What’s Your Core Business

In the past, those who have built up their own businesses have tended to measure their progress by the size of the organization. Rather than talking about turnover or profitability, it has been easier to say “I employ 70 people”, or whatever. In today’s highly competitive environment, this is no longer a valid approach.

Stephane Garelli sees an organization with three elements:

1. As small a team as possible of dedicated, completely committed people, focusing on truly “adding value” to the unique expertise by which their organization satisfies its customers. This team creates new customer demands, predicts changes in customer needs, and identifies customer needs that the customer can’t even articulate for themselves.

2. People on short-term contracts. BP advertised at one point for an economist on a non-pensionable, three-year contract. In fact, this is a very sensible route for a small, rapidly growing organization to take. Too many small companies have crippled themselves by taking on, as full time employees, people whose skills were only relevant to that stage of the company’s growth. Once the company expanded beyond their competence, they became a hindrance. So, short-term contracts for a particular short-term need make sense.

3. Work which is “outsourced”. This is an increasing trend among companies large and small. BP Exploration has outsourced all its Information Technology operations in an effort to cut costs, gain more flexible and higher quality IT resources, and refocus the IT department on activities that directly improve the overall business.   

Category:     Business
Source:        Adapted from: The 12 Pillars Of Business Success, published by Kogan
                    Page Limited, 2001
Words:        250

参考答案：

企业应关心的重要问题是什么？
在过去，那些已逐步建立起自己企业的人士一直倾向于用公司规模来衡量企业的发展。他们不是谈论营业额或者利润率，而是简单地说“我雇了70个人”或诸如此类的话。在当今竞争激烈的环境中，这已不在是一种行之有效的方法。
史蒂芬’加勒利（Stephane Garelli）认为，一个商业组织应包括3个基本要素：
1． 要有一个由富有奉献精神并勇于承担全部义务的人员组成的规模尽可能小的团队。专专注于公司满足顾客需要的专门技术的“增值”。这个团队要创造新的顾客需求，预测在顾客需要方面所发生的变化，并确定那些顾客甚至都不能为自己表达的顾客需要。
2． 雇用短期合同的职员。英国石油公司（BP）曾一度通过广告招聘一名合同期为三年且不享受退休金的经济专家。 事实上，这是小型而发展迅速的商业组织所应采取的一条合理途径。有相当多的小型公司，由于雇用那些其技能只适用于公司当时发展阶段的人作为全职员工，而使自己陷于瘫痪。一旦公司的发展超出了这些人的能力，他们就成了累赘。所以，由于特别的短期需要而采用短期合同的做法是明智之举。
3． “外包”公司业务。这种趋势在各类大小公司里越来越流行。英国石油公司勘探部（BP Exploration）已将其所有的讯息技术业务外包出去，目的在于降低成本，获取更灵活而且更高质量的讯息技术资源，并将讯息技术部门的工作重新集中在能直接改善公司总体业绩的活动上。

谢谢，我不是故意的

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