The pages of the Harvard Business Review are not usually populated by novelists. But Joseph Finder is just such a rarity. Recent

admin2014-06-20  45

问题     The pages of the Harvard Business Review are not usually populated by novelists. But Joseph Finder is just such a rarity. Recently, the HBR posted a fictitious case study by Mr. Finder on its website. Readers will now have a chance to comment: the most interesting contributions, as well as the remarks of several corporate grandees, will appear alongside the story in the printed version of the magazine in October.
    In the case study, Mr. Finder describes a dilemma facing Cheryl Tobin, the newly installed chief executive of a big aerospace firm. She starts to suspect that her colleagues have engaged in massive corruption to win contracts. Ms. Tobin is also a central character in Mr. Finder’s new book, Power Play, which was released earlier this week. In the novel, her main concern is not corruption but an executive retreat on a remote island that goes horribly wrong.
    A graduate of both Yale and Harvard, Mr. Finder took up novel-writing after flirting with a career at the CIA and taking a stab at journalism. He had written a non-fiction book about links between American businesses and the Soviet Union but had been unable to use some of the most fascinating material he had picked up, since his sources wanted it to remain off the record. So Mr. Finder wove those titbits into a political thriller instead. After three more novels on political themes, he decided to set his next book in the world of business.
    There are many novels set in offices and boardrooms. The appeal of Mr. Finder’s lies not in the majesty of the prose—they are airport novels, not Pulitzer candidates—but in the plausibility of their plots and the accuracy of their depiction of corporate life. "I’ve not seen anything that couldn’t happen, " says Skip Brandon, co-founder of Smith Brandon International, a corporate-intelligence company. "The business community is pretty interesting, with all sorts of characters which he brings to life with a level of realism people can relate to, " says Bill Teuber, of EMC, a data-storage company.
    Business journalism may provide plenty of facts and figures, Mr. Finder argues, but it seldom gives readers much of a feel for corporate life. Fiction, in his view, can provide a more accurate picture than anything found in newspapers or management literature. At any rate, Mr. Finder is convinced that corporate insiders talk more candidly to him than they do to reporters.
    He has found big companies remarkably willing to provide background material. For his book, Paranoia, he talked with high-ups at Apple, Cisco and Hewlett-Packard—a computer-maker whose subsequent involvement in a real-life case of corporate espionage may not have come as a surprise to Mr. Finder’s readers. For Killer Instinct, the company NEC helped him to understand what it was like to be an American working for a big Japanese electronics firm.
Which of the following statements is true?

选项 A、Novels provide a better insight into business than journalism.
B、Journalists can obtain more corporate information than novelist.
C、Mr. Finder’s readers are familiar with business scandals in big companies.
D、Mr. Finder’s novels are popular among big corporations.

答案A

解析 推理题。题目问的是“以下哪项是正确的?”。由文章第五段第二句“Fiction,in his view,can provide a more accurate pic—ture than anything found in newspapers or management literature.”可知:在他看来,比起报纸或管理文献,小说更能更准确的描述,这与A项内容相符。其它三个选项在文中均未提及。故选A。
转载请注明原文地址:https://kaotiyun.com/show/KwXd777K
0

最新回复(0)