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  3. According to management expert Tom David, a professional service firm--a company

According to management expert Tom David, a professional service firm--a company

游客2025-05-28  2
问题 According to management expert Tom David, a professional service firm--a company of consultants, lawyers or auditors, for example—is the best model for tomorrow’s organization in any industry. He says that these firms are typically informal and flexible in their structure, and good at teamwork and knowledge-sharing. In contrast, the world’s big old corporations can easily be portrayed as crawling along behind.
The reality is perhaps more subtle. The rapid growth which professional service firms (PSFs) are experiencing is causing them management problems which the typical big corporations addressed long ago. They are turning themselves into conglomerates, trying to coordinate themselves globally rather than by country, as corporations like Unilever have done for years. The more sophisticated big corporations today are moving towards the partnership model, with flexible structures which actively involve employees. But the bigger PSFs are moving the other way. They are becoming the clumsy giants of the future. However, there are positive aspects of PSFs--leadership, for example. The secret of good leadership is to guide and steer people without actually managing them. This means being very clear about the firm’s objectives. If these are clear, then leaders can be flexible, encouraging employees to come up with their own solutions to problems. The leader’s job is to watch carefully and adjust people back towards the objectives. Because of this approach, in many PSFs, nobody is expected to spend more than half their time on management in the conventional sense.
Teams are essential in PSFs and are central to the training process, A huge amount of the training employees receive is in the discussion and debate with those who have been done that road before. When young people join the firm, they join teams. This works when there are enough senior people with enough time to devote to them.
At the same time, it is vital that people do not identify with the team too closely. The leadership skill is in ensuring you don’t create firms within firms. So you move people from group to group and you organize around clients. As well as focusing on the client’s needs, it’s also important to keep the firm’s needs in mind. It’s relatively easy to narrow your focus to those clients that concern you, and leave worrying about your people as a whole to someone else. But the one thing which PSFs claim a clear lead over other big companies: knowledge management. There are two main technology-based ways in which they transfer their knowledge from those who have it to those who need it. First, the creation of e-mail networks. Second, the logging of data onto central computer systems. Are they effective? Jane Griffith, head of Northern Consulting, gives an example: "Suppose I have a client in the ice-cream business and I need to find out about the industry. I don’t want to have read all 5,000 electronic entries on the icecream; what I do want is to use the system to find out one e-mail address of somebody who knows about the ice-cream business and then contact them to ask them about the ice-cream business. It’s that kind of cooperation that builds success. "  [br]  ______ is or was facing both professional service firms and world’s big old corporations.
选项 A、Flexible structure
B、Management problems
C、Information technology
D、Good leadership
答案 B
解析
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