介绍了商业成功难以再次复制的原因和解决方式。
建议学习前先做完听力题目哦。
听力原文：
I'm going to move on to business systems.And in today's lecture I'm going to talk about what cango wrong when businesses try to copy their own best practices.
Once a business hassuccessfully introduced a new process --managing a branch bank, say, orselling a new product - the parent organization naturally wants to repeat thatsuccess, and capture it if possible on a bigger scale.The goal, then, is to utilize existing knowledge andnot to generate new knowledge. It's a lessglamorous activity than pure innovation, but it actually happens moreoften, as a matter of fact. However, surprisingly, gettingthings right the second time is not necessarily any simpler than it was thefirst time.
Now, there's been a lot of research intohow companies can repeat their previous successes,and it certainly hasn't been confined to the United States. It seems that mostlarge industries are trying to repeat their own successes, and manage theknowledge they've acquired - but even so it has been shown that the overwhelming majority of attempts fail. A host ofstudies confirm this, covering a wide range of business settings: branch banks,retail stores, real estate agencies, factories,call centers ... to name but a few.
So why do-so few managers get things right the second or third time? Let'sconsider one reason for failure - placing too muchtrust in the people who are running the successful operation, the'experts' shall we say. Managers who want to apply existing knowledge typicallystart off by going to an expert - such as the person who designed and isrunning a successful department store - and picking their brains. Now, thisapproach can be used if you want to gain a roughunderstanding of a particular system, or understand smaller, isolated problems. The trouble is, even the expertdoesn't fully grasp the whole thing because when it comes to complex systems, the individual components of the process are interwoven withone another.
The expert never hascomplete access to the necessary information. And the situation'scomplicated even further by the fact that experts areusually not aware of their own ignorance. The ignorance can take various forms. For instance, a lot of details ofthe system are invisible to managers. Some maybe difficult to describe --learned on the job and well known by workersperhaps, but impossible to describe in a way that's helpful. And there are somethings that people know or do that they're not, even aware of.
Now, let's consider two types of mistakethat can occur when a manager actually starts to set up a duplicate system to replicatea successful process. Firstly, perhaps he forgets that he was just trying tocopy another process, and starts trying to improve on it. Another mistake is trying to use the best parts of various different systems,in the hope of creating the perfect combination.
Unfortunately,attempts like these usually turn out to bemisguided and lead to problems. Why? Well, for various reasons. Perhapsthere weren't really any advantages after all, because the information wasn'taccurate. Or perhaps the business settingsweren't really comparable. More typically, theadvantages are real enough, but there are also disadvantages that have beenoverlooked. For example, the modifications mightcompromise safety in some way.
So, what's the solution? Well, I don't intend to suggest that it's easy to get things rightthe second time ... it's not. But the underlying problemhas more to do with attitudes than the actual difficulty of the task,and there are ways of getting it right. These involveadjusting attitudes, first of all... being morerealistic and cautious really. Secondly, theyinvolve exerting strict controls onthe organizational and operational systems. And this in turn means copying theoriginal as closely as possible, not merely duplicating the physical characteristics of the factory, but alsoduplicating the skills that the original employees had. Reliance on a templatelike this offers the huge advantage of built-inconsistency.
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