课程短文

　　I'm Michael Bush, Managing Director of Hoogle Engineering. I am pleased to welcome you here to our website and I'd like to tell you a little about the company and its organization. Hoogle Engineering was in 1960. It was divided into several departments at that time, such as the sales department, marketing department, and production department. Lots of managers were employed to manage it all.

　　Fortunately things are different now. Sixty people are employed by Hoogle and communication between departments is considered to be one of the most important aspects of the business. The market is global so we need to make contact with customers worldwide, not just locally.

　　But in the old days we were all in different departments and never spoke to each other. We had a tall structure. we had people at the first level on the manufacturing products according to the instructions which they were given. Then you had a level of people who them every day. Then you moved up to the middle management, who were doing the tasks of getting new business, and then you had the senior anagement team, and then you had the board, who decided the business strategy. So there were a lot of levels in the company in the old days actually.

　　The structure today is that we form teams within teams to place people who can a product. Each team has members that can manufacture different products. The actual teams now are self-managing, so we don't even have team leaders. You've got the teams, and then you've got two people, only two people, who are what you think of as management. This is generally called flat structure.