题型：阅读理解 题类：常考题 难易度：困难
江苏省南通市通州区2017-2018学年高二下学期英语期末调研测试卷
There are two basic modes of judgment: criticism and praise. The former consists of identifying a subject's flaws; the latter of noting its worthwhile qualities.
Often, the greater intellectual challenge — as a reader, as a viewer, and as a manager — is to recognize when something is truly great.
“Managers in particular seem to have a hard time with this” said Adam Grant, the author of Originals: How Nonconformists Move the World, in a lecture at the Aspen Ideas Festival. Grant points to the work of his former student Justin M. Berg, who is now a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford University. While at college, Berg studied circus performers who were trying to make their circus world-famous. Berg asked the performers to submit videos of their works and then asked the artists themselves, circus managers, and regular audience members to evaluate them. He wanted to know, between the performers and the managers, who could predict which acts would most resonate (共鸣) with the audience members.
What Berg found is that the artists themselves were terrible judges of their own works. “On average,” Grant explained, “when they looked at 10 videos, they ranked their own videos two spots too high.” The reason, he said, is that “they've fallen in love with their own work.” The circus managers, however, are too negative about these works,” Grant .said, “and they commit a ton of false negatives, rejecting really promising ideas.”
So why is this? Why do managers tend to find flaws, not reasons for praise? To answer that, Grant turns to the example of Seinfeld, an American sitcom (情景喜剧), which was rejected by director after director at NBC. Grant said, “You know, I realize that this show makes no sense and it's really about nothing, and you can't identify with any one of the characters. But it made me laugh and that's what a sitcom is supposed to do.” The managers, by contrast, were too focused on whether Seinfeld looked like what had succeeded in the past to recognize its novel brilliancy. Years of experience had trained them to believe that a certain type of show would be successful, and prejudiced them against something that broke that mold.
But Grant says it wasn't just experience that prevented those managers from appreciating Seinfeld. It was also that they had bad motivation. As he explained, “If you are a manager and commit a false positive, you are going to embarrass yourself, and potentially ruin your career.” Managers, he says, -are terrified of committing false positives, meaning saying something will be a hit.
False negatives, by contrast, present little costs. “If you reject a great idea,” Grant said, “most of the time, no one will ever know.'' Managers like to make safe bets and don't mind the invisible losses.
Berg's work was again inspiring. Berg found that there was one group whose nature did line up well with what was actually be popular with audiences: other circus artists. “They were the best forecasters by far,” said Grant. “Unlike the artists themselves, the peers could take a step back” and see a work's flaws. But, unlike managers, the peers “were also really invested in the creative process” which enabled them to recognize when something was novel and worth the risk.
One conclusion from this would be to free managers from certain decision-making processes. But since that's not typically possible, perhaps instead managers can be taught to think like peers, and Berg found that that can be done relatively easily. “All he did,” Grant explained, “was that he asked managers to spend five minutes brainstorming about their own ideas before they judged other people's ideas.” “That”, Grant said, “was enough to open their minds. Because when they came in to select ideas, they were looking for reasons to say no. Get them into a brainstorming mindset first, and now they're not thinking evaluatively but creatively.”
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