BEC剑桥商务英语高级指导.pdf

Unit 1 Managing in the Present Present Tenses Focus: time management and current problems facing a service company 1. Management themes Read the following text and then discuss the questions below. Time management has become one of the key issues of the second half of the twentieth century. Managers, grappling with work pressures and deadlines, have come to recognise that time is a precious commodity to be ‘saved’, ‘gained’, and not ‘wasted’ or ‘lost’. But if time is a commodity, how then can we best describe, measure and manage it? To describe and manage it, imagine a line that goes back to the beginnings of creation and continues into the mists of the future. And on that line are a number of significant marks-these separate the past from the present from the future. And within each time zone-past, present and future-we can differentiate periods of time from points of time. For example, the 1980s gave us a period of rapid economic growth; black Monday was a point of sudden financial catastrophe. How can this brief analysis help the international manager? Firstly, there is the link between past, present and future. In other words, historical performance should be a guide to the future, and the present ought to represent last year’s forecast. So change-that which normally differentiates any two periods on our continuum-can be seen as a gradual evolution rather than a dramatic revolution. Secondly, the use of a time-planning system, on which key points and periods are plotted, enables managers to organise their activities so that bottlenecks can be avoided and deadlines can be met. So stress, where