B) Write down a short summary based on the results of the discussion.

Unit 8. Joint Bosses.

The Trouble With Tandem

Lead-in

Exercise 1. Starting up:

1. Do you believe in the efficiency of cooperation at work?

2. Do you prefer to share your working responsibilities with a colleague or a friend or do you choose to work and make decisions on your own? Explain your reasons.

Vocabulary and Listening

Exercise 2. You are going to listen to the report on the problem of joint leadership. Match the English words and phrases with their Russian equivalents:

1. concern	выйти из под контроля
2. delicate	провалиться, оказаться в затруднительном положении
3. at the helm	понятие
4. tandem	решительно поддерживать, выступать за что-либо
5. a rarity	беспокойство
6. come unstuck	управлять компанией
7. ailing	отделаться от (кого-л)
8. to plump for	засорять, захламлять
9. notion	нездоровый
10. to spin out of control	для двоих или троих
11. to steer a company	качаться
12. to litter	редкость
13. to wobble	непростой, деликатный
14. to jettison	у руля

Exercise 3. Listen to the report on joint leadership and fill in the gaps in the script using the target vocabulary (Exercise 2) (“The Economist”, March 6^th 2010).

Despite a few recent appointments, there are good reasons why joint bosses are ________________.

As anyone who has tried knows only too well, riding a tandem bicycle, with two seats and two sets of pedals, takes some getting used to. Even a small ________________________ between the riders over the direction in which they want to go can cause the bicycle to wobble worryingly or spin out of __________. Trying to steer a large company in tandem requires a similarly delicate bal­ancing act, because a lack of co-ordination between joint chief executives can destabilise the business. Yet in spite of such _________________, two well-known companies have recently plumped for dual leadership.

One is SAP, a German software giant, which on February 7^th bid auf Wiedersefien to its boss, Leo Apotheker, and replaced him with two “co-CEOs”: Bill McDermott, the company’s head of sales, and Jim Hagemann Snabe, its head of product develop­ment. The other is MySpace, an ailing social network owned by News Corporation, which a few days later jettisoned its boss, Owen Van Natta, and ________________ him with two “co-presidents”: Mike Jones, the firm’s chief operating officer, and Jason Hirsch-horn, its chief product officer.

The notion of shared leadership in the corporate world is _________ new. Business history is littered with examples of compa­nies such as EADs, a giant European defence group, Unilever, an Anglo-Dutch consumer-goods company and Goldman Sachs, an American investment bank, that have, at one time or another, had two captains at ___________. But almost all of these relation­ships have ultimately come unstuck.

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