Case I
Communication Failure
Mr.
and Mrs. Basu went to Woodlands Apparel to buy a pullover. Mr. Basu did not
read the price tag on the piece selected by him. At the counter, while making
the payment he asked for the price. Rs. 950 was the answer.
Meanwhile,
Mrs. Basu, who was still shopping came back and joined her husband. She was
glad that he had selected a nice black pullover for himself. She pointed out
there was a 25% discount on that item. The counter person nodded in agreement.
Mr.
Basu was thrilled to hear that. “It means the price of this pullover is just
Rs. 712. That’s fantastic”, said Mr. Basu.
In
no time, he returned with the second pullover and asked them to be packed. When
he received the case memo for payment, he was astonished to find that he had to
pay Rs. 1,900 and not Rs. 1,424.
Mr.
Basu could hardly reconcile himself to the fact that the counter person had
quoted the discounted price which was Rs. 950. The original price printed on
the price tag was Rs. 1,266.
Case I Questions:
1. Identify the three sources of Mr.
Basu’s information.
2. Discuss the main filter involved in
this case.
3. What should Mr. Basu have done to
avoid the misunderstanding.
4. Who is to blame for this communication
gap? And Why?
Case II
ON WRITING WELL
It
won’t do to say that the snoozing reader is too dumb or too lazy to keep pace
with the train of thought. My sympathies are with him. If the reader is lost,
it is generally because the writer has not been careful enough to keep him on
the path.
This
carelessness can take any number of forms. Perhaps a sentence is so excessively
cluttered that the reader, hacking his way through the verbiage, simply doesn’t
know what it means. Perhaps a sentence has been so shoddily constructed that
the reader could read it in any of several ways. Perhaps the writer has
switched tenses, so the reader loses track of who is talking or when the action
took place. Perhaps Sentence B is not a logical sequel to Sentence A – the
writer, in whose head the connection is clear, has not bothered to provide the
missing link. Perhaps the writer has used an important word incorrectly by not
taking the trouble to look it up. He may think that ‘sanguine’ and ‘sanguinary’
mean the same thing, but the difference is a bloody big one. The reader can only
infer (speaking of big differences) what the writer is trying to imply.
Faced
with these obstacles, the reader is at first a remarkably tenacious bird. He
blames himself he obviously missed something, and he goes back over the
mystifying sentence, or over the whole
paragraph, piecing it out like an ancient rune, making guesses and moving on.
But he won’t do this for long. The writer is making him work too hard, and the
reader will look for one who is better at his craft. The writer must therefore
constantly ask himself: What am I trying to say? Surprisingly often, he doesn’t
know. Then he must look at what he has written and ask: Have I said it? Is it
clear to someone encountering the subject for the first time? If it’s not, it
is because some fuzz has worked it’s way into the machinery. The clear writer
is a person clear-headed enough to see this stuff for what it is: fuzz.
I
don’t’ mean that some people are born clear-headed and are therefore natural
writers, whereas others are naturally fuzzy and will never write well. Thinking
clearly is a conscious act that the writer must force upon himself, just as if
he were embarking on any other project that requires logic: adding up a laundry
list or doing an algebra problem. Good writing doesn’t come naturally, though
most people obviously think it does.
Case II Questions:
1. What is Fuzz?
2. Rewrite the given case study in a
succinct manner.
3. Do you believe that some people are
born writers? Justify.
Case III Outsourcing Backlash Gets
Abusive, Ugly
I
don’t want to speak to you. Connect to your boss in the US Bangalore
At
another call centre, another day, another yound girl had a Londoner unleashing
himself on her, “ Yound lady do you know that because of you Indians we are
losing jobs.”
The
outsourcing backlash is getting ugly. Handling irate callers is the new brief
for the young men and women taking calls at these outsourced job centers.
Supervisors tell them to be “cool”.
Avinash
Vashistha, managing partner of NEOIT, a leading US-based consultancy firm
says,” Companies involved in outsourcing both in the US and India are already
getting a lot of hate mail against outsourcing and it is hardly surprising that
some people should behave like this on the telephone.” Vashistha says Indian
call centers should train their operators how to handle such calls.
Indeed,
the furore raised by the western media over job losses because of outsourcing
has made ordinary citizens there sensitive to the fact that their call are
being taken not from their midst but in countries, such as India and the
Philippines.
The
angry outbursts the operators face border on the racist and sexist, says the
manager of a call center in Hyderabad. But operators and senior executives of
call centers reguse to go on record for fear of kicking up a controversy that
might result in their companies’ losing clients overseas.
“It’s
happening often enough and so let’s face it,” says a senior executive of a Gurgaon
call centre, adding, “This doesn’t have any impact on business.”
Questions:
1. Assume you are working as an operator
at a call centre in India
2. “Keep your cool.” What does this mean
in term of conversation control?
3. Do you agree with the view that such
abusive happenings on the telephone do not have any impact on business?
Justify.
Case IV
Arvind Pandey Caught in Business Web
Arvind Pandey is a project manager at Al Saba
Construction Company in Muscat. It s a
flourishing company with several construction projects in Muscat and
abroad. It is known for completing
projects on time and with high quantity construction. The company’s Chairman is a rich and a highly
educated Omani. A German engineer is
Arvind’s Vice – President for urban and foreign construction projects.
Three months ago, Al Saba had submitted a tender for a
major construction project in Kuwait.
Its quotation was for $ 25 million.
In Kuwait the project was sponsored and announced by a US – based
construction company called Fuma.
According to Al Saba, their bid of $ 25 million was modest but had
included a high margin of profit.
On 25 April, Arvind was asked to go to Kuwait to find
out from the Fuma project manager the status of their construction
proposal. Arvind was delighted to know
that Fuma had decided to give his company, (Al Saba) the construction project
work. The project meant a lot of effort
and money in planning the proposed construction in Kuwait.
But before Arvind could tank the Fuma project manager,
he was told that their bird should be raised to $ 28 million. Arvind was surprised. He tried to convince
the Fuma project manager that his (Arvind company had the bast reputation for
doing construction work in a cost effective way. However, he could always raise the bid by $ 3
million. But he wanted to know why he was required to do so.
The Fuma manager’s reply was, “That’s the way we do
our business in this part of the world, $ 1 million will go to our Managing
Director in the US, I shall get $ 1 million, you, Mr. Pandey, will get $ 1
million in a specified account in Swiss Bank.
Arvind asked, “But why me?”
“So that you never talk about it to any one.” The Fuma Project Manager said.
Arvind promised never to leak it out to any one
else. And he tried to bargain to raise
the bid by $ 2 million. For Arvind was
familiar with the practice of “pay – offs” involved in any such thing. He thought it was against his loyalty to his
company and his personal ethics. Arvind
promised the Fuma project manager that the bid would be raised to $ 28 million
and fresh papers would be put in. He did not want to lose the job.
He came back to Muscat and kept trying to figure out
how he should place the whole thing before his German Vice President. He obviously was at a loss.
Questions:
1. Analyse the reasons for Arvind Pandey’s
dilemma.
2. Does Arvind Pandey really face a
dilemma?
3. In your view what should Arvind Pandey
do? Should he disclose it to his German Vice President?
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