2017年9月9日雅思阅读考试回忆及解析

　　C First, stardom doesn`t easily transfer from one organisation to another. In many cases, performance dropped sharply when high performers switched employers and in some instances never recovered. More of success than commonly supposed is due to the working environment--systems, processes, leadership, accumulated embedded learning that are absent in and can`t be transported to the new firm. Moreover, precisely because of their past stellar performance, stars were unwilling to learn new tricks and antagonised those (on whom they now unwittingly depended) who could teach them. So they moved, upping their salary as they did-36 per cent moved on within three years, fast even for Wall Street. Second, group performance suffered as result of tensions and resentment by rivals within the team. One respondent likened hiring a star to an organ transplant. The new organ can damage others by hogging the blood supply, other organs can start aching or threaten to stop working or the body can reject the transplant altogether, he said. “You should think about it very carefully before you do a transplant to a healthy body. ” Third, investors punished the offender by selling its stock. This ironic, since the motive for important stars was often a suffering share price in the first place. Shareholders evidently believe that the company is overpaying, the hire is cashing in on a glorious past rather than preparing for a glowing present, and a spending spree is in the offing.

　　D The result of mass star hirings as well as individual ones seem to conform such doubts. Look at County NatWest and Barclays de Zoete Wedd, both of which hired teams of stars with loud fanfare to do great things in investment banking in the 1990s. Both failed dismally. Everyone accepts the cliche that people make the organisation--but much more does the organisation make the people. When researchers studied the performance of fund managers in the 1990s, they discovered that just 30 per cent of variation in fund performance was due to the individual, compared to 70 per cent to the company-specific setting.

　　E That will be no surprise to those familiar wit systems thinking. W Edwards Deming used to say that there was no point in beating up on people when 90 per cent of performance variation was down to the system within which they worked. Consistent improvement, he said, is a matter not of raising the level of individual intelligence, but of the learning of the organisation as a whole. The star system is glamorous--for the new. But it rarely benefits the company that thinks it is working it. And the knock--on consequences indirectly affect everyone else too. As one internet response to Gladwell`s New Yorker article put it: after Enron, “the rest of corporate America is stuck with overpaid, arrogant, underachieving, and relatively useless talent. ”