III. Understanding the main points.

Text 1

This Organization is disorganization

I. Vocabulary. Read and learn the following words:

Headquarter – главный офис

To drag lots of paper – таскать с собой много бумаги

To sort through the incoming mail – отсортировать входящую почту

Shredder – измельчитель

Recycling bin – корзина

To capture the imagination of business innovators – поразить воображение бизнес новаторов

To disband – распускать

To lead the development – управлять развитием

R& D leader – research and development leader – руководитель отдела исследования и разработки

To sum up – подводить итог

II. Reading. Read and translate the following text:

Oticon headquarters is an anti-paper anti-office with mobile workstations and networked computers. There are plenty of workstations, but no one is sitting at them. People are always on the move. One reason employees are free to move around is that they don’t have to drag lots of paper with them.

Every morning, people visit the company’s second-floor “paper room” to sort through incoming mail. They may keep a few magazines and reports to work with for the day, but they run everything else through an electronic scanner and throw the originals into a shredder that empties into recycling bins on the ground floor.

It’s hard to imagine a more disorganized organization than Oticon. But, over the years, Lars Kolind and his Danish colleagues have built a business so successful that they have captured the imagination of business innovators around the world. At Oticon, teams form, disband and form again as the work requires. The company has a hundred or so projects at any one time, and most people work on several projects at once.

“The most important communication is face-to-face communication”, says Torben Petersen, who led the development of Oticon’s new information systems. “When people move around and sit next to different people, they learn something about what others are doing”, says Poul Erik Lyregaard, Oticon’s R& D leader. “They also learn to respect what those people do. They’re not just “those bloody fools in marketing”.

Kolind sums it up: “To keep a company alive, one of the jobs of top management is to keep it disorganized”.

III. Understanding the main points.

1. Answer the following questions:

1. Oticon’s approach to office organization is sometimes called “hot-desking”. Would this system make your life easier or more complicated?

2. What is the reason why employees are free to move around?

3. What is the structure of work at Oticon?

4. Do you like multi-tasking or do you prefer to work on one thing at a time?

5. Do you agree that face-to-face communication is the most effective? Give examples.

6. Can you sum up the article in a sentence?

7. What’s Oticon’s solution to the paperwork problem?

2. Decide if the statements are true or false:

1. There are plenty of workstations at Oticon and employees are sitting at them.

2. Employees may keep a few magazines and reports to work with for the day, but they run everything else through an electronic scanner and throw the originals into a shredder.

3. All people work on one project.

4. “The most important communication is face-to-face communication”, says Torben Petersen.

3. Find the synonyms to the following words:

1. Workstation

2. Problem

3. Communication

4. Important

5. Solution

6. Complicated