Task 3. a) Fill in the gaps with the appropriate auxiliary or modal verb.

Before investing in a particular franchise system, carefully consider how much money you have to invest, your abilities, and your goals. The following checklist may help you make your decision.

1. How many hours … you willing to work?

2. What … your goals?

3.… you interested in pursuing a particular field?

4. How much money … you afford to lose?

5. … you need financing and, if so, where … you obtain it?

6. … you have a favorable credit rating?

7. … you have savings or additional income to live on while starting your franchise?

8. What skills … you have? … you have computer, bookkeeping, or other technical skills?

9. What specialized knowledge or talents … you bring to a business?

10. … you ever owned or managed a business?

11. … you purchase the franchise by yourself or with partners?

12. … you require a specific level of annual income?

13. … you interested in retail sales or performing a service?

14.… you be happy operating the business for the next 20 years?

15. … you want to operate the business yourself or hire a manager?

16. … franchise ownership be your primary source of income or will it supplement your current income?

17. … the franchise require technical experience or relevant education, such as auto repair, home and office decorating, or tax preparation?

18. … you like to own several outlets or only one?

19. How much money … you have to invest?

B) Rearrange the questions so that they correspond to the following headings.

Your Investment

Your Abilities

Your Goals

V. Business Style. Business Relationship.

Business Etiquette.

1. American and Japanese Styles

Japanese attitudes toward work seem to be critically different from American attitudes. Japanese people tend to be much better adjusted to the notion of work, any kind of work, as honourable. Nobody would look down on a man who retires at age fifty-five or sixty and then to keep earning money takes a more menial job than the one he left. I should mention that top-level executives usually have no mandatory retirement age, and many stay on into their seventies and even their eighties.

At Sony we have mandatory retirement from the presidency at sixty-five, but to utilize their experience and knowledge we keep former executives who have retired as consultants. We provide them with office space and staff, so that they can work apart from the day-to-day affairs of the company, at Ibuka Hall, a building located five minutes away from the headquarters building. From time to time, we ask them for advice and they attend conferences and other events as representatives of Sony. Many of those people who retire from managerial jobs find executive positions in smaller companies or subsidiary companies of Sony where their managerial experience and skill are needed and valued.

Workers generally are willing to learn new skills. Japan has never devised a system like the American, in which a person is trained to do one thing and then refuses to take a job doing anything else-and is even supported by government funds while he looks for a job that suits his specific tastes. Because of Japan's special situation, our people do not have that luxury. And our unemployment rate lately has not reached 3 percent.

One old style of management that is still being practiced by many companies in the United States and by some in Japan is based on the idea that the company that is successful is the one that can produce the conventional product most efficiently at cheaper cost. Efficiency, in this system, becomes a god. Ultimately, it means that machinery is everything, and the ideal factory is a perfectly automated one, perhaps one that is unmanned. This machinelike management is a management of dehumanization.

But technology has accelerated at an unparalleled pace in the past few decades and it has entailed digesting new knowledge, new information, and different technologies. Today, management must be able to establish new business ahead of its competitors, rather than pursue higher efficiency in manufacturing conventional products. In the U.S. and Europe today, old-fashioned low-level jobs are being protected while the new technologies are being neglected.

More important, an employee today is no longer a slave to machinery who is expected to repeat simple mechanical operations like Charlie Chaplin in the film Modern Times. He is no longer a beast of burden who works under the carrot-and stick rule and sells his labour. After all, manual labour can be taken over by machine or computer. Modern industry has to be brain-intensive and so does the employee. Neither machinery nor animals can carry out brain-intensive tasks. In the late sixties, when integrated circuits had to be assembled by hand, the deft fingers of Asian women were greatly in demand by U.S. companies. As the design of these devices became more and more complicated, along came more sophisticated machinery, such as laser trimmers, which required not deft fingers but agile minds and intelligence. And so this upgrading of the workers is something that every country will have to be concerned about, and the idea of preserving old-fashioned jobs in the modern era does not make sense. This means educating new employees and re-educating older employees for new challenges.

That is not all. At Sony we at times have scientists participate in sales for a while because we don't want our scientists to live in ivory towers. I have always felt they should know that we are in a very competitive business and should have some experience in the front lines of the business. Part of the training program for graduates who enter Sony as recruits fresh out of university includes a program where non-technical persons undergo a month of training at a factory and technical persons work as salespeople in a Sony shop or department store, selling our products.

Japanese labour practices are often called old-fashioned in today's world, and some say the old work ethic is eroding in Japan as it has elsewhere, but I do not think this is inevitable. As I see it, the desire to work and to perform well is not something unnatural that has to be imposed on people. I think all people get a sense of satisfaction from accomplishing work that is challenging, when their work and role in the company are being recognized. Managers abroad seem to overlook this. People in America, for example, have been conditioned to a system in which a person sells his labour for a price. In a way, that's good because people cannot coast; they know they have to work to earn their money or be fired. (I also think the way Americans make their children do work to earn their allowance is a fine idea; in Japan we often just give the money without requiring anything of our children.) In Japan we do take the risk of promising people job security, and then we have to keep motivating them. Yet I believe it is a big mistake to think that money is the only way to compensate a person for his work.

People need money, but they also want to be happy in their work and proud of it. So if we give a lot of responsibility to a younger man, even if he doesn't have a title, he will believe he has a good future and will be happy to work hard. In the United States, title and job and monetary incentives are all tied together. That is why, if a young person has a big job, management thinks he has to have a big salary. But in Japan we customarily give raises each year as employees get older and more experienced in the company. If we give an unusually high salary to one person, we cannot continue to give him annual increases indefinitely. At some point, his salary will have to level off, and at that point, he is likely to get discouraged. So we like to give the same sort of raise to all. I think this keeps our people well motivated. This may be a Japanese trait, but I do not think so.

I believe people work for satisfaction. I know that advertisements and commercials in the U.S. seem to hold up leisure as the most satisfying goal in life, but it is not that way in Japan yet. I really believe there is such a thing as company patriotism and job satisfaction - and that it is as important as money. It goes without saying that you must pay good wages. But that also means, of course, that the company must not throw money away on huge bonuses for executives or other frivolities but must share its fate with the workers. Japanese workers seem to feel better about themselves if they get raises as they age, on an expectable curve. We have tried other ways.

When we started our research laboratory, we had to go out and find researchers, and because these people had more education and were, naturally, older than our normal new employees we decided they should have higher wages, equivalent to U.S. salary levels. One suggested plan was to put them under short-term contract, say three years, after which we would decide whether to renew or not. But before we decided on this new pay scheme, I asked the new employees whether they would prefer the more common system of lower pay to start, but with yearly increases, or the three-year contract at a much higher wage.

Not one of them asked for the American-level salary. Everyone opted for long-range security. That is why I tell the Americans I meet that people don't work only for money. But often when I say it, they respond, "Yes, I see, but how much do you pay the ones who really work hard?" Now this is an important point. When a worker knows he will be getting a raise each year, he can feel so secure that he thinks there is no need to work hard. Workers must be motivated to want to do a good job. We Japanese are, after all, human beings, with much in common with people everywhere. Our evaluation system is complex and is designed to find really capable persons, give them challenging jobs, and let them excel. It isn't the pay we give that makes the difference-it is the challenge and the recognition they get on the job.

My eldest son, Hideo, may not be the best example of the typical Japanese worker, but he has an interesting and, I think, typical view of work in Japan. He has studied in Britain and the United States, and all his life he wanted to work for Sony. He went to work as an Artists and Repertory man at the CBS-Sony record company on the urging of Norio Ohga. He and I felt that for him to come directly into Sony headquarters would be wrong, because of the family connection and the overtones of nepotism. So he was proving himself at CBS-Sony. He worked with foreign and local artists and became famous and successful in the record industry in Japan. He worked very hard, from about noon until three or four o'clock in the morning, doing his regular office business during the day and then dealing with musicians after they finished their work. Hideo doesn't drink, and so it was hard for him to sit around the Tokyo discos and bars with these rock stars, drinking Coca-Cola while they relaxed with whiskey in the wee small hours of the morning. But it was important for him to do this, and although he could have gone on a long time resting on his laurels, he took stock of himself on his thirtieth birthday and made a decision.

As he put it, "In the record business, there are many people in their late thirties and early forties wearing jogging shoes and white socks and jeans and T-shirts to the office. I looked at those guys and said; I don't want to be like that when I am forty or forty-five. This business is fine and I have been successful, and I have no reason to leave it. If I keep this job, I thought, I might end up being a top officer of CBS-Sony, but I didn't want to see myself at fifty coming into the office at one o'clock in the afternoon in jogging shoes and white socks saying 'Good morning.' I felt I had to prove to myself after seven years in the record business that I could work from nine to five, like ordinary people."

He was assigned to the Sony accounting division-quite a change, you might think, from the artistic side of the record business-and some might have wondered whether he could make it or not, but I believed he could. His attitude is very Japanese, despite his international upbringing:

"All jobs are basically the same. You have to apply yourself, whether you are a record A&R man, a salesman on the street, or an accounting clerk. You get paid and you work one hundred percent to do the job at hand. As an A&R man, I was interested and excited and happy, but naturally as long as you are satisfied with your work and are using your energy, you will be happy. I was also very excited about the accounting division. I found out something new every day, struggling with a whole bunch of invoices and the payment sheets, the balance sheet, the profit and loss statement, and working with all those numbers. I began to get a broad picture of the company, its financial position and what is happening day to day and which way the company is heading. I discovered that that excitement and making music at the studio are the same thing."

In the late sixties a European Commission internal memo on Japan was leaked, and a great stir was created because it referred to the Japanese as "workaholics" who live in "rabbit hutches." There is no doubt that inadequate housing is a major problem in Japan, and nobody could deny that the Japanese are probably the hardest working people in the world. We have many holidays in Japan, but only about the same number as the United States. We do not give long summer vacations, even to our schoolchildren.

At Sony we were one of the first Japanese companies to close down our factory for one week in the summer, so that everybody could take off at the same time. And we long ago instituted the five-day, forty-hour week. The Japan Labour Standards Act still provides for a maximum forty-eight-hour workweek, though it is soon to be revised downward, and the average workweek in manufacturing is now forty-three hours. But even with up to twenty days of paid vacation a year, Japanese workers managed to take fewer days off and spend more days on the job than workers in the United States and Europe.

It was only in 1983 that banks and financial institutions began to experiment with the five-day week, closing one Saturday a month, and eventually the whole nation will move closer to the five-day week. Still, International Labour Organization data show that Japanese work longer weeks and have fewer labour disputes than workers in the U.S., the U.K., France, or West Germany. What I think this shows is that the Japanese worker appears to be satisfied with a system that is not designed only to reward people with high pay and leisure.

At Sony we learned that the problem with an employee who is accustomed to work only for the sake of money is that he often forgets that he is expected to work for the group entity, and this self-centered attitude of working for himself and his family to the exclusion of the goals of his co-workers and the company is not healthy. It is management's responsibility to keep challenging each employee to do important work that he will find satisfying and to work within the family. To do this, we often reorganize the work at Sony to suit the talents and abilities of the workers.

I have sometimes referred to American companies as being structures like brick walls while Japanese companies are more like stone walls. By that I mean that in an American company, the company's plans are all made up in advance, and the framework for each job is decided upon. Then, as a glance at the classified section of any American newspaper will show, the company sets out to find a person to fit each job. When an applicant is examined, if he is found to be oversized or undersized for the framework, he will usually be rejected. So this structure is like a wall built of bricks: the shape of each employee must fit in perfectly, or not at all.

In Japan recruits are hired, and then we have to learn how to make use of them. They are a highly educated but irregular lot. The manager takes a good long look at these rough stones, and he has to build a wall by combining them in the best possible way, just as a master mason builds a stone wall. The stones are sometimes round, sometimes square, long, large, or small, but somehow the management must figure out how to put them together. People also mature, and Japanese managers must also think of the shapes of these stones as changing from time to time. As the business changes, it becomes necessary to refit the stones into different places. I do not want to carry this analogy too far, but it is a fact that adaptability of workers and managements has become a hallmark of Japanese enterprise.

When Japanese companies in declining or sunset industries change their line of business or add to it, workers are offered retraining and, for the most part, they accept it eagerly. This sometimes requires a family move to the new job, and Japanese families are, again, generally disposed to do this.

(From Made in Japan by Akio Morita)

Tasks to the text “American and Japanese Styles”

Task 1 Fill in the gaps with the words Japan, Japanese, America, American(s)

Date: 2015-12-18; view: 1526