【Native Speaker每日综合训练—36系列】【36-14】经管

AceJ

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我们始终坚信，每一次阅读，都应是一次美妙的旅程
而工作组的使命就是带领大家领略阅读中的极致美景

Part I: Speaker

Ruth Reichl on Challenging Career Moves

Source: HBR Ideacast
http://blogs.hbr.org/2014/05/ruth-reichl-on-challenging-career-moves/

For transcript, you can directly click hyperlink above, or you can download word document here

[Rephrase 1, 14:52]

AceJ

Part II: Speed

Decisions Don’t Start with Data
BY Nick Morgan | May 14, 2014

[Time 2]
I recently worked with an executive keen to persuade his colleagues that their company should drop a long-time vendor in favor of a new one. He knew that members of the executive team opposed the idea (in part because of their well-established relationships with the vendor) but he didn’t want to confront them directly, so he put together a PowerPoint presentation full of stats and charts showing the cost savings that might be achieved by the change.

He hoped the data would speak for itself.

But it didn’t.

The team stopped listening about a third of the way through the presentation. Why? It was good data. The executive was right. But, even in business meetings, numbers don’t ever speak for themselves.

To influence human decision making, you have to get to the place where decisions are really made — in the unconscious mind, where emotions rule, and data is mostly absent. Yes, even the most savvy executives begin to make choices this way. They get an intent, or a desire, or a want in their unconscious minds, then decide to pursue it and act on that decision. Only after that do they become consciously aware of what they’ve decided and start to justify it with rational argument. In fact, recent research from Carnegie-Mellon University indicates that our unconscious minds actually make better decisions when left alone to deal with complex issues.
[230 words]

[Time 3]
Data is helpful as supporting material, of course. But, because it spurs thinking in the conscious mind, it must be used with care. Effective persuasion starts not with numbers, but with stories that have emotional power because that’s the best way to tap into unconscious decision making. We decide to invest in a new company or business line not because the financial model shows it will succeed but because we’re drawn to the story told by the people pitching it. We buy goods and services because we believe the stories marketers build around them:  “A diamond is forever” (De Beers), “Real Beauty” (Dove), “Think different” (Apple), “Just do it” (Nike). We take jobs not only for the pay and benefits but also for the self-advancement story we’re told, and tell ourselves, about working at the new place.

Sometimes we describe this as having a good “gut feeling.” What that really means is that we’ve already unconsciously decided to go forward, based on desire, and our conscious mind is seeking some rationale for that otherwise invisible decision.

I advised the executive to scrap his PowerPoint and tell a story about the opportunities for future growth with the new vendor, reframing and trumping the loyalty story the opposition camp was going to tell. And so, in his next attempt, rather than just presenting data, he told his colleagues that they should all be striving toward a new vision for the company, no longer held back by a tether to the past. He began with an alluring description of the future state — improved margins, a cooler, higher-tech product line, and excited customers — then asked his audience to move forward with him to reach that goal. It was a quest story, and it worked.

Good stories — with a few key facts woven in — are what attach emotions to your argument, prompt people into unconscious decision making, and ultimately move them to action.
[318 words]

Source: HBR Blog
http://blogs.hbr.org/2014/05/decisions-dont-start-with-data/


Another year of Losses for Sony and no Sign of Reprieve
BY Bruce Einhorn | May 14, 2014

[Time 4]
Sony (SNE) today said it expects to lose ¥50 billion ($490 million) in the current fiscal year, which ends in March 2015. Even though the Japanese electronics and entertainment giant has been struggling for years, today’s announcement comes as a surprise, since a Bloomberg-compiled average of 19 analyst estimates had Sony making a profit of ¥57.1 billion.

The last time Sony surprised investors with a downbeat assessment of its prospects was on May 1, when it spoiled the holiday mood by announcing that its loss for the 2013-14 fiscal year would be ¥130 billion, worse than the ¥110 billion loss it had forecast a few months earlier and much worse than the ¥30 billion profit it had forecast a few months before that.

The market took that announcement in stride as optimists argued that at least Sony was finally getting serious about the need to restructure: It’s a good thing Sony is getting out of PCs, for instance, a business in which Sony was never a leader or even a close follower. Yes, dumping the PC business is costly in the short term, which is why Sony’s earnings for 2013-14 took a hit, but the company eventually will be stronger.

A lot of additional money-losing businesses remain for Sony to dump, though. The company hasn’t made a profit on TVs in years, and with stiff competition from South Korea and China, exiting the TV business is probably vital to any Sony turnaround. In its futile attempt to remain a player in TVs, Sony has lost ¥790 billion over the last 10 years, the company revealed today.
[266 words]

[Time 5]
The problem is, even if Chief Executive Officer Kazuo Hirai accepts that there’s no hope for Sony in the TV business, getting rid of it will be expensive in the short term. As today’s surprise demonstrates, retreating from a money-losing business isn’t easy. “The high cost to exit PCs shows that it will be even harder for Sony to exit TVs,” Yasuo Nakane, an analyst at Deutsche Bank in Tokyo, told Bloomberg News. Sony is counting on the World Cup in Brazil to drive demand for its TVs, but Nakane says its expectations are “too bullish.”

Sony is now assured of losses whether it holds on to TVs or gets rid of them. “If Hirai were in the U.S., shareholders would call for his resignation,” Yasuaki Kogure, chief investment officer at Tokyo’s SBI Asset Management, told Bloomberg. “Hirai will say he needs time, but the market can’t wait.”

There was some good news amid today’s gloom. In China, The Amazing Spider-Man 2, the second installment in Sony’s reboot of the Spider Man franchise, was No. 1 at the box office, the official Xinhua news agency reported on Tuesday. The movie, which captured 60 percent of the box office in the world’s second-largest movie market, took in 286 million yuan ($45.9 million) last week, for a total of 349 million yuan since it opened on May 4.

Unfortunately for Hirai, Sony can’t count on Spidey to rescue its TV business.
[239 words]

Source: Bloomberg Business
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-05-14/another-year-of-losses-for-sony-and-no-sign-of-reprieve#r=hpt-fs


What target-date fund investors are doing wrong?
By Althea Chang | May 15, 2014

[Time 6]
Target-date funds may seem simple enough: Retirement savers can take a set-it-and-forget-it approach with them, determining how much of their salaries to contribute and letting a fund manager adjust asset allocations over time based on a target retirement date.

But a majority of savers with money in target-date funds aren't using them correctly, according to Financial Engines, a firm that sifted through data on more than 700,000 workers with about $55 billion saved in 401(k) retirement plans.

"The idea is, you put all your money in one fund and you get a diversified 401(k) account. What we've seen though is a lot of folks start off on the right foot, and ultimately sort of spread their money out over time and as a result of that, see lower returns," said Financial Engines CEO Jeffrey Maggioncalda.

Savers should have at least 95 percent of their money in a target date fund, if they elect to invest in one at all, but fewer than 17 percent of people with money invested in them are adhering to this rule, Financial Engines found.

Target-date funds are intended to be used exclusively since they inherently control for risk and provide good diversification, according to the firm.

Those savers who are partially invested in target date funds only put 35 percent of their savings into those funds, Financial Engines found.
[224 words]

Source: Yahoo Finance
http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/big-data-download/what-target-date-fund-investors-are-doing-wrong-132610026.html

AceJ

Part III: Obstacle

The 50-year snooze
Brazilian workers are gloriously unproductive. For the economy to grow, they must snap out of their stupor
From the print edition | April 19, 2014

[Paraphrase 7]
PECKISH revellers at Lollapalooza, a big music festival in São Paulo earlier this month, were in for a treat. In contrast to past years’ menus of reheated hamburgers, they could plump for pulled pork, barbecue ribs or corn on the cob, courtesy of BOS BBQ, a Texan eatery in the city. More surprising than the fare, however, was the pace at which BOS’s two tents dished it out. Over the course of two days the booths, each manned by six people, served 12,000 portions, or more than one every 15 seconds, boasts Blake Watkins, who runs the restaurant. Such efficiency is as welcome as it is uncommon. Neighbouring stands needed two to three minutes to serve each customer, leading to lengthy lines and rumbling stomachs.

“The moment you land in Brazil you start wasting time,” laments Mr Watkins, who moved to the country three years ago after selling a fast-food business in New York. To be sure of having at least ten temporary workers at Lollapalooza, he hired 20 (sure enough, only half of them turned up). Lu Bonometti, who opened a cookie shop 18 months ago in a posh neighbourhood of São Paulo, has commissioned four different firms to fix her shop sign. None has come. Few cultures offer a better recipe for enjoying life. But the notion of opportunity cost seems lost on most Brazilians.

Queues, traffic jams, missed deadlines and other delays have been so ubiquitous for so long that “Brazilians have become anaesthetised to them”, says Regis Bonelli of Fundação Getulio Vargas, a business school. When on April 12th the boss of the state-owned operator suggested that large chunks of the airport in Belo Horizonte that will not be refurbished in time for the football World Cup in June should simply be “veiled”, his remark elicited no more than a shrug of resignation.

Apart from a brief spurt in the 1960s and 1970s, output per worker has either slipped or stagnated over the past half century, in contrast to most other big emerging economies (see chart). Total-factor productivity, which gauges the efficiency with which both capital and labour are used, is lower now than it was in 1960. Labour productivity accounted for 40% of Brazil’s GDP growth between 1990 and 2012, compared with 91% in China and 67% in India, according to McKinsey, a consultancy. The remainder came from an expansion of the workforce as a result of favourable demography, formalisation and low unemployment. This will slow to 1% a year in the next decade, says Mr Bonelli. If the economy is to grow any faster than its current pace of 2% or so a year, Brazilians will need to become more productive.

Economists trot out familiar reasons for the performance. Brazil invests just 2.2% of its GDP in infrastructure, well below the developing-world average of 5.1%. Of the 278,000 patents granted last year by the United States patent office, just 254 went to inventors from Brazil, which accounts for 3% of the world’s output and people. Brazil’s spending on education as a share of GDP has risen to rich-world levels, but quality has not, with pupils among the worst-performing in standardised tests. Mr Watkins complains that his 18-year-old barbecuers have the skills of 14-year-old Americans.

Less obviously, many Brazilian companies are unproductive because they are badly managed. John van Reenen of the London School of Economics found that although its best firms are just as well run as top-notch American and European ones, Brazil (like China and India) has a long, fat tail of highly inefficient ones.

Preferential tax treatment for firms with turnovers of no more than 3.6m reais ($1.6m) has reeled many irregular enterprises into the formal economy. But it discourages companies from growing. And as big fish in areas like retail make efficiency gains they need fewer workers, who instead swell the shoals of less productive minnows. Many hire trusted kith or kin rather than a better-qualified stranger, to limit the risk of being robbed or sued by employees for flouting notoriously worker-friendly labour laws. The upshot is even more inefficiency.

Instead of collapsing, feeble firms plod on thanks to various forms of state protection, which shields them from competition. Protectionism weighs on productivity in other ways, too. Punitively high tariffs on imported technology—such as the whopping 80% cumulative tax slapped on foreign smartphones—make many productivity-enhancing gizmos prohibitively expensive, says José Scheinkman of Columbia University. Rather than buy cheaper and better products from abroad, firms have to pay over the odds for lower-quality local ones.

Historical evidence points to a solution, thinks Marcos Lisboa of Insper university. The period of catch-up in productivity growth began in the 1960s, following a bout of liberal reforms engendered by years of near-autarkic industrial policy. A smaller uptick in the early 2000s also followed liberalising measures, enacted a decade before to stave off hyperinflation. Success notwithstanding, both the military dictatorship of 1964-85 and the leftist Workers’ Party, which has held the presidency since 2003, soon reverted to interventionist type. Recently this has meant local-content requirements, subsidised fuel and electricity, and overweening regulation. Productivity has duly sputtered.

Mr Lisboa highlights two salutary examples from recent years. Agriculture was deregulated in 1990, allowed to consolidate and gain access to foreign machines, fertiliser and pesticides. A few years later, financial services enjoyed far-reaching institutional reforms to boost the supply of credit and bolster capital markets. Both were left in peace—and became roughly 4% more efficient each year in the decade that followed. Brazilian soyabean producers are now the envy of the world. Mr Watkins, the restaurateur, praises the banking system as something that works more quickly in Brazil than it does in the United States.

Regulation is always hard to unwind, Mr Lisboa concedes. But if Brazil is to grow beyond 2020, when the working-age population will begin to decline as a share of the total, it will have to tackle its productivity problem. Until it does so, it risks falling into an ever deeper slumber.
[1001 words]

Source: Economist
http://www.economist.com/news/americas/21600983-brazilian-workers-are-gloriously-unproductive-economy-grow-they-must-snap-out

AceJ

robot青 发表于 2014-5-16 08:33
其实speaker那篇重复啦

谢谢Robot提醒，确实跟36-06重复了，下次会注意，谢谢

AceJ

yshib 发表于 2014-5-16 19:06
掌管 6        00:13:00.15        00:21:36.78
掌管 5        00:01:40.99        00:08:36.63
掌管 4        00:01:06.31        00:06:55.64

hi, yshib, 越障部分的素材来源经济学人的文章一向比较难，特别是在用词上，所以这是正常现象，不要气馁哈

AceJ

samalagorn 发表于 2014-5-16 22:10
怎么33-14跟36-14在一起？！刚没看清进去直接把33-14做了..............

hi, sama，任何一个帖子只要有最新的回复都会被顶上来，所以下次要特别注意了哦。

AceJ

Time2: 1'27"
Time3: 1'45“
Time4: 1'15"
Time5: 1'25"
Time6: 1'13"
Time7: 6'01"