND THEIR FUNCTIONS

In a country with a developed banking system there are different kinds of banks with widely varying activities: They are:

1.The Universal banks.Those banks (commonly found in Switzerland, West Germany and the Netherlands) are allowed to do almost anything financial, from lending other people's money to underwriting, advising on investments, stockbroking, etc. Some frown on universal banking in the belief that it creates too many conflicts of interest within one bank. Can a bank give advice on a share for which it is the underwriter and also broker and banker to the issuer? That question has not stopped foreigners from wanting a Swiss bank account and taking their Swiss banker's investment advice.

2.The ordinary deposit banks.These include the commercial or joint-stock banks, large and small, some private banks. All these have direct contact with the public which deposits money with them and draws cheques on them.

3.The savings banks.The chief function of these banks is explained by their name. In old times savings banks were banks which accepted only the deposits of small savers. They did no business with industry and provided no money-transmission service, had no cheque-drawing facilities. These distinctions between savings banks and other banks are now being eroded.

4.The merchant banks, or "acceptance houses".Merchant banks are British banks which concentrate on advising companies about raising new capital and about buying or selling other companies. They do a bit of lending too. Some of them also specialize in fund management. Merchant banking is the business carried out over the last two hundred years or so by a small number of London-based institutions. Merchant banks maintained excellent connections with leading British companies and frequently joined their boards. They played a leading role in developing the international investment management industry in London.

5. The consortium banks. A consortium bank is a bank owned by a group of other banks from a number of different countries, no one of which owns a majority share. Consortium banks were children of the Euromarket. Born in the 1970s they gave smaller banks a way into the Euromarket hand in hand with bigger bank partners. The advantage to the bigger banks lay in their easier access to the big domestic customers of the smaller banks. Some consortium banks continue to thrive by staying at the forefront of new financial techniques, acting as a type of merchant bank, some other were gobbled up by one or other of their shareholders.

Words:

underwriting n андеррайтинг, гарантирование размещения (ценных бумаг)

frown v не одобрять, относиться отрицательно

consortium bank консорциальный банк

majority share контрольный пакет акций

gobble (зд.) поглощать

PERFORMING AN AUDIT

Auditing is a process in which an independent accountant-auditor examines a firm's accounting records and financial statements and offers an opinion on their accuracy and reliability.

There are different types of audits, for example, financial statements audits, income tax audits, "value for money" audits, environmental audits, administrative audits, financial management audits, etc.

It should be stressed that auditors do not monitor, they offer an opinion, and the audit process and audit procedures are various and complicated. The auditor's opinion is gradually being built up from a mass of detailed work to the final judgment through the planning and testing stages. The auditor normally starts with a study of the business environment the audited company is working in and performs a preliminary analytical review.

Then he should direct his attention to the financial statements. For instance, the auditor needs to know if figures are complete and accurate and reflect what they should reflect, if income and expenses are recorded in the proper periods and if the legal position is reflected adequately.

The auditor should focus on any misstatement whether it is intentional or unintentional. The management is responsible for the reliability of financial information. If the management is not prepared to take the responsibility it may be hard to complete the audit. In such situations the auditor should seek his own evidence by means of independent audit procedures.

The natural finalization of the audit process is the auditor's report, reflecting the auditor's opinion on the financial statements. Unfortunately, audits do not always end up in an approval of the financial statements. Any deviation from the unqualified opinion should be explained in the auditor's report, including the uncertainty or the disagreement that caused the auditor to qualify his opinion. In order to protect the public interests and the profession's integrity an individual must be sufficiently educated and adequately trained before being certified to act as an auditor.

Words:

accounting records – документы учета

misstatement – искажение сведений

preliminary analytical review – предварительный анализ фин.хоз.деят-ти

Для заметок

Цуканова Лидия Дмитриевна

Английский язык.

Рабочая программа, методические указания, контрольные задания и тексты для чтения для студентов заочной формы обучения 2 курса института экономики, бизнеса и права.

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