第三輯? TEST 4

PART ONE

Good morning. In today's class we'll be comparing two supermarket chains whose futures are looking very different at the moment. First of all, the Williams chain.

Sharon Tucker joined Williams two years ago as Sales Director, taking over as Chief Executive three months later. The company was struggling. Sales growth was fading away, and profits were falling. Its strategy of focusing on redesigning stores (重新設計分店) was doing nothing to boost sales. In short, Williams had lost its way.

After just one year under Tucker's leadership, it's regained its confidence, and with good reason. Sales have been rising for fifteen months, starting almost as soon as she walked in the door. They're up by five per cent in the last six months, excluding new space, with profits over the same period rising by ten per cent. And the company claims to have attracted a million new customers.

Tucker came from the American chain Hurst's, and her experience there persuaded her that everyday low pricing, the strategy pursued by that giant and by most of the British supermarket groups, wouldn't work for a small player like Williams. Its larger rivals could too easily undercut it. 削價競爭

Instead, she decided to use a high-low strategy, which is generally known as loss-leading. 虧本銷售定價策略 The technique's familiar: cut the price of twenty or so selected items each week. The radical part came in the implementation.

Instead of making it a national campaign, which would allow Williams's rivals to instantly follow its price cuts, the company's ‘best deals', as they're called, vary from town to town, and change every week. The company employs five thousand distributors in order that, every week, a third of all the people living in the catchment area（服務地區(qū)）of a Williams store receive flyers through their doors, detailing these special offers. The price cuts are dramatic, like forty per cent off breakfast cereals, the same off bars of soap, fifty per cent off soft drinks, and so on. Indeed, many items are sold at below the cost to Williams.

Shoppers seem to love it, as is evident from Williams's sales. But it's high risk: sales have to increase by enough to limit the impact on profits, and they have to be able to deliver the goods. That's harder than it sounds. Some of the products on offer fly out of the door, selling as much in a week as they normally would in a year. Organising adequate stock levels for that, on different products around the country, is a nightmare of logistics. What makes all this feasible, apart from very good planning, is that Williams's distribution system isn't centralized, unlike some of the other supermarket chains.

Williams has just passed the first anniversary of its promotional campaign, so it'll be more and more difficult to keep sales rising. But the company's working hard to keep the momentum going with a renewed focus on fresh produce（新鮮農(nóng)產(chǎn)品）, having been tempted（青睞） in recent years by clothing and electrical goods, which are both in highly competitive sectors. the company has also promised longer opening hours at their stores in order to increase convenience for their customers.

Now let's compare Williams's success with one of their suffering rivals…

PART TWO

1. I organize IT projects, and hire other companies or individuals to do the work. With one, the contractor（承包商，承包人） told me halfway through that it couldn't be done they way I'd planned it, and it would be overdue. I took a chance that he was wrong, but he wasn't, and it really inflated the cost of the project, because of course the contractor's staff had to be paid for longer. ??

When my boss found out, I only managed to keep my job by suggesting that I email him weekly progress reports on any future projects, and notify him of any potential or actual problems. It really helped me too, because I think if you make a mistake, you shouldn't just say, 'It won't happen again', you have to make sure it doesn't.

2. I worked for a publisher where you were allocated an art editor per issue from a studio team. I always got the useless one, because everyone else refused to work with him: he was so bad he should never have been given the job in the first place. In the end, I suddenly snapped（暴走了）, and instead of having a quiet word with my boss, as I should have done, I dashed off （匆忙完成）a furious memo about him to the head of his department.
Well, that put me in the wrong, everyone was very angry with me, and I came very close to resigning.
?It certainly taught me not to rush into things: what seems the obvious course of action in the heat of the moment（ 在盛怒之下）isn't necessarily the most effective one.

3. When I worked in import export, the best thing I ever did was getting myself transferred from one section to another. It happened because I'd calculated how much we should charge a customer for some goods we were going to import on a regular basis, and didn't allow for our agent's commission（沒有考慮代理的回扣）. When the invoices started coming in, I realized we were making a loss. I tried to increase the price to the customer without telling my boss, but, in the end, I had to admit what I'd done, and I think that's the only reason I didn't get the sack (沒被開除).?

It gave us quite serious cash flow problems for a few months. But it made me realize that I really wasn't interested in that side of the work.

4. I used to work in a catering company, and was promoted to Catering Manager, but at first I just kept on messing around with the rest of my staff. My duties included doing the rounds when everyone else had left. One evening, one of my staff put several thousand pounds' worth of frozen food in a fridge by mistake. I should have discovered this, but I didn't, and the next day the food was ruined.
When I told my boss, I treated it as a joke, and put the blame on the person who'd made the mistake. My boss made it clear that I was ultimately answerable for what my staff did, and if my attitude didn't change I'd be out of a job. Needless to say, it did change, and quickly.

5. I used to work in a PR agency, doing publicity for lots of celebrities, and we were always too busy to pool our knowledge（匯集信息）. Eventually, I instituted a working lunch once a week, to swap（交換） the latest information. I'd realized that we needed something like that when I was publicizing one of our clients, and gave a journalist from a national newspaper the phone number of the person I thought was the client's booking agent. 訂貨代理 /經(jīng)紀人

What I didn't know, but some of my colleagues did, was that the client had changed agents, so the wrong one then got hundreds of call. He was furious, so were our client and her new agent, and so was my boss. All I wanted was to hide away somewhere until it all blew over.（平息;煙消云散）

PART THREE

Man: So Jane, the changes are certainly quite wide-ranging, aren't they?
Woman: Yes, Oliver, the skills audit（技能審核）, targets, suggestion scheme, training arrangements… the list seems endless…
Man:I suppose different people will react differently – they won't all see the benefits of the changes….
Woman: Sure – and for some people, they'll feel their areas of responsibility are being taken over, become resentful, and the company must tread very carefully here… because it's the tide of high turnover that they company is trying to stem（遏制）with these measures. These days, it's often service that's the key to maintaining an edge… so what the company needs to avoid happening in the future is sales decreasing if clients stop feeling they're getting that treatment from happy, motivated staff here…
Man:Mm… I guess it was Human Resources that pushed for the changes, then?
Woman: Well, they were consulted. Actually, they're the kinds of ideas that you might have expected the team system might have generated – because they're quite wide-ranging, not just focused on one aspect.
Woman: So, I guess it's quite surprising, in a way, that it was the leadership group which authored them… what's good, I think, is the way they've spent quite an amount of time consulting with management at all levels, so they have a kind of hands-on（親身實踐的，實際操作的 ） feel.
Man:So what will affect us first?
Woman: Well, the skills audit, though its real effects won't be apparent for some time. I don't know, I think that was a wasted opportunity, really… It was so thorough, too thorough in fact… I mean, they asked absolutely everyone about absolutely everything because they were so obsessed with wanting to be accurate, but the result is they're just swamped with（使不堪承受; 使疲于應對; 使應接不暇）information… they didn't need to be that in-depth（徹底的;深入詳盡的）…

Man:Uh-huh… So is it really these divisional targets that will have the first impact?
Woman: Er, yeah, I suppose… but then again, there's some poor design involved there… Oh sure, they've carefully calculated how sales move throughout the year, but the point is that it's not only shifting actual products that counts – the targets should really be looking at data on customer satisfaction too, which is certainly a major concern in my section, where we're always looking for ways to keep that high enough to retain customers.
Man:So, are you unconvinced about the suggestions scheme too?
Woman: Er… I just think they should have gone further with it.
Woman: After all the publicity it's been given, you'd think they'd want to involve everyone… what you don't want is just the same ideas from the same people all the time… we've got all these short-term workers, they're in and out of organisations all the time… we should be trying to capture their insights and observations, especially since they won't personally stand to benefit from making suggestions.
Man:And do you think the performance reviews are similarly flawed in their approach?
Woman: Oh, I don't want to seem too negative! The only unfortunate thing there is not incorporating（將...包括在內(nèi)）what competitors are doing. We don't want to be saying one of our reps is underperforming at the moment, only to find out that so is everyone in the business at the moment. That could be very unfair, especially on the reps abroad, who are at the mercy of the supply situation too.
Man:And do you think that people have been missed out of the training programmes as well?
Woman: No, there I'm quite positive! They're going to be a real winner, I'm sure. A long time's been spent on trying to get our training right, and I think the final results are great. We've been far too focused on IT training, and it's much better now that it's broadening out to include more aspects for staff to select from, according to their needs.
Man:So would you see all the changes having a lasting impact?
Woman: Well, they must have some kind of future… after all, they're the kind of thing our competitors have been doing for some time. But, well, by the end of the year, I'm fairly sure they'll get scrutinized, thoroughly checked and probably revised before they become fixed as company policy in the long term.
Man：So it's a case of wait and see?（要拭目以待了）
Woman: Definitely. Now…

tread carefully, warily, etc.
小心謹慎地說；小心翼翼地做
to be very careful about what you do or say
The government will have to tread very carefully in handling this issue.
政府在處理這個問題時須慎之又慎。