Since its founding in 1923, Yellow Corporation has been a leader in the transportation industry, using trucks to transport goods between points in Canada, the United States, and Mexico. For decades, Yellow achieved success by concentrating virtually all of its attention on increasing efficiency at every turn. Yellow has long been a master at ensuring that trucks are full before they have a warehouse, and it has also developed precisely time delivery schedules.
Unfortunately, Yellow eventually fell victim to its own success. As operational efficiency increased, customer service received less and less attention, and before long, newer and more responsive companies were taking away the firm’s customers. Accompanying this problem was the fact that the customers most likely to seek a more service-oriented transportation provider were also the ones willing to pay high prices for the extra service. As a result, Yellow’s financial performance began to decline, slowly at first, but then more dramatically. Naturally, the decline in profit led to even worse across-the-board service.
To help turn Yellow around, the board of directors offered Bill Zollars the position of CEO. Already a highly respected manager, Zollars was attracted by the opportunity to revitalize the carrier. Zollars quickly learned that organizational change at Yellow would have to be fundamental. Over a period of decades, people throughout the company were often willing to do only the minimal amount necessary to get their jobs done. Zollars knew that he had to alter the attitudes, behavior, and performance of 30,000 employees. He began by improving communication. The CEO spent 18 months traveling to several hundred locations, and at each site, he talked face-to-face with customers and with employees at all levels. He asked for opinions and provided his own message---namely, that enhanced customer service was to become the firm’s new focus.
Zollars’s plan consisted of more than promises and motivational speeches. While previous leaders often didn’t focus on problems and refused to reveal information about the firm’s performance, Zollars openly acknowledged the company’s defect rate---the percentage of shipments that were late, wrong, or damaged. Employees were shocked to find that the rate was 40 percent, but that knowledge was necessary to enhance motivation and set a benchmark for improvement. Zollars also instituted the company’s first ongoing program for surveying customer satisfaction, and the results were reported openly throughout the company. Zollars made a real effort to listen to employees, gave them authority to make decisions, and developed an enviable reputation for honesty and commitment. “If people doing the work don’t believe what’s coming from the leadership,” says Zollars, “it doesn’t get implemented.”
1. What caused Yellow Corporation’s financial performance to decline?A.There was suddenly some difficulty finding enough warehouses. |
B.Fewer customers were willing to pay high prices for extra services. |
C.More transportation providers emerged with the market expanding. |
D.It put more emphasis on operational efficiency than on customer service. |
A.He communicated with customers in person. |
B.He employed some highly respected managers. |
C.He reevaluated all the employee’s performance. |
D.He estimated the minimal amount of job each should do. |
A.the precise calculation of the company’s defect rate |
B.the ongoing survey of the employers’ satisfaction |
C.the improvement of the leadership’s confidence |
D.the revelation of information to the employees |
A.The CEOs of Yellow Corporation |
B.The Future at Yellow Corporation |
C.The Success of Yellow Corporation |
D.The Turnaround at Yellow Corporation |
相似题推荐
【推荐1】It can be hard to be enthusiastic about your job after you’ve been at it for a while.
Keep busy and note your progress. Feeling a sense of accomplishment can go a long way toward improving mood. Time goes by faster when you’re busy.
Talk to your boss about changing up your responsibilities. You might feel more excited about your job if your duties and responsibilities shifted. Think about how you might like to adjust things, and then consider talking with your boss about making a switch.
Be intentional and reflective about your experience at work. To fully appreciate an experience, you need to take time to process it. This can be difficult when work has become predictable and routine.
A.Set some goals for your work. |
B.This doesn’t necessarily mean you need a new job. |
C.So you might have to get a little intentional about it. |
D.Have strong intentions to work hard to achieve your goals. |
E.So be aware of everything you’re getting done each day at work. |
F.Surely, a new position in the company or office will excite you a lot. |
G.Be deliberate about this and you’ll see each week as being a little different. |
【推荐2】History is a record of the people and events of the past. People study history to discover how the past has shaped the world of today. All students learn about history in school.
A person must be educated and develop skills to be a history teacher. A history teacher must have a college degree.
Students who want to be history teachers can begin to gain the skills they need while they are still in high school. They can take social studies courses. They can help classmates with schoolwork. They can work. ,with young children. These activities help students prepare for their college studies.
A new teacher can find a job in many ways. Schools often post job advertisements at colleges or on the Internet. When a teacher applies for a job, the school may ask for an interview, or a time to meet with the teacher and ask questions. If this meeting goes well, the school may offer the teacher a job.
A.In this way, a history teacher secures a job in the classroom. |
B.Teachers in this field have a strong interest in social studies. |
C.A teacher must have a license or a certificate. |
D.It is also helpful for them to practice in a classroom with students. |
E.While in college, students take classes about methods of teaching. |
F.A history teacher must earn a college degree in the field of education. |
G.They may study foreign languages as well. |
【推荐3】For most of us, work is the central, dominating fact of life. We spend more than half our conscious hours at work, preparing for work, traveling to and from work. What we do there largely determines our standard of living and our status to a considerable extent. It is sometimes said that because leisure has become more important, the injustices of work can be pushed into a comer, and that because most work is pretty intolerable, the people who do it should compensate for its boredom, frustrations and humiliations by concentrating their hopes on the other parts of their lives. For the foreseeable future, however, the material and psychological rewards which work can provide will continue to play a vital part in determining the satisfaction that life can offer.
Yet only a small minority can control the pace at which they work or the conditions where their work is done; only for a small minority does work offer scope for creativity, imagination or initiative.
Inequality at work is still one of the most glaring(明显的)forms of inequality in our society. We cannot hope to solve the more obvious problems of industrial life, many of which arise from the frustrations created by inequality at work, unless we handle it determinedly.
The most glaring inequality is that between managers and the rest. For most managers, work is an opportunity and a challenge. Their jobs engage their interest and allow them to develop their abilities. They are constantly learning. They are able to exercise responsibility. They have a considerable degree of control over their own and others' working lives. Most important of all, they have opportunities to initiate. By contrast, for most manual workers, work is a boring, dull, even painful experience. They spend all their working lives in intolerable conditions. The majority have little control over their work. It provides them with no opportunity for personal development. Many jobs are so routine that workers feel themselves to be mere cogs (齿轮)in the bureaucratic machine. As a direct consequence of their work experience, many workers feel alienated (疏远)from their work and their firm.
1. In the writer's opinion, people judge others mainly by_________.A.the amount of money they earn | B.the type of work they do |
C.the time they spend at work | D.the place where they work |
A.have to get rid of the unequal aspects in work |
B.should create more working opportunities for the poor |
C.had better cancel all managing positions in a company |
D.should encourage the manual workers to promote efficiency |
A.They have complete control over themselves. | B.They can work at what interests them. |
C.They get time off to learn constantly. | D.They won't be out of work. |
【推荐1】In the three decades since Darah Lady’s grandmother first arrived in this distant area of northern Brazil, clearing the forest by hand to build a house for her 14 children, the family has pushed deeper and deeper into the Amazon. It has been driven by a saying that good fortune comes when nature gives in to human control.
Yet their growing community there could ruin not only their children’s future but also that of the entire planet. More global pandemics (流行病) are on the way, scientists say, and the next one is likely to crop up from a community like Darah Lady’s, where people are taking up more and more space of the natural world and erasing the buffer zone (缓冲区) between themselves and habitats that existed long. As people cut down forest, they not only speed up the global warming but also greatly increase their risk of exposure to disease.
Scientists also say disease hot zones are expanding from Africa to South America, and that deforestation has already led to a rise in spreading disease. Zoologists have found that a third of all known disease outbreaks around the world were due to rapid land use change.
Darah Lady’s community of Maruaga is filled with risks for the spread of viruses (病毒). Their family has already battled zoonotic illnesses — the term used to describe diseases spread between animalsand humans.
When 40% of a land area has been destroyed, according to Tom Gillespie, a university researcher, the region hits a sort of tipping point: Wild animals are pushed closer to humans for food, and viruses begin to spread.
Darah Lady seemed to notice the slight dfference of deforestation. “I get kind of sad,” Darah Lady said, “Because the forest is something I’ve loved since I was little. And they are deforesting, right? It’s destroying nature.”
1. What do you know about Darah Lady?A.She built a house for her 14 children. |
B.She made a big fortune in Amazon. |
C.Her family cut down trees for growing crops. |
D.Her family lived in Amazon for decades. |
A.The loss of the buffer zone. |
B.The effect of global warming. |
C.The lack of species variety. |
D.The expansion of wildlife habitats. |
A.A possible treatment for diseases. |
B.A real example of the prevention of diseases. |
C.A further explanation of the spread of diseases. |
D.A supporting evidence for the danger of diseases. |
A.Entertainment. | B.Design. |
C.Education. | D.Environment. |
【推荐2】Laughter Yoga(瑜伽) is one form of yoga. Madan Kataria, a doctor in Mumbai, India invented it. He believed that people had forgotten how to really laugh. Through his research he made an interesting discovery. The human mind does not know the difference between forced laughter and real laughter. Forced laughter can also lead to a feeling of happiness.
And then Kataria had the idea for a group of people who would laugh together. He gathered a few of his friends together. They met in a public park in Mumbai. That small group grew and grew! And this is how people began to do Laughter Yoga. People doing Laughter Yoga usually meet together in a Laughter Club. Kataria’s friends formed the first Laughter Club in 1995.
Today, there’re over 5,000 Laughter Clubs in 53 countries. But what exactly do people do in a Laughter Club? People in Laughter Yoga meetings usually do a series of exercises. The exercises include body movement, correct breathing, and of course, laughter! At the beginning of the meeting, people may have to force themselves to laugh. But by the end, everyone is usually laughing in a real way! Each meeting is a little different. But there are common exercises groups may do.
Experts say that the exercises help blood move around the body faster. They also say that Laughter Yoga helps people deal with the bad things in their lives. They say that a person may go into a Laughter Club meeting feeling sad, angry, or worried. But then, people act happy. After a time, forced laughter becomes real laughter. This is one reason why people may enjoy laughter Yoga so much.
1. What did Kataria find out about laughter? ____A.People are often forced to laugh. |
B.Forced laughter works as well as real laughter. |
C.Forced laughter is more interesting than real laughter. |
D.People refuse to use forced laughter to cheer them up. |
A.to make friends | B.to laugh at each other |
C.in a public park | D.in a Laugter Club |
A.the rapid development of Laughter Clubs. |
B.the importance of laughter in Laugter Yoga. |
C.common exercises people do in a Laughter Club. |
D.different feelings at the beginning and end of the meetings. |
A.anyone can join in a Laughter Club. |
B.laughter is a very good form of exercise. |
C.Laughter Yoga makes blood move slowly. |
D.it takes a long time for people to be free of bad feelings. |
【推荐3】Charles Darwin found inspiration for his theory of evolution in birds’ beaks, giant tortoise shells — and language. “The survival of certain favored words in the struggle for existence is natural selection,” he wrote in The Descent of Man in 1871.
Language gradually shifts over time. Much research examines how social and environmental factors influence language change, but ignores the forces of human cognitive selection that fix certain words into the lexicon (词汇表). For an extensive new study published recently, scientists investigated just that.
In an experiment like a game of telephone, thousands of participants read English-language stories and rewrote them to be read by other participants, who then rewrote them for others. Only certain words from the first stories survived in the final versions. Researchers analyzed the word types speakers consistently favored, theorizing that such preferences drive language change over time. The scientists also separately analyzed two large collections of English historical texts from the past two centuries, containing more than 40 billion words — again seeing only certain types survive.
The end result shows three properties that give words an “evolutionary advantage” by helping them stick in the brain: First, words typically acquired at an early age (such as “hand,” “uncle”or “today”) are stabler. Next, concrete words linger (逗留) better than abstract ones: “dog” persists longer than “animal,” which persists longer than “organism.” Lastly, emotionally exciting words — whether negative or positive — tend to endure.
Early language-evolution models assumed that language becomes increasingly complex over time. But Fritz Breithaupt, a cognitive scientist, says the new study supports a more recent theory that language ultimately gets more efficient and easier to understand. Still, as the study notes, “the English language is not baby talk.” Breithaupt explains: “Yes, we shift toward simple language, but then we also grab complex language that we need.” New words that address the complexities of modern life may somewhat balance out this shift.
Columbia University linguist McWhorter more or less agrees with the study’s results about evolutionary advantages within language. He questions, however, implications regarding the overall efficiency of English — a language which contains things like “needlessly complex” grammatical traces.
1. What does the new study concentrate on?A.The impact of cognitive selection. |
B.The perspective of Charles Darwin. |
C.The effectiveness of preserved words. |
D.The importance of natural environment. |
A.Its stability in word-building. | B.Its more abstract meaning. |
C.Its strong emotional information. | D.Its simple grammatical structure. |
A.Communication gets more complex. |
B.Humans prefer to use simpler language. |
C.Language is getting less understandable. |
D.New words can interpret modern life easily. |
A.It has an evolutionary advantage. |
B.It keeps the grammatical traces. |
C.It should be simplified sometimes. |
D.People should embrace its changes. |