题目内容

Since the late 1970s, in the face of a severe loss of market share in dozens of industries, manufacturers in the United States have been trying to improve productivity and therefore enhance their international competitiveness through costcuttig programs. (Cost-cutting here is defining the amount of labor constant.) However, from 1978 through 1982, productivity -- the value of goods manufactured divided by the amount of labor input -- did not improve; and while the results were better in the business upturn of the three years following, they ran 25 percent lower than productivity improvements during earlier, post-1945 upturns. At the sametime, it became clear the harder manufactures worked to implement cost-cutting, the more they lost their competitive edge.
With this paradox in mind, I recently visited 25 companies; it became clear to me that the cost-cutting approach to increasing productivity is fundamentally flawed. Manufacturing regularly observes a "40, 40, 20" rule. Roughly 40 percent of any manufacturing-based competitive advantage derives from long-term changes in manufacturing structure (decisions about the number, size, location, and capacity of facilities) and in approaches to materials. Another 40 percent comes from major changes in equipment and process technology. The final 20 percent rests on implementing conventional cost-cutting. This rule does not be tried. The well-known tools of this approach -- including simplifying jobs and retraining employees to work smarter, not harder -- do produce results. But the tools quickly reach the limits of what they can contribute.
Another problem is that the cost-cutting approach hinders innovation and discourages creative people. As Abernathy's study of automobile manufacturers has shown, an industry can easily be come prisoner of its own investment in cost-cutting techniques, reducing its ability to develop new products. And managers under pressure to maximize cost-cutting will resist innovation because they know that more fundamental changes in processes or systems will wreak havoc with the results on which they are measured. Production managers have always seen their job as one of minimizing costs and maximizing output. This dimension of performance has until recently sufficed as a basis of evaluation, but it has created a penny-pinching, mechanistic culture in most factories that has kept away creative managers.
Every company I know that has freed itself from the paradox has done so, in part, by developing and implementing a manufacturing strategy. Such a strategy facturing and implementing a manufacturing strategy. Such a strategy focuses on the manufacturing structure and on equipment and process technology. In one company a manufacturing strategy that allowed different areas of the factory to specialize in different markets replaced the conventional cost-cutting approach; within three years the company regained its competitive advantage. Together with such strategies, successful companies are also encouraging managers to focus on a wider set of objectives besides cutting costs. There is hope for manufacturing, but it clearly rests on a different way of managing.
The author of the passage is primarily concerned with ______.

A. summarizing a thesis
B. recommending a different approach
C. comparing points of view
D. making a series of predictions

查看答案
更多问题

Humans will take charge of their own evolution by______.

A. altering their genes
B. improving the species
C. detecting illness
D. developing biotechnology

SECTION C NEWS BROADCAST
Directions: In this section you will hear everything ONCE ONLY. Listen carefully and then answer the questions that follow. At the end of each news item, you will be given 10 seconds to answer the questions.
听力原文: Gunmen assassinated two Sunni Arabs involved in the drafting of Iraq's constitution Tuesday, another blow to U.S. and Iraqi efforts to draw members of the disaffected community away from the insurgency and into the political process.
Mijbil Issa, a committee member, Dhamin Hussein al-Obeidi, an adviser to the group, and their bodyguard died in a hail of gunfire from two vehicles as they left a restaurant in Baghdad's Karradah district, police said.
Issa, a prominent lawyer, was among 15 Sunni Arabs appointed last month to the 55-member constitutional committee—made up mostly of Shiites and Kunds—to give the Sunni minority a greater voice in building a new Iraq. Ten other Sunnis, including al-Obeidi, were named as advisers to the committee.
On Wednesday, a suicide attacker wearing an explosives belt detonated himself outside an army recruiting center in Baghdad, killing at least 10 people, police and army officials said. Dr. Muhannad Jawad from Yarmouk Hospital said 21 people were also injured.
Insurgents had threatened Sunnis who help draft the constitution, and two committee members resigned earlier because they feared for their lives. Issa was the first to be assassinated.
______ Sunnis were appointed as advisers to the constitutional committee.

A. 2
B. 10
C. 11
D. 12

In a controlled situation, children's ______ are regulated and recreated by art.

A. communication
B. immediate requirements
C. comprehension
D. emotions and reactions

What does the word "impart" (P.1) refers to?

A. Help
B. Give
C. Lose
D. Great

答案查题题库