There is a never-ending supply of business leaders telling us how we can, and must, do more. John Bernard offers breathless advi

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问题     There is a never-ending supply of business leaders telling us how we can, and must, do more. John Bernard offers breathless advice on conducting " Business at the Speed of Now". Michael Port tells salesmen how to "Book Yourself Solid". And in case you thought you might be able to grab a few moments to yourself, Keith Ferrazzi warns that you must "Never Eat Alone".
    【F1】Yet when it comes to the biggest problem in the business world, the key is not too little but too much—too many distractions and interruptions, too many things done for the sake of form, and altogether too much busyness. The Dutch seem to believe that an excess of meetings is the biggest devourer of time. However, a study last year by the McKinsey Global Institute suggests that it is e-mails: it found that highly skilled office workers spend more than a quarter of each working day writing and responding to them.
    【F2】Which of these thorns of modern business life is worse remains open to debate, but what is clear is that office workers are on a treadmill of pointless activity. Managers allow meetings to drag on for hours. Workers generate e-mails because it requires little effort and no thought. An entire management industry exists to spin the treadmill ever faster.
    All this "doing more" is making it harder to focus on real work.【F3】In 2012 Gloria Mark of the University of California deprived 13 people in the IT business of e-mail for five days and studied them intensively to find that people without it concentrated on tasks for longer and experienced less stress.
    It is high time that we tried a different strategy—"doing less and thinking more". The most obvious beneficiaries of thinking more would be creative workers—the very people who are supposed to be at the heart of the modern economy. In the early 1990s Mihaly Csikszentmi-halyi, a psychologist, asked 275 creative types if he could interview them for a book he was writing. A third did not bother to reply at all and another third refused to take part.【F4】Creative people’s most important resource is their time—particularly big chunks of uninterrupted time— and their biggest enemies are those who try to nibble away at it with e-mails or meetings.
    Managers themselves could benefit.【F5】Those at the top are best employed thinking about strategy rather than operations—about whether the company is doing the right thing rather than whether it is sticking to its plans. Bill Gates, when he was in charge of Microsoft, used to take two "think weeks" a year when he would lock himself in an isolated cottage.
    Doing more has been producing negative returns for some time now. It is time to try the far more radical strategy of doing less and thinking more.
【F5】

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答案高层管理者被雇用,目的在于让他们进行策略思考,而非业务操作——在于考虑公司的规划既定方案是否正确,而非公司是否在遵照既定方案行事。

解析 该句是一个复合句,句子的主干是Those at the top are best employed…。根据上下文可以确定those指代的是前面提到的“managers”,所以those at the top就可以译为“高层管理者”。而该句的难点在于理解“thinking about…”所充当的句子成分,通过分析上下文可知,这一现在分词结构在该句中充当目的状语,所以可以译为“目的是来思考……”,而about之后又连接了两个含有“rather than”的并列成分,可以把这两个并列成分翻译为结构相同的“在于……,而非……”。
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