"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 cult of the celebrity chief executive seemed to demand bossly narcissism, as evidence that a firm was being led by an all-conquering hero. Narcissus in Greek myth met a nasty end, of course. And in recent years, boss-worship has come to be seen as bad for business. In his management besteller, 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 self-effacing, thoughtful, monkish 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 Chatterjee and Donald Hambriek, of Pennsylvania State University, examined narcissism in the upper echelons of 105 firms in the computer, and software industries. To do this, they had to solve a practical problem: studies of narcissism have hitherto 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 co-operation 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. How does that affect a firm 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 and leverage; they carried out more and bigger mergers and acquisitions; and their results were both more extreme (more big wins or big losses) and more volatile than those of firms run by their humbler peers. For shareholders, that could be good or bad. The best title for the text may be ______.
A. It’s All About Me: Is the Boss an All-conquering Hero.
B. The Brand of Me: Does the Boss in Your Corporation Have Narcissism.
C. Narcissistic Boss: To Be Or Not To Be.
D. The Studies of Narcissism.
To Journalists, three of anything makes a trend. So after three school shootings in six days, speculation about an epidemic of violence in American classrooms was inevitable, and wrong. Violence in schools has fallen by half since the mid-1990s; children are more than 100 times more likely to be murdered outside the school walls than within them. On September 27th a 53-year-old petty criminal, Duane Morrison, walked into a school in Bailey, Colorado, with two guns. He took six girls hostage, molested some of them, and killed one before committing suicide as police stormed the room. And on September 29th a boy brought two guns into his school in Cazenovia, Wisconsin. Prosecutors say that 15-year-old Eric Hainstock may have planned to kill several people. But staff acted quickly when they saw him with a shotgun, calling the police and putting the school into "lock-down". The head teacher, who confronted him in a corridor, was the only one killed. October 2nd a 32-year-old milk-truck driver, Charles Roberts, entered a one-room Amish school in Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania. He lined the girls up, tied their feet and, after an hour, shot them, killing at least five. He killed himself as police broke into the classroom. What to make of such horrors Some experts see the Colorado and Pennsylvania cases as an extreme manifestation of a culture of violence against women. Both killers appeared to have a sexual motive, and both let all the boys in the classroom go free. But it is hard to infer from such unusual examples, and one must note that violence against women is less than half what it was in 1995. Other experts see all three cases as symptomatic of a change in the way men commit suicide. Helen Smith, a forensic psychologist, told a radio audience "men are deciding to take their lives, "and they’re not going alone anymore. They’re taking people down with them." True, but not very often. Gun-control enthusiasts think school massacres show the need for tighter restrictions. It is too easy, they say, for criminals such as Mr. Morrison and juveniles such as Mr. Hainstock to obtain guns. Gun enthusiasts draw the opposite conclusion: that if more teachers carried concealed handguns, they could shoot potential child-killers before they kill. George Bush has now called for a conference on school violence. Will it unearth anything new, or valuable After the Columbine massacre in 1999, the FBI produced a report on school shooters. It concluded that it was impossible to draw up a useful profile of a potential shooter because "a great many adolescents who will never commit violent acts will show some of the behaviours on any checklist of warning signs.\ According to the passage, an epidemic of violence in American classrooms was inevitable in that ______.
A. three school shootings in six days make a trend.
B. children are less likely to be murdered outside the school walls than within them.
C. there is no limits to get a gun for children.
D. an epidemic of violence is not only in American classrooms but also in society.
The enlightenment needs rescuing, or so thinks Jonathan Israel, the pre-eminent historian of 17th-century Holland. In 2001 he published Radical Enlightenment. He now offers a second Volume with a third to come. (46) The three volumes will be the first comprehensive history of the Enlightenment for decades--and Mr. Israel’s groundbreaking interpretation looks set to establish itself as the one to beat.The period was once thought of as a glorious chapter in the history of mankind, a time when the forces of light (science, progress and tolerance) triumphed over the forces of darkness (superstition and prejudice). Today, the Enlightenment tends to be dismissed. (47)Post-modernists attack it for being biased, self-deceived and ultimately responsible for the worst in Western civilization. Post-colonialists accuse it of being Eurocentric, an apology for imperialism. Nationalist historians reject the idea of a coherent universal movement, preferring to talk about the English, French, even Icelandic Enlightenments.Mr. Israel has set himself the task oil repelling these critics and re-establishing the period as the defining episode in the liberation of man. His arguments are convincing. He contends that there were two Enlightenments, one Radical, and the other Moderate. The Radicals, inspired by Spinoza, were materialists, atheists and equalities. (48)The Moderates, who followed Locke and Newton, were conservative and more at home than the Radicals in the hierarchical and deeply religious world of 18th-century Europe. They advocated only a partial Enlightenment.In Mr. Israel’s opinion, the Radicals offered the only true Enlightenment, giving us democracy, equality, individual liberty and secular morality. The Moderates, on the other hand, have left an ambiguous and, in the end, harmful legacy. While promoting tolerance, they remained uncomfortable with the idea of universal equality. While advancing reason, they failed to divorce morality from religion and tried to rationalize faith. (49) Mr. Israel argues that for as long as historians treat the two wings of the Enlightenment as a single movement, they have misunderstood the phenomenon. Worst still, they supply today’s critics with the evidence they need to blacken the movement.This re-evaluation makes for an unfamiliar picture of the Enlightenment and its torchbearers. According to Mr. Israel, "enlightened values" were born not in England but in Holland, and he re-casts men such as Locke, Voltaire and even Hume, once thought of as champions of the party of light, as apologists for colonialism and enemies of equality. In addition, Mr. Israel would like his book to be studied beyond academia. In an ideal world everyone would be reading it. (50) His stupendous research and grasp of the sources are such that few will contest his core argument that the Enlightenment was a coherent, Europe-wide phenomenon, intellectual in origin, which represented a profound shift in the way that men thought about themselves and the world around them. 50