Picture a typical MBA lecture theatre twenty years ago. In it the majority of students will have conformed to the standard model

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问题     Picture a typical MBA lecture theatre twenty years ago. In it the majority of students will have conformed to the standard model of the time; male, middle class and Western. Walk into a class today, however, and you’ll get a completely different impression. For a start, you will now see plenty more women—the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, for example, boasts that 40% of its new enrolment is female. You will also see a wide range of ethnic groups and nationals of practically every country.
    It might be tempting, therefore, to think that the old barriers have been broken down and equal opportunity achieved. But, increasingly, this apparent diversity is becoming a mask for a new type of conformity. Behind the differences in sex, skin tones and mother tongues, there are common attitudes, expectations and ambitions which risk creating a set of clones among the business leaders of the future.
    Diversity, it seems, has not helped to address fundamental weaknesses in business leadership. So what can be done to create more effective managers of the commercial world? According to Valerie Gauthier, associate dean at HEC Paris, the key lies in the process by which MBA programmes recruit their students. At the moment candidates are selected on a fairly narrow set of criteria such as prior academic and career performance, and analytical and problem solving abilities. This is then coupled to a school’s picture of what a diverse class should look like, with the result that passport, ethnic origin and sex can all become influencing factors. But schools rarely dig down to find out what really makes an applicant succeed, to create a class which also contains diversity of attitude and approach-arguably the only diversity that, in a business context, really matters.
    Professor Gauthier believes schools should not just be selecting candidates from traditional sectors such as banking, consultancy and industry. They should also be seeking individuals who have backgrounds in areas such as political science, the creative arts, history or philosophy, which will allow them to put business decisions into a wider context.
    Indeed, there does seem to be a demand for the more rounded leaders such diversity might create. A study by Mannaz, a leadership development company, suggests that, while the bully-boy chief executive of old may not have been eradicated completely, there is a definite shift in emphasis towards less tough styles of management-at least in America and Europe. Perhaps most significant, according to Mannaz, is the increasing interest large companies have in more collaborative management models, such as those prevalent in Scandinavia, which seek to integrate the hard and soft aspects of leadership and encourage delegated responsibility and accountability.
What aspect of diversity does Valerie Gauthier think is most important?

选项 A、Age and educational background.
B、Social and professional experience.
C、Attitude and approach to business.
D、Ethnic origin and gender.

答案C

解析 文章提到巴黎高等商学院副院长瓦莱丽·戈捷说学校采用一套比较狭隘的方法选拔学生,没有探究什么才是真正使申请人成功的原因,没有创造一种包含多样化的态度及方法的商业课堂,后面破折号后解释到这个唯一的多样化是真正重要的,即多样化的态度和方法是最重要的,故选C。
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