"What’s the difference between God and Larry Ellison?" asks an old software industry joke. Answer: God doesn’t think he’s Larry

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问题     "What’s the difference between God and Larry Ellison?" asks an old software industry joke. Answer: God doesn’t think he’s Larry Ellison. The boss of Oracle is hardly alone among corporate chiefs in having a reputation for being rather keen on himself. Indeed, until the bubble burst and the public turned nasty at the start of the decade, the worship of the celebrity chief executive seemed to demand bossly narcissism, as evidence that a firm was being led by an all-conquering hero.
    Narcissus met a nasty end, of course. And in recent years, boss-worship has come to be seen as bad for business. In his management bestseller, "Good to Great", Jim Collins argued that the truly successful bosses were not the self-proclaimed stars who adorn the covers of Forbes and Fortune, but instead modest, thoughtful sorts who lead by inspiring example.
    A statistical answer may be at hand. For the first time, a new study, "It’s All About Me", to be presented next week at the annual gathering of the American Academy of Management, offers a systematic, empirical analysis of what effect narcissistic bosses have on the firms they run. The authors, Arijit Chat-terjee and Donald Hambrick, of Pennsylvania State University, examined narcissism in the upper rank of 105 firms in the computer and software industries.
    To do this, they had to solve a practical problem: studies of narcissism have relied on surveying individuals personally, something for which few chief executives are likely to have time or inclination. So the authors devised an index of narcissism using six publicly available indicators obtainable without the cooperation of the boss. These are: the prominence of the boss’s photo in the annual report; his prominence in company press releases; the length of his "Who’s Who" entry; the frequency of his use of the first person singular in interviews; and the ratios of his cash and non-cash compensation to those of the firm’s second-highest paid executive.
    Narcissism naturally drives people to seek positions of power and influence, and because great self-esteem helps your professional advance, say the authors, chief executives will tend on average to be more narcissistic than the general population. Messrs Chatterjee and Hambrick found that highly narcissistic bosses tended to make bigger changes in the use of important resources, such as research and development, or in spending; they carried out more and bigger mergers and acquisitions; and their results were both more extreme (more big wins or big losses) and more unstable than those of firms run by their humbler peers.
The study "It’s All About Me" is designed to_____.

选项 A、offer all-encompassing answers to the American Academy of Management
B、analyze the effect of selfishness on a boss as well as company employees
C、explore the relationship between a boss’ narcissism and business performance
D、test whether narcissism should be valued in the computer industry

答案C

解析 根据题干中的“It’s All About Me”可定位到第三段第二句。读懂该句是解答本题的关键。该句中的of what effect至句末为修饰analysis的后置定语,而of what effect...表明这是关于“自恋型老板对其管理的公司所产生的影响”的一个分析,C项与之意思相近,故为答案。
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