2. 职称英语
  3. (1) The more responsibility you take on at work and in life, the more often y

(1) The more responsibility you take on at work and in life, the more often y

游客2024-11-09  1
问题    (1) The more responsibility you take on at work and in life, the more often you face gray-area problems. These are situations where usually you have done a lot of hard work, on your own and often with other people, to understand a problem or a situation. You’ve assembled all the data, information, and expert advice you can reasonably get. You’ve analyzed everything carefully. But critical facts are still missing, and people you know and trust disagree about what to do. And, in your own mind, you keep going back and forth about what is really going on and about the right next steps. These problems come in all shapes and sizes. What they all have in common, whether they are major or minor, is how we experience them. But how do we resolve them?
   (2) Gray areas are particularly risky today because of the seductive power of analytical technique. Many of the hard problems now facing managers and companies require sophisticated techniques for analyzing vast amounts of information. It is tempting to think that if you can just get the right information and use the right analytics, you can make the right decision. It can also be tempting to hide out from tough decisions or disguise the exercise of power by telling other people that the numbers tell the whole story and there is no choice about what to think or do. But serious problems are usually gray. By themselves, tools and techniques won’t give you answers. You have to use your judgment and make hard choices.
   (3) These choices often come with serious emotional and psychological risks. When you face really hard decisions, there is no way to escape the personal responsibility of choosing, committing, acting, and living with the consequences. An MBA student presciently described this challenge by saying, "I don’t want to be a businessman claiming to be a decent human being. I want to be a decent human being claiming to be a businessman. "
   (4) So how do you deal with these choices and risks if you are facing a hard gray-area decision and don’t want to bypass your basic human obligations? The challenge is to see yourself as "the other" , as one of the outsiders or victims, and not as the insider, the decision maker, the dominant party. And the harder challenge is to grasp and feel the experience of the other in a way that vividly highlights your core obligations as a human being.
   (5) A practical way to do this is to spend a few moments trying to answer a very old question. It was articulated by Hillel the Elder, the ancient Hebrew philosopher and theologian. He spoke with a man who was willing to convert to Judaism but only on one condition: that Hillel explain the entire Torah to him during the time that he could stand on one foot. Hillel met the challenge easily. He simply said, "That which is hateful unto you, do not do to your neighbor. That is the whole Torah. The rest is commentary. Go and study it. "
   (6) The striking word here is "hateful". Hillel is asking us to pay attention to what we would really care about, deeply and urgently, if we were in another person’s situation. In practice, this means finding ways to ask yourself and others what you would be thinking and feeling if you were among the people hit hardest by the decision you might make. Try to imagine how you would react if your parents or children or some other loved ones were in this vulnerable position.
   (7) The familiar version of Hillel’s guidance is the Golden Rule: "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. " In the West, most people view this precept as a teaching of Christian religion, which relegates it to occasional sermons in certain houses of worship. But that view misses the full force of the question Hillel wants us to ask. The Golden Rule isn’t simply a precept of Christianity. Versions of it appear in almost every major religion. Some philosophers have argued that the Golden Rule is part of the foundation of important moral theories. And it is easy to hear it echoed in everyday, practical moral guidance, such as the Native American recommendation to "walk a mile in the other person’s shoes".
   (8) Dismissing the Golden Rule as Sunday sermonizing, rather than seeing it as an almost universal humanist insight, is a serious mistake. The moral imagination is basically a secular version of it. And Hillel’s version—which asks what we would find hateful—has a sharp edge. This question has endured for two millennia because it prods our dormant moral imaginations. It pushes us to think imaginatively and sympathetically about the experiences of others as a way of understanding what our core human obligations require in a particular situation.
   (9) Asking the question is valuable, but awakening your moral imagination on your own is hard. This is another reason why process—working with and through others in the right ways—is so important. That’s why it is particularly valuable for managers and teams working on gray-area problems to find ways to escape their organizational bubbles and hear directly from people whose livelihoods and lives will be affected by their decision or from people who can represent their experience in direct, concrete, forceful ways. Unless you find a way to do this, you may unwittingly buy into Joseph Stalin’s observation that "a single death is a tragedy: a million deaths is a statistic," and harden yourself to individual hardships and tragedies by focusing on statistical aggregates.
   (10) Another approach is to ask someone to play the role of the outsider and victim and to do so as vividly and persuasively as they can, so everyone else hears at least some version of the urgent, basic needs of the people a gray-area decision will affect. This approach is sometimes described as making sure there is a "barbarian" at every meeting—someone who will speak awkward truths clearly and urgently.
   (11) All these tactics are ways of working hard to awaken your moral imagination. They remind us, in effect: Don’t think your position in society or in an organization exempts you from basic human duties. Don’t get trapped in your own interests, experiences, judgments, and ways of seeing the world. Do everything you can to escape from your egocentric prison. Try hard, on your own and with others, to imagine how you would feel and what you would really want and need if you were actually that person. [br] Which type of people do you think this passage is addressed to?
选项 A、Businessmen.
B、Common people.
C、People with high social status.
D、Corporation leaders.
答案 D
解析 主旨大意题。本题考查的是作者的写作对象，需阅读全文后进行作答。第二段提到，现今很多公司经理和企业面临的困难问题需要使用复杂的技术来分析大量信息才能解决。第三段又以MBA学生为例，提示这篇文章是写给商业领域工作者的。第四段提到，假如你正面临一个艰难的“灰色地带”决定，而又不想无视你身为人类的基本义务的话，你要把自己看作一个局外人或受害者，而不是局内人、决策者。第九段第三句再次提到，对那些处理“灰色地带”问题的经理和团队来说，应该如何使用“黄金法则”。由此可推断，这篇文章的写作对象是商业人士，并且是身居高位、具有决策权力的商界领导者，故D为答案。
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