Welcome back to Business English Pod for today’s lesson on business English collocations for talking about strategy.
Think about the future of your company. How will it remain competitive? What are the long-term goals of your company? What does your company want to achieve? And how will it do that? These are just some of the questions that you might consider when you discuss business strategy. You need to think about what your business does well, how you can use your resources wisely, and what you need to do to grow the company. And when you discuss these ideas, you can use some common expressions, or combinations, which we call “collocations.”
But what is a collocation? A collocation is a group of words that sound natural together. They sound natural because native speakers commonly use them. And you can sound natural too if you learn these collocations. For example, you can say “implement a plan.” That sounds natural. But how about “do a plan?” Well, that’s not a common collocation and so it doesn’t sound natural.
As you listen to the conversation in this lesson, try to pick out some of these collocations and we’ll discuss them later in the debrief.
In the dialog, we’ll hear Anne, Jenny, and Max, three executives at a food company called Healthy Organics. They are discussing their strategy for developing the company into the future. They’ll talk about some important strategic decisions, and they’ll use lots of useful expressions.
Listening Questions
1. According to Anne, why do they need to broaden their product offerings?
2. What does Jenny think they need to build on?
3. What specifically does Anne want to figure out for the next three to five years?
Download: Podcast MP3
very good