Business English Certificate (BEC) Higher Level C1 / Reading / Part 2

PART TWO

Questions 9 – 14

    Read this text taken from an article about how companies’ decision-making can go wrong.
    Choose the best sentence from the opposite page to fill each of the gaps.
    For each gap 9 – 14, mark one letter (A – H) on your Answer Sheet.
    Do not use any letter more than once.
    There is an example at the beginning, (0).

 

 

Bad business decisions are easy to make

Those who make disastrous business decisions generally exhibit two characteristic types of behaviour. First they make a selective interpretation of the evidence when deciding to go ahead with a project. (0) ... H ... .

How do such bad decisions come about? One reason is that the people in control are determined to make their mark by doing something dramatic. (9) ......  [A/*B/C/D/E/F/G/H] . Once the leader has decided to put his or her name to a project, many in the organisation believe it politic to support it too, whatever their private doubts.(10) ...... [A/B/C/D/E/*F/G/H] . These doubters know that such a perception will cloud their future careers. The desire to agree with the boss is typical of committees, with group members often taking collective decisions that they would not have taken individually. They look around the table, see their colleagues nodding in agreement and suppress their own doubts. If all these intelligent people believe this is the right thing to do, they think to themselves, perhaps it is. It rarely occurs to committee members that all their colleagues have made the same dubious calculation.

Responsible managers usually ask to see the evidence before reaching a decision. (11) ...... [A/B/C/D/E/F/*G/H] . Even those who consider all the evidence, good and bad, fail to take account of the fact that expert predictions are often wrong. The reason for this is that feedback is only effective if it is received quickly and often; and senior executives rarely become the experts they claim to be, because they make too few big decisions to learn much from them. So when it becomes clear that disaster looms, many executives insist on pressing ahead regardless. (12) ...... [A/B/C/*D/E/F/G/H] . The repercussions of doing so can be daunting.

So what can be done to prevent companies making bad decisions? (13 )...... [A/B/C/D/*E/F/G/H] . Another is to delegate the decision on whether or not to continue to people who are not in the thick of the decision-making, such as the non-executive directors. (14) ...... [*A/B/C/D/E/F/G/H] . But they shouldn’t expect any gratitude: people who have made huge mistakes are not going to say ‘Thank you, we should have paid attention to you in the first place.’

 

A  It would be far better, though, if dissidents in the organisation raised their doubts beforehand, and were listened to.

B  They want to be recognised as having changed the company in a way that history will remember.

C  This is not to argue that companies should never attempt anything brave or risky.

D  Too much money has been spent and too many reputations are at stake to think about stopping at this stage.

E  One solution is to set targets for a project and to agree in advance to abandon it if these are not met.

F  After all, people who persistently point to potential pitfalls are seen as negative and disloyal.

G  But they often rely only on those parts of it that support their case.

H  Coupled with this, they insist that the failure was someone else’s fault.

 

[answer-table]