TASK ONE - TOPIC TO BE DISCUSSED • For questions 13 - 17, match the extracts with the topics to be discussed at each meeting,

Speaker 1
I think the worst meeting I ever attended was one where there was an awful lot of talk in fact the chairperson bent over backwards to make sure everyone had their say, and clearly a lot of people felt strongly about the proposal on the table. We seemed to be pretty evenly divided on it, so it really needed a vote, but the chair chose to ’take the feeling of the meeting’ instead, and I felt he was unduly influenced by the opinions of one or two very vocal people. And it was a pretty important matter, too, because our design department had come up with a range of materials that would entail radically changing the manufacturing process. We agreed to go ahead with it, but we were taking a real risk.
Speaker 2
Well, we once had a meeting about how to get raw materials exactly when we needed them: you see, sometimes they’d come in very soon after we’d placed an order, and would fill all our storage space, and at other times production would have to stop because we’d run out of what we needed. I reckoned that we should renegotiate the agreement we had with the company concerned, to build in a time-scale, And that was what we decided to do, but it turned out that in fact they weren’t really interested, because in their terms we were too small a customer Oddly enough, one of our purchasing assistants knew about this, but hadn’t been invited to the meeting. Still, it helped us when we drew up the agreement with o different firm,
Speaker 3
The company had recently been taken over, and we were selling in overseas markets for the first time. A new department was set up, which a number of people moved into from domestic sales. But they simply weren’t up to the new demands. For instance, they weren’t aware of cultural differences in how people negotiate, and as a result, our foreign sales just weren’t happening. So we had a meeting about how to get the input we needed, and the outcome was that we decided to find a company that could provide an in-house seminar for us. The trouble was, some people had made up their minds about the best method before the meeting and though it was all very polite, they just ignored what the others said. Honestly, I was pretty annoyed,
Speaker 4
I wish everyone who chaired a meeting was trained in how to do iL For one thing, they really ought to make sure everyone gets the chance to say what they think, because otherwise people start wondering if there’s any point in having a meeting, and that can be bad for morale. I was once in a project group, and we had a meeting to consider improvements to the way one particular division was structured, Well, the Chief Executive decided to attend, which wasn’t a good idea, because the project leader, who was chairing the meeting, kept asking the CE what he thought, so some people more or less gave up, It’s not that any of the project group particularly disagreed with the decisions, but they felt their opinions weren’t being taken seriously.
Speaker 5
Our board of directors was in talks with one of our competitors about amalgamating, and the Managing Director called a meeting of the workforce to explain the implications. He started by saying that the synergies in the new relationship would mean we could cut costs, particularly in bulk purchasing of supplies, and anyone whose job disappeared would be offered retraining, But people didn’t believe him and thought there would be mass redundancies. It got completely out of hand. Everyone was determined to have their say, people were shouting, and eventually the MD gave up and walked out. It was the most chaotic meeting I’ve ever attended, but at least we all felt a bit better for having let off steam! In fact demand for our products rose, and nobody was laid off after all,