下列文章均从英文原著中节选，分为两部分，即案例和理论，内容涉及工商管理的基本实践与理论问题，旨在为是非问题分析类作文提供有用的观点与论据。同时，背诵这些篇章将有助于提高GMAT写作的语言水平（Issue和Argument所涉及的问题主要是工商管理类问题）。而且，有志于MBA的你应该早下决心，从根本上提高自己用英语表达工商管理类问题的能力，这将是你未来成功的关键。
一、 案例
1. 3M: A Novel Company
The great diversity of American businesses often gets forgotten in discussions about “bottom lines” or marketing strategies. Someone with only a theoretical knowledge of American companies might think that they’re structured more or less the same and that they develop products the same way. Current wisdom says that if you want a successful product, you need first to perform detailed market analysis, making sure that there are plenty of people who need the new product and they entry into the market will be able to gain a significant share of that market. Then, with as much of the company’s force as you can muster, you push your product to the top.
3M is a giant American company that rejects such wisdom and does things its own way. (If you don’t know the company name, you know their Scotch brand tape or their Post-it notes, the best-selling office product in the world.) You can’t argue with the company’s track record. Started at the turn of the century, 3M has been growing at a healthy rate of about 10 percent a year, and it boasts of having 45,000 products on the market.
Yet 3M refuses to do things the traditional way. Rather than find a winner and stick with it, promoting it with all the company’s resources, it prefers to make an array of products in 45 different, nearly independent divisions. Instead of hiring new executives from outside, the company looks to its own when it has upper management position to fill. While other companies see a profitable product and copy it, 3M looks for niches no one has bothered to fill.
The key to 3M’s unique approach is its reliance on invention. It likes to create unique products that perfectly fill a need, even if only a limited number of people can use the product. It would rather make a little money on each of a great number of products than a lot from one big seller.
This unusual corporate philosophy started with the company’s founders, who first made ordinary sandpaper. When some 3M people were inside an automobile factory making a sale, they noticed that workers choked from the dust produced by dry sandpaper, so the company developed sandpaper that could be used wet.
The company has been spotting and filling small needs ever since. But they don’t always identify a need before they have a new product. When one of the company’s independent inventors comes up with a new product, the company will look until it finds a use for it. That happened with the Post-it adhesive and with a new kind of fabric the company developed in 1939 out of pressed, not woven, fabrics. Over the years a number of uses were proposed and dismissed. Finally, in the 1950s, the fabric found a home in surgical masks.
To keep its innovative products coming , the company sues a number of unusual corporate strategies. When a division gets large—over $100 million in sales—it is split in two so that market share will not become more important than innovation. The company reasons that the head of a huge enterprise won’t care enough about the little products that have made the company famous. 3M likes to follow up “embryonic product” that open up new fields, like the surgical tape that didn’t sell all that well but stated the company’s important health-care division. It shies away from making “me-too” products or battling big names in the marketplace. In the 1960s, it had the technology to compete with Kodak in the amateur film market, but chose instead to settle for making house-brand film for retailers like Sears.
To encourage innovation, the company insists that one-quarter of each division’s sales must be derived from products that did not exist five years before. And every year it gives its own version of the Noble Prize to employees who have made the most important contributions to 3M technology.
3M’s corporate structure, climate, and philosophy are no more “right” than are the more traditional approaches to American business. They do help to demonstrate, however, that there are many routes to corporate success in America, and that even if you’ve found a good thing like Scotch tape, you don’t necessarily just have to stick with it. |
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