Day reading Passage (Australian culture and culture shock)

11 
To outsource (v) 
- to get work done by making a contract with another company to do 
it, often in another country, rather than in your own company:
Example: The decision to outsource had been made for financial reasons.
12 
In-house (adj/adv) 
- Something that is done in-house is done within an organization 
or business by its employees rather than by other people.
Example: All our advertising material is designed in-house.
13 
Bottom-up (adj) 
- considering the smaller or less important parts or details of a plan, 
organization, first.
Example: a bottom-up approach to building a successful company.
14 
To abide by something (phrasal verb) 
- to accept or obey an agreement, decision, 
rule, etc.:
Example: Competitors must abide by the judges’ decision.
15 
To insist on doing sth (phr verb) 
(C1) - to keep doing something, even if it annoys 
other people, or people think it is not good for you.
Example: I don’t know why you insist on talking about it.
16 
To reign (v) 
(C2) - to be the main feeling or quality in a situation or person.
Example: The bomb attacks produced a panic which reigned over the city.
17 
To foster (v) 
- to encourage the development or growth of ideas or feelings.
Example: I’m trying to foster an interest in classical music in my children.

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Day 15
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 27-40, which are based on Reading
Passage 3 below.
What should companies do to survive?
A 
In the world of business, where today’s fashionable management theory soon 
becomes a stale cliche or a quaint archaism, it is essential to have a clear idea 
about the enduring rules of good management. The company that follows these 
is the company that is in the strongest position amid the uncertainties and violent 
upheavals of the world as we know it.
В 
Company is the sum of what its people understand and know how to do well. Value 
lies increasingly in creative ideas and knowledge. But ideas have value only if people 
share and develop them in ways that increase revenue; knowledge is useful only if 
people can find what they need to know. Getting intelligent people to share what is 
in their heads is vital, and takes more than mere money or clever software. Ideas 
must flow in every direction through a company — not merely from the top down. And 
knowledge is worth storing only if senior staff set careful rules to filter and structure 
it. What goes into a database determines the value of what comes out. So setting 
central rules and standards is key to good knowledge management.
С 
Good judgment is a key skill. Managers constantly blitzed with new information 
needed to build in the data that matters and set aside the rest. Big-bang decisions 
are generally best avoided - or implemented in small incremental moves that leave 
room for flexibility and for altering course, if circumstances change.
D 
Customers matter but some matter more than others. Acquiring new customers
often costs more than making extra sales to existing ones. So companies must build 
loyalty by providing reliability and good service. Given the welter product information 
reaching customers, memorable brands will grow more important. Companies need 
not only to widen their reach by finding new markets, but also to deepen existing 
relationships. They have more information than ever before about their customers, 
and must use this to offer their most profitable customers, special deals, and to 
make them feel part of an elite club. Some companies even seek to ‘fire’ unprofitable 
customers by charging them higher rates than others.
E 
Like its customers, some of a company’s people matter more than others, and not 
just at the top: managing talent is also about capturing innovative ideas from middle 
managers and those further down the line. At every level, managers must identify 
where most value lies. In some cases, a few stars will encapsulate much of a 
company’s value; in others, teams of employees will matter more. Some companies

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Reading Passage 3
will want to hire the talents of ‘free agents’ as and when they are required; others, to 
employ directly their best brains.
F 
Companies need to collaborate more, in alliances that allow them to outsource 
production or to spread risk or to enter new markets. Effective collaboration calls 
for trust and shared understanding, rather than the top-down, command-and- 
control approach of hierarchical structures. Successful collaboration also requires 
excellent communication, and incentives that reward sharing information and working 
for common goals. As costs of handling information in a company decline, now 
opportunities open for redefining corporate shape, and companies are becoming 
less hierarchical, with more ways to arrange and rearrange structure. Managers 
must think through from scratch which activities should be kept in-house and 
outsourced, and normally a company should keep those activities it does better than 
its competitors.
G 
Given the pace of change, bosses need more than ever to be able to communicate 
persuasively through many channels, with their staff and the outside world. They 
must also listen: the most valuable communications will frequently be bottom-up, 
and the people nearest to the customer are best placed to explain what they see and 
hear. Managers must listen to them.
H 
Ironically, Internet technologies, tools of freedom and decentralization, call for 
discipline and standard processes. Only by setting standards and insisting that 
everyone abide by them will companies reap their potential savings. Companies 
need to insist on common practices in areas such as purchasing and information 
technology in order to harvest real productivity gains. As a result, some aspects of 
centralization will increase: a key task of top managers is to provide structures and 
standards, and to insist that they are observed.
I 
Once standards have been set, openness and freedom should reign. Centralization 
of standards makes possible decentralization of decision making. In addition, internet 
technologies increase the need for a culture of openness, to foster the sharing 
of knowledge and effective collaboration. Increasingly, companies will allow their 
suppliers and customers ‘inside the machine,’ as it were, by giving them extraordinary 
access to their databases and inner workings in order to integrate their operations 
and to make collaboration effective.
J 
The key to success lies much less in technical know-how than in excellent leadership 
to push through and build upon organizational change. At some points in a 
company’s life, it will need a leader who can rally staff to push through the trauma 
of disruptive change. At other times, the right style will be the manager-as-coach, 
a selfless talent scout who specializes in assembling and motivating great teams. 
Always, the people at the top will set the tone in a firm. Their skills will determine 
whether it is a good company to work in and do business with.

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In boxes 27-34 on your answer sheet, write