The following appeared in a memo from a vice president of a large highly diversified company Ten years ago our company had two new office buildings constructed as regional headquarters for two different regions The buildings were erected by two different

A vice president in his memorandum expresses his opinion that Alpha company should be used for the new construction site due to several reasons. More specifically, when instructed to construct the same office building as Zeta company, according to the vice president Alpha company achieved 30% less cost of building the offices and also the energy consumption of the Alpha building during these years is also less than Zeta building. Also, the workforce in Alpha is more stable than in Zeta. However, there are several assumptions made in the proccess of supporting the argument the most important of which are being examined in the paragraphs below.

The author in his way of backing up his argument that indeed the company should use Alpha construction company instead of Zeta is failing to take into consideration that the two construction sites are situated in two different regions. This indicates that the climate, the terrain and the working conditions may have been entirely different between these two construction sites. For example, consider that Zeta company had to build the office building in a rocky terrain with a little road infrastructure and the operations had to seize during winter due to heavy snowfall. This example, indicates that the conditions in the buiding construction site by Zeta company may have taken more money to build and also the costs of maintaining the offices due to poor roads may be higher. This consideration, undermines the assumption of the vice president that these two buildings had the same weather and climate conditions and therefore that Alpha is a more efficient company than Zeta.

Furthermore, the vice president states that the Zeta building has more energy consumption than the Alpha building and this is due to construction malfunctions by Zeta company. However, the energy consumption may be more not only from construction issues but from higher work load in Zeta building. For example, if the Zeta building is situated in a region were it is needed for the employees to work overtime and stay up late, the energy consumption from the lights, computer terminals and heating or cooling may be significantly larger than the Alpha building. Also, as mention in the paragraph above if the Zeta building is situated in a region with heavy winters then the energy consumption from heating the entire building may be larger than heating the Zeta building which may be placed in a region with less severe climate conditions. The above examples, undermine the argument made by the vice president and may lead to a change of the conclusion stating that Alpha construction company is better than Zeta.

Lastly, an unstated assumption the vice president is making is that the workforce on Zeta company is less or completely unstable when contrasted with the workforce of Alpha company and thus Alpha company is a better candidate for constructiong the new office building. However, we should take into consideration the possibility that the changing workforce of Zeta company, just because it is changing can achieve better results in order to stay in the company longer. Also, there is the issue of time, the vice president fails to give a specific time period in which the two constructions were finished. Therefore, there is also the possibility that the more unstable workforce of Zeta company to manage and finish the new work in shorter time than the Alpha company.

To sum up, in this essay the stated and unstated assumptions used by the vice president in order to support Alpha company were demonstrated through examples. The vice president should provide more evidence regarding the climate conditions, the work load and the time of construction in order to back up his assumptions.