You will hear five different people talking about a project they carried out at work, and their experience while carrying it out

Speaker One
Woman: I worked for a tool manufacturer, which had always targeted the domestic market, but then the Managing Director realised our product lines would do well abroad, too, and he asked me to look into how best to achieve this. Well, this was a great opportunity for me. I thought it was really important to send our own staff overseas, so they could devote all their time to getting our products into the markets. But it turned out the boss actually meant I should investigate local companies to use as our agents: he said they would already have information about potential customers. I wish he’d spelt this out at the beginning, because at least we could have discussed it. As it was, he ignored most of what I proposed, so I’d simply wasted my time.
Speaker Two
Man: My boss gave me responsibility for this big project once, where I had to plan a strategy for improving the amount of flexibility in our production section. You see, there were people who could operate a specific machine, or do a particular part of the process, but if someone was off sick or on holiday, nobody else could take over. It also meant that when people got bored with their job, they tended to leave. So I was supposed to work out how to get everyone familiar with several machines. Well, I didn’t know the department very well, so I wanted to discuss my ideas with the shopfloor workers, but morale had got so bad, most of them couldn’t be bothered, and in the end, I can’t claim I had much success.
Speaker Three
Woman: We make luxury bags, and we’re never short of customers. We don’t have our own stores: the bags are sold by retailers, and we work closely with them. They generally have pretty limited storage space, so they can’t carry much stock, which means we have to make lots of small deliveries. So I had to do a comparative study of the alternatives. The thing was, though, that I was told just to look at getting our finished products from the factory to the outlets, which was straightforward enough, but I soon realised that it would make more sense to look at the whole of the supply chain. Anyway, I managed to solve the immediate problem.
Speaker Four
Man: The company I worked for merged with another one, and I was given the task of evaluating all the senior positions and redefining their roles to fit into the structure of the new company. It was pretty hard, because people were afraid they’d lose their jobs, so the atmosphere was awful. But it also proved very difficult to find out exactly how the other company had been operating. It was small, and the directors were basically a group of friends who’d set up the business together. Everything was done verbally, and they hadn’t bothered to draw up organograms or job descriptions. I had to spend ages talking to all of them, so it took me a long time to reach the point where I felt confident enough to present my report.
Speaker Five
Woman: We’re a small manufacturer of fashion clothing, targeted at people in their twenties with high disposable incomes. We compete with imported clothing, and only use outlets close by, which keeps distribution costs down. And then management decided we were too dependent on these customers, and we should aim at a broader age range, and as soon as possible. They considered designing new ranges for other age groups, but we just didn’t have the production capacity, so they decided to change the product image, to broaden its appeal. The task of making this happen fell to me. Well, I wish I’d refused, because they simply didn’t realise that it’s a very complicated process, and that lots of companies have tried and failed. Instead they blamed me for not being bold enough.
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Now listen to the recording again.
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That is the end of Part Two.