Nothing succeeds in business books like the study of success. The current business-book boom was launched in 1982 by Tom Peters

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问题     Nothing succeeds in business books like the study of success. The current business-book boom was launched in 1982 by Tom Peters and Robert Waterman with In Search of Excellence. The trend has continued with a succession of experts and would-be experts who promise to distil the essence of excellence into three(or five or seven)simple rules.
    The Three Rules is a self-conscious contribution to this type of writing; it even includes a bibliography of " success studies". Michael Raynor and Mumtaz Ahmed work for a consultancy, Deloitte, that is determined to turn itself into more of a thought-leader and less a corporate repairman. They employ all the tricks of the success books. They insist that their conclusions are " measurable and actionable"—guides to behaviour rather than analysis for its own sake. Success authors usually serve up vivid stories about how exceptional businesspeople stamped their personalities on a company or rescued it from a life-threatening crisis. Messrs Raynor and Ahmed are happier chewing the numbers: they provide detailed appendices on "calculating the elements of advantage" and "detailed analysis".
    The authors spent five years studying the behaviour of their 344 "exceptional companies" , only to come up at first with nothing. Every hunch(直觉)led to a blind alley and every hypothesis to a dead end. It was only when they shifted their attention from how companies behave to how they think that they began to make sense of their voluminous material.
    Management is all about making difficult tradeoffs in conditions that are always uncertain and often fast-changing. But exceptional companies approach these tradeoffs with two simple rules in mind, sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously. First: better before cheaper. Companies are more likely to succeed in the long run if they compete on quality or performance than on price. Second: revenue before cost. Companies have more to gain in the long run from driving up revenue than by driving down costs.
    Most success studies suffer from two faults. There is "the halo(光环)effect" , whereby good performance leads commentators to attribute all manner of virtues to anything and everything the company does. These virtues then suddenly become vices when the company fails. Messrs Raynor and Ahmed work hard to avoid these mistakes by studying large bodies of date over several decades. But they end up embracing a different error: stating the obvious. Most businesspeople will not be surprised to learn that it is better to find a profitable niche(隙缝市场)and focus on boosting your revenues than to compete on price and cut your way to success. The difficult question is how to find that profitable niche and protect it. There, The Three Rules is less useful.
How does The Three Rules differ from other success books according to the passage?

选项 A、It focuses on the behaviour of exceptional businessmen.
B、It bases its detailed analysis on large amounts of data.
C、It offers practicable advice to businessmen.
D、It draws conclusions from vivid examples.

答案B

解析 事实细节题。第二段倒数第二句提到,研究成功学的作者通常会讲述一些生动的故事,接下来定位句指出,雷纳和艾哈迈德则更喜欢琢磨数字:他们在“计算优势元素”和“详细分析”两章中给出了详细的附录。第三段首句又指出,该书作者花了五年的时间研究了344家杰出公司的运营状况。由此可知,此书详细的分析是基于海量的数据,这是它与其他成功学书籍的不同之处,故答案为B)。
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