【正确答案】 C

【答案解析】[解析] 1-12 Transcript Presenter: . . . the first high-flyer schemes were introduced in the 1960s and now many sectors of commerce, industry and the civil service pick out their most promising younger managers as 'high-flyers'. You find schemes of this kind mostly in large companies or groups of companies, where the fairly rigid career structure can only be broken by by-passing the normal steps in the promotion ladder. It can take a company many years to develop a top-level manager, if he or she joins them straight from university. Suc people must obtain wide experience in different parts of the company and this can take up to 20 years. This means that someone who joins the firm from university works for the company in different capacities, and is identified as a high- flyer, can expect to reach top management at around the age of 40. Rod Scott has been looking at what is called the 'individual development programme' at BR Rod Scott: BP is one of the largest multinational companies in the world. It employs 130,000 people. It has 260 managers involved in its own 'individual development programme' who will compete for 180 senior positions in the group. They don't join the scheme until they are in their late 20s, by which time they will have established themselves in their special field, they will have built up their professional reputation and they will have a record of high performance. While they're on the scheme (and this lasts 5 to 10 years) their progress is supervised by a committee of 15 senior managers. One of the main purposes of the scheme is to provide them with experience outside their own field - in finance, working in an overseas division, or experience in information technology. Presenter: But high-flyer schemes have their drawbacks, according to Heather Stewart, a management consultant. Heather Stewart: One weakness is that you may be creating a management team who think and act in the same ways. That means, if your business changes, they may not be able to meet the challenges. As outsiders tend to be excluded as senior recruits, the company may be cutting itself off from a pool of talent which their competitors can draw on. Another problem is that late-starters are also excluded - not everyone is at their peak in their 20s and such qualities as experience and in-depth knowledge may be undervalued. Another weakness is that women are often excluded from high-flyer schemes, since schemes identify high-flyers at the very time when women are most likely to have children: they are forced to choose between career and family. Worst of all though is the resentment that high-flyers create among other managers who aren't chosen to be high- flyers. Developing a sort of elite, a chosen few, within an Organization is quite simply bad for company morale - it makes everyone else feel they are being undervalued and takes away their enthusiasm and dedication - and clearly this is counter-productive. This is particularly noticeable in medium-sized companies, where high-flyer schemes seem to be particularly controversial and divisive. There have been various experiments...