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Words coming in and out of fashion in business.
Businesses exist to make money. New products are needed, and in order to
develop successful new products we have focus
groups - a number of ordinary people who are brought together
to discuss what they want and how it can be achieved. Focus groups are
held these days about everything. What colour should represent the
‘new’ Conservative Party in Britain: should it stick its traditional
blue or should it change to purple? Should the party change its name?
Shops need customers, more and more of them if they are to increase
profits. There’s a new word - footfall
- which means the number of people who walk into a shop. And the aim
is to increase footfall.
Businessmen and women seek power. So they have power
lunches, power dinners and
even power breakfasts, to
show that work never stops! And they go in for power
dressing. Women are particularly likely to dress in this way
if they have broken through the glass ceiling,
a barrier which is perceived by many as preventing women from
reaching most of the top jobs in the country.
Companies used to worry about absenteeism
- people who didn’t bother to go in to work. But now many
employees are afraid of losing their jobs, so they work excessively long
hours in order to be seen to be working. This has been called presenteeism.
Some good companies are discouraging this, as it leads to stress and
poor performance. It’s thought that people like to get out of their
formal work clothes, and so an American concept that is becoming popular
in Britain is that of dress down
Fridays
or casual Fridays when employees
are supposed to go to work in informal clothes!
Perhaps the word that typifies many people’s attitude to business is fat
cats - people who run companies and who earn enormous amounts
of money. If fat cats lose their
jobs, they often get even larger amounts of money in compensation, which
they pocket or trouser;
this is sometimes called a golden farewell,
to distinguish it from the golden handshake
they probably got when they were offered the job in the first place.
If all this talk of work is too much for you, we now have downshifters,
who are the opposite of the yuppies
of the 80s. They believe that time is more important than money and it
is better to work less and have less money and be happy than to work
more and have more money but be unhappy. So they cut out unnecessary
spending and have a simpler lifestyle. Perhaps ironically, you’ve got
to be fairly well-off before you can afford to do this!
GLOSSARY
seek:
look for
well-off:
prosperous, having plenty of money.
Source:
New English Digest - Author:
Gwyneth
Fox
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