Marketers like to work on the demand side—take what’s in demand, make it cheaper, run a lot of ads, make a profit. If you can in

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问题     Marketers like to work on the demand side—take what’s in demand, make it cheaper, run a lot of ads, make a profit. If you can increase demand for what you have already made, a lot of problems will take care of themselves. It’ s the promise made by the typical marketing organization: Give us money, and we’ll increase demand.
    There’s an overlooked alternative. If you can offer a scarce and coveted good or service that others can’t, you win. What is both scarce and in demand? Things that are difficult: difficult to conceive, to convey, and to make. Sometimes difficult even, at first, to sell—maybe an unpopular idea or a product that’s ahead of its time. In fact, just about the only thing that is not available in unlimited supply in an ever more efficient, connected world is the product of difficult work.
    It’s no longer particularly difficult to run a complex factory. There are people across the globe able to do it more cheaply than you. Commoditization doesn’ t apply only to making and selling cheap goods. Almost everything they teach in business school is easy to do. It’s easy to do the options pricing model. Providing audit services isn’t difficult. Neither is running a high-traffic website. Amazon will do it for you for pennies on the dollar.
    With a lack of difficulty comes more choice, more variation, and, yes, lower prices. And so consumers of every stripe are jaded. This puts huge pressure on organizations, because the race to the bottom demands that they either do all this easy work faster or do it cheaper than they did it yesterday. And there’s not a lot of room to do either one. The only refuge from the race to the bottom? Difficult work. Your only alternative is to create something scarce, something valuable, something that people will pay more for.
    What’s difficult? Creating beauty is difficult, whether it’s the tangible beauty of a brilliant innovation or the intangible essence of exceptional leadership. Beauty exists in an elegant and novel approach to a problem. Maybe it’ s captured in a simple device that works intuitively, reliably, and efficiently or in an effective solution—a "beautiful" solution—to an organizational dysfunction. And it exists in the act of connecting with and leading people.
    Leading changes is difficult. It’s difficult to find, hire, and retain people who are eager and able to change the status quo. It’s difficult to stick with a project that everyone seems to dislike. It’s difficult to motivate a team of people who have been lied to or had their spirits dashed.
    People who can do difficult work will always be in demand. And yet our default is to do the easy work, busy work, and work that only requires activity, not real effort or guts. That’s true of individuals, and also true of companies. That’s because we regard our role as cranking out average stuff for average people, pushing down price, and, at best, marginally improving value. That used to be the way to grow an organization.
    No longer. The world will belong to those who can create something scarce, not something cheap. The race to the top has just begun.
The underlined phrase "a team of people" in paragraph 6 refers to

选项 A、leaders.
B、producers.
C、marketers.
D、consumers.

答案B

解析 本题考查根据上下文猜测词义。答案信息来源在第六段首句,它指出领导改变很难。其余内容通过三个同样结构的句子,从生产者角度说明在改变过程中可能遇到的困难,包括:寻找合适的人才;无惧外界的眼光;激发情绪受创的团队。由此可知,“a team of people”指的生产者,他们“受骗”(have been lied to)指的是他们受到营销人员需求分析的蒙蔽,一味追求需求量的增加;他们“情绪受创”(had their spirits dashed)是说直逼底限的成本削减使他们元气大伤,所以B选项(producers)为正确选项。
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