Star Performers

A. The difference between companies is people. With capital and technology in plentiful supply, the critical resource for companies in the knowledge era will be human talent. Companies full of achievers will, by definition, outperform organisations of plodders. Ergo, compete ferociously for the best people. Poach and pamper stars; ruthlessly weed out second-raters.

B. The point was illuminated in brilliant relief by Enron, whose leaders, as a New Yorker article called ‘The Talent Myth’ entertainingly related, were so convinced of their own cleverness that they never twigged that collective intelligence is not the sum of a lot of individual intelligence. In fact, in a profound sense, the two are opposites. Enron believed in stars, noted author Malcolm Gladwell, because they didn’t believe in systems. But companies don’t just create: ‘they execute and compete and coordinate the efforts of many people, and the organisations that are most successful at that task are the ones where the system is the star’. The truth is that you can’t win the talent wars by hiring stars – only lose it.

C. Group performance suffered as a result of tensions and resentment by rivals within the team. One respondent likened hiring a star to an organ transplant. The new organ can damage others by hogging the blood supply; other organs can start aching or threaten to stop working or the body can reject the transplants altogether, he said. ‘You should think about it very carefully before you do a transplant to a healthy body,’ said, investors punished the offender by selling its stock. This is ironic since the motive for importing stars was often a suffering share price in the first place. Shareholders evidently believe that the company is overpaying, the hiree is cashing in on a glorious past rather than preparing for a glowing present, and a spending spree is in the offing.

D. The result of mass star hirings as well as individual ones seems to confirm such doubts. Look at County NatWest and Barclays de Zoete Wedd, both of which hired teams of stars with loud fanfare to do great things in investment banking in the 1990s. Both failed dismally. Everyone accepts the cliche that people make the organization.>> Form đăng kí giải đề thi thật IELTS 4 kĩ năng kèm bài giải bộ đề 100 đề PART 2 IELTS SPEAKING quý đang thi (update hàng tuần) từ IELTS TUTOR

E. That will be no surprise to those familiar with systems thinking. W Edwards Deming used to say that there was no point in beating up on people when 90 per cent of performance variation was down to the system within which they worked. Consistent improvement, he said, is a matter not of raising the level of individual intelligence.

F. Significantly, Thierry Henry, Patrick Vieira and Robert Pires are much bigger stars than when Arsenal bought them, their value (in all senses) enhanced by the Arsenal system. At Chelsea, by contrast, the only context is the stars themselves – managers with different outlooks come and go every couple of seasons. There is no settled system for the stars to blend into. The Chelsea context has not only not added value, it has subtracted it: th

e side is less than the sum of its exorbitantly expensive parts. Even Real Madrid’s galacticos, the most extravagantly gifted on the planet, are being outperformed by less talented but better-integrated Spanish sides. In football, too, stars improve through systems.

G. So if not by hiring stars, how do you compete in the war for talent? You grow your own. This worked for investment managers, where some companies were not only better at creating stars but also at retaining them. Because they had a much more sophisticated view of the interdependent relationship between star and system, they kept them longer without resorting to the arbitrary treatment so destructive to rivals.

Questions 1-4
Which paragraph contains the following information? A-G.
NB You may use any letter more than once.

1. One example from non-commerce/business settings that better systems win bigger stars.
2. One failed company that believes stars rather than the system.
3. One suggestion that the author made to acquire employees than to win the competition nowadays.
4. One metaphor to human medical anatomy that illustrates the problems of hiring stars.

Questions 5-8
YES/NO/NOT GIVEN

1. McKinsey who wrote The War for Talent had not expected the huge influence made by this book.
2. Economic condition becomes one of the factors which decide whether or not a country would prefer to hire foreign employees.
3. The collapse of Enron is caused totally by an unfortunate incident instead of company's management mistake.
4. Football clubs that focus making stars in a system setting are better than simply collecting stars.>> IELTS  TUTOR  hướng  dẫn PHÂN TÍCH ĐỀ THI 30/5/2020 IELTS WRITING TASK 2 (kèm bài sửa HS đạt 6.5)

Questions 10-13
Complete the following summary of the paragraphs of Reading Passage

An investigation carried out on 1000 _____.
Participants of a survey by Harvard Business Review found a company hire a 10. ______ has negative effects. For instance, they behave considerably worse in a new team than in the 11. ______ that they used to be. They move faster than wall street and increase their 12. ______. Secondly, they faced rejections or refuse from those 13. ______ within the team. Lastly, the one who made mistakes had been punished by selling his/her stock share.