题目内容
1 Do you ever feel as though you spend all your time in meetings？
2 Henry Mintzberg, in his book The Nature of Managerial Work, found that in large organizations managers spent 22 per cent of their time at their desk, 6 per cent on the telephone, 3 per cent on other activities, but a whopping 69 per cent in meetings.
3 There is a widely-held but mistaken belief that meetings are for "solving problems"and "making decisions". For a start, the number of people attending a meeting tends to be inversely roportional to their collective ability to reach conclusions and make decisions. And these are the least important elements.
4 Instead hours are devoted to side issues, playing elaborate games with one another. It seems, therefore, that meetings serve some purpose other than just making decisions.
5 All meetings have one thing in common: role-playing. The most formal role is that of chairman. He sets the agenda, and a good chairman will keep the meeting running on time and to the point. Sadly, the other, informal, role-players are often able to gain the upper hand. Chief is the "constant talker", who just loves to hear his or her own voice.
6 Then there are the "can't do" types who want to maintain the status quo. Since they have often been in the organization for a long time, they frequently quote historical experience as an excuse to block change: "It won't work, we tried that last year and it was a disaster. "A more subtle version of the "can't do" type, the "yes, but... ," has emerged recently. They have learnt about the need to sound positive, but they still can't bear to have things changed.
7 Another whole sub-set of characters are people who love meetings and want them to continue until 5: 30 p.m. or beyond. Irrelevant issues are their speciality. They need to call or attend meetings, either to avoid work, or to justify their lack of performance, or simply because they do not have enough to do.
8 Then there are the "counter-dependents", those who usually disagree with everything that is said, particularly if it comes from the chairman or through consensus from the group. These people need to fight authority in whatever form.
9 Meetings can also provide attenders with a sense of identification of their status and power. In this case, managers arrange meetings as a means of communicating to others the boundaries of their exclusive club: who is "in", and who is not.
10 Because so many meetings end in confusion and without a decision, another game is played at the end of meetings, called reaching a false consensus. Since it is important for the chairman to appear successful in problem-solving and making a decision, the group reaches a false consensus. Everyone is happy, having spent their time productively. The reality is that the decision is so ambiguous that it is never acted upon, or, if it is, there is continuing conflict, for Which another meeting is necessary.
11 In the end, meetings provide the opportunity for social intercourse, to engage in battle in front of our bosses, to avoid unpleasant or unsatisfying work, to highlight our social status and identity. They are, in fact, a necessary though not necessarily productive psychological sideshow. Perhaps it is our civilized way of moderating, if not preventing, change.
On role-playing, the passage seems to indicate that chairman
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Why did the early cities fail to grow as quickly as expected throughout the 18th century？
1 It is nothing new that English use is on the rise around the world, especially in business circles. This also happens in France, the headquarters of the global battle against American cultural hegemony. If French guys are giving in to English, something really big must be going on. And something big is going on.
2 Partly, it's that American hegemony. Didier Benchimol, CEO of a French e-commerce software company, feels compelled to speak English perfectly because the Internet software business is dominated by Americans. He and other French businessmen also have to speak English because they want to get their message out to American investors, possessors of the world's deepest pockets.
3 The triumph of English in France and elsewhere in Europe, however, may rest on something more enduring. As they become entwined with each other politically and economically, Europeans need a way to talk to one another and to the rest of the world. And for a number of reasons, they've decided upon English as their common tongue.
4 So when German chemical and pharmaceutical company Hoechst merged with French competitor Rhone-Poulenc last year, the companies chose the vaguely Latinate Aventis as the new company name — and settled on English as the company's common language. When monetary policymakers from around Europe began meeting at the European Central Bank in Frankfurt last year to set interest rates for the new Euroland, they held their deliberations in English. Even the European Commission, with 11 official languages and a traditionally French-speaking bureaucracy, effectively switched over to English as its working language last year.
5 How did this happen？ One school attributes English's great success to the sheer weight of its merit. It's a Germanic language, brought to Britain around the fifth century A. D. During the four centuries of French-speaking rule that followed Norman Conquest of 1066, the language morphed into something else entirely. French words were added wholesale, and most of the complications of Germanic grammar were shed while few of the complications of French were added. The result is a limguage with a huge vocabulary and a simple grammar that can express most things more efficiently than either of its parents. What's more, English has remained ungoverned and open. to change — foreign words, coinages, and grammatical shifts — in a way that French, ruled by the purist Academie Francaise, had not.
6 So it's a swell language, especially for business. But the rise of English over the past few centuries clearly owes at least as much to history and economies as to the language's ability to economically express the concept win-win. What happened is that the competition first Latin, then French, then briefly, German — faded with the waning of the political, economic, and military fortunes of, respectively, the Catholic Church, France, and Germany. All along, English was increasing in importance: Britain was the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, and London the world's most important financial centre, which made English a key language for business. England's colonies around the world also made it the language with the most global reach. And as that former colony the U.S. rose to the status of the world's preeminent political, economic, military, and cultural power, English became the obvious second language to learn.
7 In the 1990s more and more Europeans found themselves forced to use English. The last generation of business and government leaders who hadn't studied English in school was leaving the stage. The European Community was adding new members and evolving from a paper-shuffling club into a serious regional government that would need a single common language if it were ever to get anything done. Meanwhile, economic barriers between European nations have been disappearing,
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