Artists routinely mock businesspeople as money-obsessed bores. Or worse, many business people, for their part, assume that artists are a bunch of pretentious wasters. Bosses may stick a few modernist paintings on their boardroom walls. But they seldom take the arts seriously as a source of inspiration.
The bias starts at business school, where "hard" things such as numbers and case studies rule. It is reinforced by everyday experience. Bosses constantly remind their underlings that if you can’t count it, it doesn’t count. Manager’s reading; habits often reflect this no nonsense attitude. Few read deeply about art. The Art of the Deal by Donald Trump does not count; nor does Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, Some popular business books rejoice in their vulgarism: consider Wess Robert’s Leadership Secrets of Attila the Hun.
But lately there are welcome signs of a thaw on the business side of the great cultural divide. Business presses are publishing a series of books such as The Fine Art of Success, by Jamie Anderson. Business schools such as the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto are trying to learn from the arts.
Mr. Anderson points out that many artists have also been superb entrepreneurs. Damien Hirst was even more enterprising. He not only realised that nouveau-fiche collectors would pay extraordinary sums for dead cows and jewel-encrusted skulls. He upturned the art world by selling his work directly through Sotheby’s, an auction house. Whatever they think of his work, businesspeople cannot help admiring a man who parted art-lovers from ~ 75.5m on the day that Lehman Brothers collapsed.
Studying the arts can help businesspeople communicate more eloquently. Most bosses spend a huge amount of time "messaging" and "reaching out", yet few are much good at it. Their prose is larded with cliches and garbled with gobbledegook. Half an hour with George Orwell’s Why I Write would work wonders.
Studying the arts can also help companies learn how to manage bright people. Rob Goffee of the London Business School points out that today’s most productive companies are dominated by what they call "clevers", who are the devil to manage. They hate being told what to do by managers, whom they regard as dullards. They refuse to submit to performance reviews. In short, they are prima donnas. The arts world has centuries of experience in managing such difficult people. Publishers coax books out of authors. Directors persuade actresses to cooperate with actors they hate. Their tips might be worth hearing.
Studying the art world might even hold out the biggest prize of all-helping business become more innovative. Companies are scouring the world for new ideas. In their quest for creativity, they surely have something to learn from the creative industries. Look at how modem artists adapted to the arrival of photography, a technology that could have made them redundant, or how J.K. Rowling (the creator of Harry Potter) kept trying even when publishers rejected her novel.
Which book might be thought by the author as having the least value

The Art of War.

Leadership Secrets of Attila the Hun.

The Fine Art of Success.

Why I Write.

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【单选题】28（） A.mind B.mentality C.intelligence D.wit

Silence is unnatural to man. He begins life with a cry and ends it in stillness. In the interval he does all he can to make a noise in the world, and there are few things 21 he stands in more fear than of the 22 of noise. Even his conversation is 23 a desperate attempt to prevent a dreadful silence. If he is introduced to a fellow mortal and a number of pauses occur in the conversation, he regards himself as a failure, a worthless person, and is full of 24 of the emptiest-headed chatterbox. He knows that ninety-nine percent of human conversation means 25 the buzzing of a fly, but he longs to join in the buzz and to prove that he is man and not a wax-work figure. The object of conversation is not, 26 the most part, to communicate ideas; it is to keep up the buzzing sound. Most buzzing, 27 is agreeable to the ear, and some of it is agreeable even to the 28 . He would be a foolish man, however, who waited until he had a wise thought to take part in the buzzing with his neighbors. Those who despise the weather as a conversational opening seem to be ignorant of the reason why human beings wish to talk. Very few human beings join in a conversation in the hope of learning anything new. Some of them are 29 if they are merely allowed to go on making a noise into other people’s ears though they have nothing to tell them except that they have seen a new play. At the end of an evening during which they have said nothing at immense length, they justly 30 themselves on their success as conversationalists.

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