GETTING THINGS DONE

6. Tick the answer you think is correct. Discuss your answer after reading the text.

1) The skills required to be an effective manager and an effective managee are

the same.

2) Managers are usually effective as managees.

3) To succeed in management as a career, it is not sufficient to excel as a

manager.

7. The paragraphs of the text are mixed up. Read the text and put the paragraphs in

the correct order.

A. And yet upon the answer – and upon the remedy – may hinge the differences between career success and failure for these same managers.

B. Of all the objective sources of your time management problems – namely, your boss, your peers, your subordinates – your boss is the principal one.

C. Although the term management has many valid definitions, this one is widely used: management is getting things done through others. In this definition “others” obviously refers to the manager’s immediate subordinates. If your boss happens to come to his/her mind when his/her eyes light upon that word “others”.

D. “Where is my time going today?”

Tens of thousands of managers are asking this of their secretaries around quitting time every day. Because these dedicated and perceptive assistants typically want to hold their jobs, they won’t risk an honest reply.

The order of the paragraphs is: 1…………………………………………………...

2…………………………………………………...

3…………………………………………………...

4…………………………………………………...

8. Read the text and put the paragraphs in the correct order.

WORKING AT HOME

A. Driving to work on Monday morning, you quickly reviewed once again your day’s schedule, your week’s tactical outline and the month’s scenario. You entered your office at 8:30 a.m., sat down behind your desk for last-minute inspiration. Before you got down to work you took in the aphorism on the opposite wall: “PLAN YOUR WORK, THEN WORK YOUR PLAN.” You had already done the first part: you were ready now to drive into the last part.

B. To illustrate this, let us imagine that you are a manager with a few years’ experience. You know that the management process consists of planning, organizing, reading, coordinating and controlling.

C. First your mind went quickly through tomorrow’s (Monday’s) scenario. This was easy, because you had spent the last hour before quitting time on Friday getting organized for Monday. What you ended up with was not a plan for Monday but a very tight schedule.

D. One Sunday afternoon you were doing the planning part of the process in your living room with the TV set tuned to a programme you were ignoring. Your spouse was down the street gossiping with the neighbours, your youngsters were up the street ‘doing their thing’, and you were making the most of your solitude to do some planning.

E. Next your mind scanned the entire week. You knew better than to schedule that far ahead, for Murphy’s three famous laws would have made a shambles of it. But you did have a tactical plan for getting a number of issues squared away that had been hanging fire for too long. Finally, your mind, like a radar beam, scanned the entire upcoming month. This, you recognize, is long-range planning, in which one can easily lose sight of both the forest and the trees.

The order of the paragraphs is: 1…………………………………………………...

2…………………………………………………...

3…………………………………………………...

4…………………………………………………...

5…………………………………………………...

Date: 2015-01-12; view: 986