There is an ongoing debate about whether leadership can be taught, and whether business schools, in particular, are teaching it.

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问题     There is an ongoing debate about whether leadership can be taught, and whether business schools, in particular, are teaching it. There are fair arguments on both sides, but I would broaden the discussion. Our entire education system, from elementary school to graduate school, is poorly constructed to teach young people leadership. Schools do many things well, but they often cultivate habits that can be detrimental to future leaders. Given that most of us spend 13-20 years in educational institutions, those habits can be hard to break.
    Consider first the emphasis schools have on authority. Schools are hierarchical: The teacher is the authority in the classroom. Principals or deans preside over teachers and professors. Seniors "rank" higher than juniors, and so on. In our years in the educational system, many of us become obsessed with hierarchy. We think we’re leaders if we’re the "boss" , and if we’re not the boss, we should simply do as we’re told. In reality, even the most senior people in organizations can’t rely solely on hierarchy, particularly given the much needed talents, experiences, and intelligence of the others who surround them. Leadership is an activity, not a position, a distinction explored deeply by Ron Heifetz in Leadership Without Easy Answers. Many great leaders like Gandhi and Nelson Mandela have led others, despite having little to no formal authority, and writers are now exploring methods for leading without formal authority. While some hierarchy may be needed, leaders who learn to lean too hard on formal authority often find themselves and their organizations frustrated, stunted, and stagnant.
    Schools also teach us to deal with information as if it is certain and unchanging, when there’s rarely a stable " right answer. " In my first job, I was constantly frustrated by the lack of guidance I received. If you gave me a textbook, I could learn almost anything. But in the workplace, there were no textbooks. Real world problems are complex. They evolve. They’re organizational and analytical. And success is often driven as much(Or more)by successful and rapid implementation as by developing the "correct" approach. Understanding that there’s rarely one right answer can make a person more adaptive , agile, and open to the thoughts of their peers. But that understanding is rarely cultivated through textbooks and multiple choice tests.
    Critically, these failures teach us to reflect and to ask questions—of ourselves and of others—so that we can learn and grow(one of life’s worst failures can be wasting a failure). And failure itself indicates that we are taking on challenging tasks and stretching the limits of our current capabilities. A lot of people are raising questions about the way business schools and corporations teach leadership, but we need to dramatically broaden the scope of that question. In a world that’s growing ever flatter and more complex, we need societies full of capable leaders. But the only way to raise those leaders properly is to structure our educational system—from elementary school through graduate school—to train them.
The purpose of taking the example of Gandhi and Nelson Mandela is to show that______.

选项 A、great men are easier to win other people’s trust
B、formal authority is always the impediment of leadership
C、leaders have the same rights with the employers
D、gaining leadership does not rely solely on authority

答案D

解析 信息题。根据题干定位到第二段,定位词为:Gandhi和Nelson Mandela。第二段倒数第二句指出“许多伟大的领导人,比如甘地和曼德拉,尽管拥有的正式权威极少,甚至没有正式权威,但他们也领导别人”。此句的上两句指出“在现实中,即使是组织内最高级别的人,也不能单靠阶级制度,尤其是考虑到他们亟需身边人才的才智、经验与智慧时。领导是一种活动,而不是一个地位。”由此可知,[D]选项正确。[A]选项为无中生有,故排除;[B]选项说法言过其实,亦排除;[C]选项说领导和员工拥有相同的权利,原文中并未提及,排除。
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