A class review for the practical business English class on 22nd,Sep.

During this class, we were instructed with the concept of people’s positions in business world. Generally, there are three kinds of positions in the business world. They are leader, colleagues and assistant.

The leader is the final decision maker of a certain project, and is equipped with the authority to hire and fire staffs, that means your leader is in a higher place than you. As employee, people respect the leaders for their positions and power, even though they didn’t get used to their personality sometimes. And keep showing that kind of respect to the boss is crucial to an employee.

Colleagues are people who work together as a team group. In certain projects, people have to cooperate in order to tackle a task, in order to figure out several optional solutions, and offer their solutions to the boss. Despite of the differences in job distribution, the status of each member in a group is equal.

Assistant often refers to people who work for you but only in an auxiliary manner, he/she can help his/her employer in information gathering, schedule arrangement and paper works etc. But an assistant is neither an idea offer nor the decision maker in a project. Namely, assistant has the lowest position in these people.

In the discussion session, Mary gave us a topic of heard donation. Assuming Mary were going to donate her heart to a dying cardiac patient, but there are six candidates for this heart, both of them are in desperate need of a healthy heart to keep living. Then here comes to our mission to decide which one of them should be the recipient. They are a 57 years old Nobel Prize winner, a 12year old boy, a couple of twin sisters that both have highly recognized academic prospect, a single father(wife died in an accident) with three children and a single mother(unmarried) with four children.

This time I served as the chairperson in our discussion group. The first 25minutes were spent in settling down our objective. We need an agreed goal in this case. At first time, there are many offered ideas of what principles should we obey to make selections, these principles are mainly based on the further contribution of the saved life , kids and possibility of the patient to survive a heart transaction operation. But none of those ideas could serve as an objective. Since there are six people need Mary’s heart, the result we wanted is that Mary has more than six hearts to save all of them. Thus, we finally got a conclusion that we prefer to save as many lives as we can with only one heart. Of course, only one people of the six could be kept, but indirectly, we could save more. There are a single father and a single mother in the six, both of them have several kids. The kids could not survive if they lost their parent, or at least wouldn’t live a rich and healthy life. The single mother has the most kids, seems to be the optimal choice. But when take a all-sided consideration, we eliminated her for the reason that she lives in a slum where no guarantee exists for kids. It’s hard to tell whether her kids would grow up well educated, and even harder to predict whether her kids could survive the wild adolescence in a slum. Whereas, the single father with three kids seems to be more probable for meaningful and healthy lives, and the man has the financial power for the education fee of his kids. Therefore, after a short period of time spent on balancing these factors, we chose the father as the recipient. I have to confess that we made this choice our ignorance on what kind of business does the father’s working company K.G.B do.

After 40 minute of discussion, we made a choice and organized our objective and principles, then I gave a brief presentation to the whole class. It turns out who we chose as the recipient didn’t matter, what matters is that whether we take the donor’s opinion into consideration. Since it was Mary’s heart been donated, she was thought to be the boss, her emotion should be highly regarded, and that is what we were just told in the first half part during the class----respect the boss. Plus, we also fail to realize the existence of competitors, for there are two other groups also chose the single father as the survivor, we never thought about this and didn’t figure out a more convincing explanation that can make us the best project bidder.

In the class, Mary also told us how to reject a proposal or request and how to deal with other’s grumbles. I regard these as very useful interaction skills. However, what we’ve learnt is knowledge not practice. I have been considering how to adjust the knowledge into daily life, till now the feedback is very limited, I still don’t know how to keep a small talk going on in a natural way. The business world is wild in its own way, and even wilder than I thought after taking Mary’s class, because there are much more details we need to pay attention to. Not trying to deny the utility of this course, I believe the practical improvements in business English skills lays in more daily exercise.