[求助]大全passage27(27/63)-Q7

Passage 27 (27/63)

Since the late 1970’s, in the face
of a severe loss of market share (market share: 市场份额, 市场占有率) in dozens of industries, manufacturers in
the United States have been trying to improve productivity—and therefore
enhance their international competitiveness—through cost-cutting programs. (Cost-cutting
here is defined as raising labor output while holding the amount of labor
constant.) However, from 1978 through 1982, productivity—the value of goods
manufactured divided by the amount of labor input—did not improve; and while
the results were better in the business upturn of the three years following,
they ran 25 percent lower than productivity improvements during earlier,
post-1945 upturns. At the same time, it became clear that the harder
manufactures worked to implement cost-cutting, the more they lost their competitive
edge.

With this paradox in mind, I
recently visited 25 companies; it became clear to me that the cost-cutting
approach to increasing productivity is fundamentally flawed. Manufacturing
regularly observes a “40, 40, 20” rule. Roughly 40 percent of any
manufacturing-based competitive advantage derives from long-term changes in
manufacturing structure (decisions about the number, size, location, and
capacity of facilities) and in approaches to materials. Another 40 percent
comes from major changes in equipment and process technology. The final 20
percent rests on implementing conventional cost-cutting. This rule does not
imply that cost-cutting should not be tried. The well-known tools of this
approach—including simplifying jobs and retraining employees to work smarter,
not harder—do produce results. But the tools quickly reach the limits of what
they can contribute.

Another problem is that the
cost-cutting approach hinders innovation and discourages creative people. As
Abernathy’s study of automobile manufacturers has shown, an industry can easily
become prisoner of its own investments in cost-cutting techniques, reducing its
ability to develop new products. And managers under pressure to maximize
cost-cutting will resist innovation because they know that more fundamental changes
in processes or systems will wreak (BRING ABOUT, CAUSE “wreak havoc”)
havoc with the results on which they are measured. Production managers have
always seen their job as one of minimizing costs and maximizing output. This
dimension of performance has until recently sufficed as a basis of evaluation,
but it has created a penny-pinching (FRUGALITY, PARSIMONY), mechanistic
culture in most factories that has kept away creative managers.

Every company I know that has freed
itself from the paradox has done so, in part, by developing and implementing a
manufacturing strategy. Such a strategy focuses on the manufacturing structure
and on equipment and process technology. In one company a manufacturing
strategy that allowed different areas of the factory to specialize in different
markets replaced the conventional cost-cutting approach; within three years the
company regained its competitive advantage. Together with such strategies,
successful companies are also encouraging managers to focus on a wider set of
objectives besides cutting costs. There is hope for manufacturing, but it
clearly rests on a different way of managing.

7.
            The author
suggests that implementing conventional cost-cutting as a way of increasing
manufacturing competitiveness is a strategy that is

(A) flawed and ruinous

(B) shortsighted and difficult
to sustain

(C) popular and easily
accomplished

(D) useful but inadequate（D）

(E) misunderstood but promising

答案选D，但我实在找不到文中有支持conventional cost-cutting的表达，一直是讲它哪里哪里不好，所以我选了A

希望有NN解答，谢谢！