IELTS Forcast Reading Test 2026 - Q2 Test 3 with Practice Test, Answers And Explanation
Luyện tập đề IELTS Forcast Reading Test 2026 - Q2 Test 3 được lấy từ cuốn sách Forcast Test 2026 - Q2 với trải nghiệm thi IELTS trên máy và giải thích đáp án chi tiết bằng Linearthinking, kèm answer key và list từ vựng IELTS cần học trong bài đọc.
IELTS Forcast Reading Test 2026 - Q2 Test 3 with Practice Test, Answers And Explanation
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 1
Question 1 - 6
The Reading Passage has six paragraphs A-F.
From the list of headings below choose the most suitable heading for each paragraph.
Write the appropriate numbers i-ix
List of Headings
I
The popularity and impact of Drucker's work
II
Finding fault with Drucker
III
The impact of economic globalisation
IV
Government regulation of business
V
Early publications of Drucker's
VI
Drucker's view of balanced management
VII
Drucker's rejection of big business
VIII
An appreciation of the pros and cons of Drucker's work
IX
The changing role of the employee
1
Paragraph A
2
Paragraph B
3
Paragraph C
4
Paragraph D
5
Paragraph E
6
Paragraph F
Question 7 - 10
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage?
In following statements below, choose
YES if the statement agrees with the information
NO if the statement contradicts the information
NOT GIVEN if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this
7
Drucker believed the employees should enjoy the same status as the employers in a company.
8
Drucker argued the managers and politicians will dominate the economy during a social transition.
9
Drucker supported that workers are not simply in the employment relationship and should develop their resources of intelligence voluntarily.
10
Drucker's work on management is out of date in modern days.
Question 11 - 12
Choose TWO letters, A-E.
Which TWO of the following are true of Drucker’s views?
A
High-rank executives and workers should be put in balanced positions in management practice.
B
Young executives should be given chances to start from low-level jobs.
C
More emphasis should be laid on fostering the development of the union.
D
Management should facilitate workers with tools of self-appraisal instead of controlling them from the outside force.
E
Leaders should go beyond the scope of management details and strategically establish goals.
Question 13 - 14
Choose TWO letters, A-E.
Which TWO of the following are mentioned in the passage as criticisms of Drucker and his views?
A
His lectures focus too much on big organisations and ignore the small ones.
B
His lectures are too broad and lack precision and factual accuracy.
C
He put a source of objectives more on corporate executives but not on average workers.
D
He acted much like a maverick and did not set up his own management groups.
E
He was overstating the case for knowledge workers when warning businesses to get prepared.
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 2
Question 15 - 19
Look at the following statements and the list of people below.
Match each statement with the correct person, A-D.
Write the correct letter, A-D.
List of Findings
A
Neil Plumridge
B
Gal Zauberman and John Lynch
C
Jan Elsner
D
Tony Lamontagne
15
High-level workers tend to react positively to stress.
16
Stress levels are increased by trying to please customers.
17
Support from other workers may relieve stress.
18
Lack of independence at work is often responsible for stress.
19
Workers commonly expect their workloads to lessen over time.
Question 20 - 22
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.
Write the correct letter in boxes on your answer sheet.
20
Which of the following is NOT mentioned by Neil Plumridge as an indication that his workload is too heavy?
A
An inability to keep to his schedule.
B
Inattention to family celebrations.
C
A lack of concentration on a task.
D
A period of insufficient sleep.
21
Which method of lessening work stress is NOT suggested by Neil Plumridge?
A
Rethinking ideas of what can be achieved.
B
Extending the deadline for completing the task.
C
Using more workers on a project.
D
Taking more time off for sport or other recreation.
22
According to Jan Elsner, meditation offers a method of
A
taking a worker’s mind off his troubles.
B
changing physical response to stress.
C
resting more effectively.
D
encouraging executives to take breaks.
Question 23 - 27
Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER from the passage for each answer.
Stress: Its effects and how to reduce it
Statistics on workers’ compensation show that people take more time off work due to stress than for any other at work. On average, workers who take time off because of stress stay away for . This absence comes at a high price – while the number of insurance claims due to stress amount to only of the total, they account for a much higher proportion of the cost of claims payments. Experts believe that seeking to relieve stress through physical therapies such as sport or may be less effective than simply reviewing your .
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 3
Question 28 - 32
Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.
Nowadays it seems difficult for people to avoid the effects of living in a noisy world. Noise is the sound beyond the average of referring to the agency’s definition. Scientific studies over the years from the mid to late 1990s have confirmed that exposure to certain levels of sound can damage on certain senior age.
From the testing of 5,249 children, those who are constantly exposed to excessive noise may have trouble in sound discrimination. The effects of sound don’t stop with the ears, exposure to noise may lead to the unease of in healthy people. Europe has taken steps on the noise issue, big cities of over 250,000 people are creating to help to create noise pollution policies.
Question 33 - 37
Look at the following findings and the list of researchers below.
Match each finding with the correct researcher, A-E.
Write the correct letter, A-E.
List of Findings
A
WHO
B
William Luxford
C
Craig Moulton
D
Arline Bronzaft
E
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
33
People can change the environment to improve hearing health.
34
The government should continue the research on anti-noise researches with the fund.
35
Companies should be required to protect the employees to avoid noise.
36
Noise has posed an effect on American children’s hearing ability.
37
Noise has seriously affected human being where they live worldwide.
Question 38 - 40
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.
Write the correct letter in boxes on your answer sheet.
38
The board of schools built close to the tracks are convinced to
A
move the classrooms away from the noisy track
B
regulate the track usage to a less extent
C
utilise a special material into classroom buildings lessening the effect of outside noise
D
organise a team for a follow-up study
39
In European countries, the big cities’ research on noise focuses on
A
how to record pollution details of the city on maps
B
the impact of noise on population shift in the European cities
C
how wide can a city be to avoid noise pollution
D
helping the authorities better make a decision on noise management of the city
40
What is the best title in paragraph 1?
A
How people cope with noise pollution
B
The fight against the noise with the powerful technology
C
The Effects of Living in a Noisy World
D
The Effects of noise on children’s learning
DOL IELTS Đình Lực
05/05/2026
📖 Bài đọc passage 1
Father of modern management
A
A. Peter Drucker was one of the most important management thinkers of the past hundred years. He wrote about 40 book and thousands of articles and he never rested in his mission to persuade the world that management matters. “Management is an organ of institutions … the organ that converts a mob into an organisation, and human efforts into performance.” Did he succeed? The range of his influence was extraordinary. Wherever people grapple with tricky management problems, from big organizations to small ones, from the public sector to the private, and increasingly in the voluntary sector, you can find Drucker’s fingerprints.
B
His first two books – The End of Economic Man (1939) and The Future of Industrial Man (1942) – had their admirers, including Winston Churchill, but they annoyed academic critics by ranging so widely over so many different subjects. Still, the second of these books attracted attention with its passionate insistence that companies had a social dimension as well as an economic purpose. His third book, The Concept of the Corporation, became an instant bestseller and has remained in print ever since.
C
The two most interesting arguments in The Concept of the Corporation actually had little to do with the decentralization fad. They were to dominate his work. The first had to do with “empowering” workers. Drucker believed in treating workers as resources rather than just as costs. He was a harsh critic of the assembly-line system of production that then dominated the manufacturing sector – partly because assembly lines moved at the speed of the slowest and partly because they failed to engage the creativity of individual workers. The second argument had to do with the rise of knowledge workers. Drucker argued that the world is moving from an “economy of goods” to an economy of “knowledge” – and from a society dominated by an industrial proletariat to one dominated by brain workers. He insisted that this had profound implications for both managers and politicians. Managers had to stop treating workers like cogs in a huge inhuman machine and start treating them as brain workers. In turn, politicians had to realise that knowledge, and hence education, was the single most important resource for any advanced society. Yet Drucker also thought that this economy had implications for knowledge workers themselves. They had to come to terms with the fact that they were neither “bosses” nor “workers”, but something in between: entrepreneurs who had responsibility for developing their most important resource, brainpower, and who also needed to take more control of their own careers, including their pension plans.
D
However, there was also a hard side to his work. Drucker was responsible for inventing one of the rational school of management’s most successful products – “management by objectives”. In one of his most substantial works, The Practice of Management (1954), he emphasised the importance of managers and corporations setting clear long-term objectives and then translating those long-term objectives into more immediate goals. He argued that firms should have an elite corps of general managers, who set these long-term objectives, and then a group of more specialised managers. For his critics, this was a retreat from his earlier emphasis on the soft side of management. For Drucker it was all perfectly consistent: if you rely too much on empowerment you risk anarchy, whereas if you rely too much on command-and-control you sacrifice creativity. The trick is for managers to set long-term goals, but then allow their employees to work out ways of achieving those goals. If Drucker helped make management a global industry, he also helped push it beyond its business base. He was emphatically a management thinker, not just a business one. He believed that management is “the defining organ of all modern institutions”, not just corporations.
E
There are three persistent criticisms of Drucker’s work. The first is that he focused on big organisations rather than small ones. The Concept of the Corporation was in many ways a fanfare to big organisations. As Drucker said, “We know today that in modern industrial production, particularly in modern mass production, the small unit is not only inefficient, it cannot produce at all.” The book helped to launch the “big organisation boom” that dominated business thinking for the next 20 years. The second criticism is that Drucker’s enthusiasm for management by objectives helped to lead the business down a dead end. They prefer to allow ideas, including ideas for long-term strategies, to bubble up from the bottom and middle of the organisations rather than being imposed from on high. Thirdly, Drucker is criticised for being a maverick who has increasingly been left behind by the increasing rigour of his chosen field. There is no single area of academic management theory that he made his own.
F
There is some truth in the first two arguments. Drucker never wrote anything as good as The Concept of the Corporation on entrepreneurial start-ups. Drucker’s work on management by objectives sits uneasily with his earlier and later writings on the importance of knowledge workers and self-directed teams. But the third argument is short-sighted and unfair because it ignores Drucker’s pioneering role in creating the modern profession of management. He produced one of the first systematic studies of a big company. He pioneered the idea that ideas can help galvanise companies. The biggest problem with evaluating Drucker’s influence is that so many of his ideas have passed into conventional wisdom. In other words, he is the victim of his own success. His writings on the importance of knowledge workers and empowerment may sound a little banal today. But they certainly weren’t banal when he first dreamed them up in the 1940s, or when they were first put in to practice in the Anglo-Saxon world in the 1980s. Moreover, Drucker continued to produce new ideas up until his 90s. His work on the management of voluntary organisations remained at the cutting edge.
🔥 Đáp án & giải thích 1
1
I
Giải thích chi tiết
Ứng dụng Linearthinking để giải quyết dạng bài Matching Headings
-------
Step 01: Read to understand main idea
Dựa vào phần Simplify & Connection ở trên, ta có thể rút ra main idea như sau:
Đoạn A giới thiệu Drucker như một trong những nhà tư tưởng quản trị quan trọng nhất thế kỷ, tác giả của hàng chục cuốn sách và hàng ngàn bài báo.
Ông không ngừng truyền bá thông điệp rằng quản trị có ý nghĩa quan trọng.
Tư tưởng của ông có tầm ảnh hưởng rất lớn, lan tỏa đến nhiều loại hình tổ chức khác nhau.
⇒ Nội dung chính: Tầm ảnh hưởng và mức độ phổ biến rộng rãi của Drucker.
Step 02: Compare meaning with meaning
Đại ý của đoạn:
Đoạn A tập trung vào việc mô tả Drucker là nhà tư tưởng quản trị hàng đầu, với sự nghiệp đồ sộ và tầm ảnh hưởng sâu rộng đến mọi lĩnh vực.
✅ Đáp án đúng: i. The popularity and impact of Drucker's work
How busy is too busy? For some, it means sometimes having to have a short lunch; for others, it may mean missing lunch altogether. For a few, it is not being able to take a day off once a month. Then there is a group of people for whom working every evening and weekend is normal, and feeling stressed is taken for granted. For most senior executives, workloads swing between extremely busy and frenzied. Neil Plumridge, vice-president of a management consultancy company, says that his weeks vary from a 'manageable 45 hours to 80 hours, but average 60 hours.'
Three signs warn Plumridge about his workload: sleep, scheduling, and family. He knows he is doing too much when he gets less than six hours' sleep for three consecutive nights, when he is constantly having to reschedule appointments, and when he misses a family birthday or anniversary. Then, he says, "I know things are out of control." Plumridge states that stress is often caused by his having unrealistic expectations of himself. "I'll promise a client that I'll do something tomorrow, and then I'll promise another client that I'll do the same thing when I know it's not going to happen. I could have said: 'Why don't I give that to you in 48 hours?' The client wouldn't care."
Over-committing is something people experience as an individual problem. However, new research indicates that people may be designed to over-commit. A study in the Journal of Experimental Psychology shows that people always believe that they will be less busy in the future. This is a misapprehension, according to the authors of the report, Gal Zauberman of the University of North Carolina and John Lynch of Duke University. On average, an individual will be just as busy two weeks or a month from now as he or she is today. But that is not how it appears in everyday life, they say. "People make commitments long in advance that they would never make if the same commitments required immediate action. They discount future time investments relatively steeply."
Being too busy is highly subjective, but for any individual, there are some concrete signs of stress—disturbed sleep and declining mental and physical health are the most common examples. Figures for National Workers' Compensation (insurance against injury caused by work) show that stress causes the most lost time of any workplace injury: employees suffering stress are absent from work for an average of 16.6 weeks. The effects of stress are also expensive. The Australian Government insurer reports that in 2003-2004, claims for stress-related psychological injury accounted for 7% of insurance claims but almost 27% of the amount paid out in claim payments.
Experts say the key to dealing with stress is not to focus on relief—a game of golf or a massage—but to reassess workloads. Neil Plumridge says he makes it a priority to work out what has to change: that might mean allocating extra staff to a job, allowing more time, or changing expectations. He also relies on the advice of colleagues, saying that his peers coach each other on business problems: "Just a fresh pair of eyes over an issue can help," he states.
Executive stress is not confined to big organisations. Vanessa Stoykov has been running her own advertising agency and public relations business for seven years. Her company has grown so fast that it appeared on the Business Review Weekly 'Fast 100' list of fastest-growing small enterprises in 2004, just after Stoykov had her first child. In 2005, revenue was projected to double to $2.4 million. She had just had her second child. With a fast-growing business and two small children, Stoykov says she has mastered the art of caring for children, typing, and talking on the phone at the same time. But, unlike many others, she appears to thrive on the mental stimulation of running her own business, despite the stress.
Jan Elsner, a psychologist who specialises in executive coaching, says that doing well on a demanding workload is typical of senior executives. Some people work best with high-adrenaline periods followed by quieter times, while others thrive under sustained pressure. Elsner's practice is based on a movement known as positive psychology, a school of thought that argues that positive experiences—feeling engaged and challenged, for example—do not balance out negative experiences such as stress; instead, they help people increase their resilience over time. Elsner says that many of the senior business people she coaches are increasingly relying more on regulating stress through methods such as meditation. She points to research showing that meditation can alter the biochemistry of the brain and the way that brains and bodies react to stress.
Some experts believe there is too much emphasis on treating job stress as an individual problem. Tony LaMontagne, of the University of Melbourne, says that while personality traits do have some effect on stress, it is systemic stressors—qualities of job roles and organisations themselves—that have a far greater effect. His recent research shows that the major predictor of stress is the level of job control a person has. The best type of job combines challenging work with high autonomy. The worst jobs combine challenging work and low control. People with demanding jobs but little autonomy have up to four times the probability of depression and more than double the risk of heart attack.
🔥 Đáp án & giải thích 2
15
C
Giải thích chi tiết
☺️ Ứng dụng Linearthinking để giải quyết dạng bài Matching Names
Step 01: Read the question to understand main idea
Simplified: High-level workers tend to react positively to stress
-------
Step 02: Locate relevant information
🔍 Từ khoá: “High-level workers”, ”senior executives”, “react positively”, “stress”
→ Dựa vào các từ khoá trên -> Tìm được trích dẫn ở đoạn 7.
-------
Step 03: Read relevant information to understand (main + detail)
📌 Trích dẫn:“Jan Elsner, a psychologist who specialises in executive coaching, says that doing well on a demanding workload is typical of senior executives. Some people work best with high-adrenaline periods followed by quieter times, while others thrive under sustained pressure.”
Simplified: Jan Elsnersays → Doing well on a demanding workloadis typical ofsenior executives
-------
Step 04: Compare meaning with meaning
Nội dung câu hỏi:Nhân sự cấp cao thường phản ứng tích cực với stress.
Nội dung tìm được trong bài: Jan Elsner nói rằng làm việc tốt dưới áp lực là đặc trưng của senior executives.
A. Decibel Hell
It’s not difficult for a person to encounter sound at levels that can cause adverse health effects. During a single day, people living in a typical urban environment can experience a wide range of sounds in many locations, even once-quiet locales have become polluted with noise. In fact, it’s difficult today to escape sound completely. In its 1999 Guidelines for Community Noise, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared, “Worldwide, noise-induced hearing impairment is the most prevalent irreversible occupational hazard, and it is estimated that 120 million people worldwide have disabling hearing difficulties.” Growing evidence also points to many other health effects of too much volume.
Mark Stephenson, a Cincinnati, Ohio-based senior research audiologist at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), says his agency’s definition of hazardous noise is sound that exceeds the time-weighted average of 85 dBA, meaning the average noise exposure measured over a typical eight-hour workday. Other measures and definitions are used for other purposes.
B
Growing Volume
In the United States, about 30 million workers are exposed to hazardous sound levels on the job, according to NIOSH. Industries having a high number of workers exposed to loud sounds include construction, agriculture, mining, manufacturing, utilities, transportation, and the military.
Noise in U.S. industry is an extremely difficult problem to monitor, acknowledges Craig Moulton, a senior industrial hygienist for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). “Still,” he says, “OSHA does require that any employer with workers overexposed to noise provide protection for those employees against the harmful effects of noise. Additionally, employers must implement a continuing, effective hearing conservation program as outlined in OSHA’s Noise Standard.”
C
Scary Sound Effects
Numerous scientific studies over the years have confirmed that exposure to certain levels of sound can damage hearing. Prolonged exposure can actually change the structure of the hair cells in the inner ear, resulting in hearing loss. It can also cause tinnitus, a ringing, roaring, buzzing, or clicking in the ears.
NIOSH studies from the mid to late 1990s show that 90% of coal miners have hearing impairment by age 52 – compared to 9% of the general population – and 70% of male metal/nonmetal miners will experience hearing impairment by age 60 (Stephenson notes that from adolescence onward, females tend to have better hearing than males). Neitzel says nearly half of all construction workers have some degree of hearing loss. “NIOSH research also reveals that by age twenty-five, the average carpenter’s hearing is equivalent to an otherwise healthy fifty-year-old male who hasn’t been exposed to noise,” he says.
William Luxford, medical director of the House Ear Clinic of St. Vincent Medical Center in Los Angeles, points out one piece of good news: “It’s true that continuous noise exposure will lead to the continuation of hearing loss, but as soon as the exposure is stopped, the hearing loss stops. So a change in environment can improve a person’s hearing health.”
Research is catching up with this anecdotal evidence. In the July 2001 issue of Pediatrics, researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that, based on audiometric testing of 5,249 children as part of the Third National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, an estimated 12.5% of American children have noise-induced hearing threshold shifts - or dulled hearing - in one or both ears. Most children with noise-induced hearing threshold shifts have only limited hearing damage, but continued exposure to excessive noise can lead to difficulties with high-frequency sound discrimination. The report listed stereos, music concerts, toys (such as toy telephones and certain rattles), lawnmowers, and fireworks as producing potentially harmful sounds.
D
Beyond the Ears
The effects of sound don’t stop with the ears. Nonauditory effects of noise exposure are those effects that don’t cause hearing loss but still can be measured, such as elevated blood pressure, loss of sleep, increased heart rate, cardiovascular constriction, labored breathing, and changes in brain chemistry.
The nonauditory effects of noise were noted as early as 1930 in a study published by E.L. Smith and D.L. Laird in volume 2 of the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. The results showed that exposure to noise caused stomach contractions in healthy human beings. Reports on noise’s nonauditory effects published since that pioneering study have been both contradictory and controversial in some areas.
Bronzaft and the school principal persuaded the school board to have acoustical tile installed in the classrooms adjacent to the tracks. The Transit Authority also treated the tracks near the school to make them less noisy. A follow-up study published in the September 1981 issue of the Journal of Environmental Psychology found that children’s reading scores improved after these interventions were put in place.
E
Fighting for Quiet
Anti-noise activists say that Europe and several countries in Asia are more advanced than the United States in terms of combating noise. “Population pressure has prompted Europe to move more quickly on the noise issue that the United States has,” Hume says. In the European Union, countries with cities of at least 250,000 people are creating noise maps of those cities to help leaders determine noise pollution policies. Paris has already prepared its first noise maps. The map data, which must be finished by 2007, will be fed into computer models that will help test the sound impact of street designs or new buildings before construction begins.
Activists in other countries say they too want the United States to play a more leading role on the noise issue. But as in other areas of environmental health, merely having a more powerful government agency in place that can set more regulations is not the ultimate answer, according to other experts. Bronzaft stresses that governments worldwide need to increase funding for noise research and do a better job coordinating their noise pollution efforts so they can establish health and environmental policies based on solid scientific research. “Governments have a responsibility to protect their citizens by curbing noise pollution,” she says.
🔥 Đáp án & giải thích 3
28
85 dBa
Giải thích chi tiết
☺️ Ứng dụng Linearthinking để giải quyết dạng bài Gap Fill
Step 01: Read the question to understand (main idea + detail) + Predict Word Form + Meaning
Simplified: Noise is the sound beyond the average of __________
Main idea: Tiếng ồn là âm thanh vượt quá mức trung bình của __________ theo định nghĩa của cơ quan.
Prediction: Danh từ (n) → có khả năng là một con số đo mức âm thanh
-------
Step 02: Locate relevant information
🔍 Từ khoá: “definition”, "beyond", “noise”, “average”, “agency”→ Tìm đoạn văn mô tả định nghĩa của cơ quan (agency) về mức tiếng ồn nguy hiểm.
→ Dựa vào các từ khoá trên → Tìm được trích dẫn ở đoạn A.
-------
Step 03: Read relevant information to understand (main + detail)
📌 Trích dẫn:
“Mark Stephenson, a Cincinnati, Ohio-based senior research audiologist at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), says his agency’s definition of hazardous noise is sound that exceeds the time-weighted average of 85 dBA, meaning the average noise exposure measured over a typical eight-hour workday.” (Đoạn A)
Simplified:
His agency’s definition of hazardous noise is sound that exceeds the average of 85 dBA
Main idea:
NIOSH định nghĩa tiếng ồn nguy hiểm là âm thanh vượt quá mức trung bình 85 dBA
-------
Step 04: Compare meaning with meaning
Trong bài đọc: NIOSH định nghĩa tiếng ồn nguy hiểm là âm thanh vượt quá mức trung bình 85 dBA
Trong câu hỏi: Tiếng ồn là âm thanh vượt quá mức trung bình __________ theo định nghĩa của cơ quan
B. His first two books – The End of Economic Man (1939) and The Future of Industrial Man (1942) – had their admirers, including Winston Churchill, but they annoyed academic critics by ranging so widely over so many different subjects. Still, the second of these books attracted attention with its passionate insistence that companies had a social dimension as well as an economic purpose. His third book, The Concept of the Corporation, became an instant bestseller and has remained in print ever since.
C. The two most interesting arguments in The Concept of the Corporation actually had little to do with the decentralization fad. They were to dominate his work. The first had to do with “empowering” workers. Drucker believed in treating workers as resources rather than just as costs. He was a harsh critic of the assembly-line system of production that then dominated the manufacturing sector – partly because assembly lines moved at the speed of the slowest and partly because they failed to engage the creativity of individual workers. The second argument had to do with the rise of knowledge workers. Drucker argued that the world is moving from an “economy of goods” to an economy of “knowledge” – and from a society dominated by an industrial proletariat to one dominated by brain workers. He insisted that this had profound implications for both managers and politicians. Managers had to stop treating workers like cogs in a huge inhuman machine and start treating them as brain workers. In turn, politicians had to realise that knowledge, and hence education, was the single most important resource for any advanced society. Yet Drucker also thought that this economy had implications for knowledge workers themselves. They had to come to terms with the fact that they were neither “bosses” nor “workers”, but something in between: entrepreneurs who had responsibility for developing their most important resource, brainpower, and who also needed to take more control of their own careers, including their pension plans.
D. However, there was also a hard side to his work. Drucker was responsible for inventing one of the rational school of management’s most successful products – “management by objectives”. In one of his most substantial works, The Practice of Management (1954), he emphasised the importance of managers and corporations setting clear long-term objectives and then translating those long-term objectives into more immediate goals. He argued that firms should have an elite corps of general managers, who set these long-term objectives, and then a group of more specialised managers. For his critics, this was a retreat from his earlier emphasis on the soft side of management. For Drucker it was all perfectly consistent: if you rely too much on empowerment you risk anarchy, whereas if you rely too much on command-and-control you sacrifice creativity. The trick is for managers to set long-term goals, but then allow their employees to work out ways of achieving those goals. If Drucker helped make management a global industry, he also helped push it beyond its business base. He was emphatically a management thinker, not just a business one. He believed that management is “the defining organ of all modern institutions”, not just corporations.
E. There are three persistent criticisms of Drucker’s work. The first is that he focused on big organisations rather than small ones. The Concept of the Corporation was in many ways a fanfare to big organisations. As Drucker said, “We know today that in modern industrial production, particularly in modern mass production, the small unit is not only inefficient, it cannot produce at all.” The book helped to launch the “big organisation boom” that dominated business thinking for the next 20 years. The second criticism is that Drucker’s enthusiasm for management by objectives helped to lead the business down a dead end. They prefer to allow ideas, including ideas for long-term strategies, to bubble up from the bottom and middle of the organisations rather than being imposed from on high. Thirdly, Drucker is criticised for being a maverick who has increasingly been left behind by the increasing rigour of his chosen field. There is no single area of academic management theory that he made his own.
F. There is some truth in the first two arguments. Drucker never wrote anything as good as The Concept of the Corporation on entrepreneurial start-ups. Drucker’s work on management by objectives sits uneasily with his earlier and later writings on the importance of knowledge workers and self-directed teams. But the third argument is short-sighted and unfair because it ignores Drucker’s pioneering role in creating the modern profession of management. He produced one of the first systematic studies of a big company. He pioneered the idea that ideas can help galvanise companies. The biggest problem with evaluating Drucker’s influence is that so many of his ideas have passed into conventional wisdom. In other words, he is the victim of his own success. His writings on the importance of knowledge workers and empowerment may sound a little banal today. But they certainly weren’t banal when he first dreamed them up in the 1940s, or when they were first put in to practice in the Anglo-Saxon world in the 1980s. Moreover, Drucker continued to produce new ideas up until his 90s. His work on the management of voluntary organisations remained at the cutting edge.
How busy is too busy? For some, it means sometimes having to have a short lunch; for others, it may mean missing lunch altogether. For a few, it is not being able to take a day off once a month. Then there is a group of people for whom working every evening and weekend is normal, and feeling stressed is taken for granted. For most senior executives, workloads swing between extremely busy and frenzied. Neil Plumridge, vice-president of a management consultancy company, says that his weeks vary from a 'manageable 45 hours to 80 hours, but average 60 hours.'
Three signs warn Plumridge about his workload: sleep, scheduling, and family. He knows he is doing too much when he gets less than six hours' sleep for three consecutive nights, when he is constantly having to reschedule appointments, and when he misses a family birthday or anniversary. Then, he says, "I know things are out of control." Plumridge states that stress is often caused by his having unrealistic expectations of himself. "I'll promise a client that I'll do something tomorrow, and then I'll promise another client that I'll do the same thing when I know it's not going to happen. I could have said: 'Why don't I give that to you in 48 hours?' The client wouldn't care."
Over-committing is something people experience as an individual problem. However, new research indicates that people may be designed to over-commit. A study in the Journal of Experimental Psychology shows that people always believe that they will be less busy in the future. This is a misapprehension, according to the authors of the report, Gal Zauberman of the University of North Carolina and John Lynch of Duke University. On average, an individual will be just as busy two weeks or a month from now as he or she is today. But that is not how it appears in everyday life, they say. "People make commitments long in advance that they would never make if the same commitments required immediate action. They discount future time investments relatively steeply."
Being too busy is highly subjective, but for any individual, there are some concrete signs of stress—disturbed sleep and declining mental and physical health are the most common examples. Figures for National Workers' Compensation (insurance against injury caused by work) show that stress causes the most lost time of any workplace injury: employees suffering stress are absent from work for an average of 16.6 weeks. The effects of stress are also expensive. The Australian Government insurer reports that in 2003-2004, claims for stress-related psychological injury accounted for 7% of insurance claims but almost 27% of the amount paid out in claim payments.
Experts say the key to dealing with stress is not to focus on relief—a game of golf or a massage—but to reassess workloads. Neil Plumridge says he makes it a priority to work out what has to change: that might mean allocating extra staff to a job, allowing more time, or changing expectations. He also relies on the advice of colleagues, saying that his peers coach each other on business problems: "Just a fresh pair of eyes over an issue can help," he states.
Executive stress is not confined to big organisations. Vanessa Stoykov has been running her own advertising agency and public relations business for seven years. Her company has grown so fast that it appeared on the Business Review Weekly 'Fast 100' list of fastest-growing small enterprises in 2004, just after Stoykov had her first child. In 2005, revenue was projected to double to $2.4 million. She had just had her second child. With a fast-growing business and two small children, Stoykov says she has mastered the art of caring for children, typing, and talking on the phone at the same time. But, unlike many others, she appears to thrive on the mental stimulation of running her own business, despite the stress.
Jan Elsner, a psychologist who specialises in executive coaching, says that doing well on a demanding workload is typical of senior executives. Some people work best with high-adrenaline periods followed by quieter times, while others thrive under sustained pressure. Elsner's practice is based on a movement known as positive psychology, a school of thought that argues that positive experiences—feeling engaged and challenged, for example—do not balance out negative experiences such as stress; instead, they help people increase their resilience over time. Elsner says that many of the senior business people she coaches are increasingly relying more on regulating stress through methods such as meditation. She points to research showing that meditation can alter the biochemistry of the brain and the way that brains and bodies react to stress.
Some experts believe there is too much emphasis on treating job stress as an individual problem. Tony LaMontagne, of the University of Melbourne, says that while personality traits do have some effect on stress, it is systemic stressors—qualities of job roles and organisations themselves—that have a far greater effect. His recent research shows that the major predictor of stress is the level of job control a person has. The best type of job combines challenging work with high autonomy. The worst jobs combine challenging work and low control. People with demanding jobs but little autonomy have up to four times the probability of depression and more than double the risk of heart attack.
Simplified: Jan Elsnersays → Doing well on a demanding workloadis typical ofsenior executives
Nội dung tìm được trong bài: Jan Elsner nói rằng làm việc tốt dưới áp lực là đặc trưng của senior executives.
B. Growing Volume
In the United States, about 30 million workers are exposed to hazardous sound levels on the job, according to NIOSH. Industries having a high number of workers exposed to loud sounds include construction, agriculture, mining, manufacturing, utilities, transportation, and the military.
Noise in U.S. industry is an extremely difficult problem to monitor, acknowledges Craig Moulton, a senior industrial hygienist for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). “Still,” he says, “OSHA does require that any employer with workers overexposed to noise provide protection for those employees against the harmful effects of noise. Additionally, employers must implement a continuing, effective hearing conservation program as outlined in OSHA’s Noise Standard.”
C. Scary Sound Effects
Numerous scientific studies over the years have confirmed that exposure to certain levels of sound can damage hearing. Prolonged exposure can actually change the structure of the hair cells in the inner ear, resulting in hearing loss. It can also cause tinnitus, a ringing, roaring, buzzing, or clicking in the ears.
NIOSH studies from the mid to late 1990s show that 90% of coal miners have hearing impairment by age 52 – compared to 9% of the general population – and 70% of male metal/nonmetal miners will experience hearing impairment by age 60 (Stephenson notes that from adolescence onward, females tend to have better hearing than males). Neitzel says nearly half of all construction workers have some degree of hearing loss. “NIOSH research also reveals that by age twenty-five, the average carpenter’s hearing is equivalent to an otherwise healthy fifty-year-old male who hasn’t been exposed to noise,” he says.
William Luxford, medical director of the House Ear Clinic of St. Vincent Medical Center in Los Angeles, points out one piece of good news: “It’s true that continuous noise exposure will lead to the continuation of hearing loss, but as soon as the exposure is stopped, the hearing loss stops. So a change in environment can improve a person’s hearing health.”
Research is catching up with this anecdotal evidence. In the July 2001 issue of Pediatrics, researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that, based on audiometric testing of 5,249 children as part of the Third National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, an estimated 12.5% of American children have noise-induced hearing threshold shifts - or dulled hearing - in one or both ears. Most children with noise-induced hearing threshold shifts have only limited hearing damage, but continued exposure to excessive noise can lead to difficulties with high-frequency sound discrimination. The report listed stereos, music concerts, toys (such as toy telephones and certain rattles), lawnmowers, and fireworks as producing potentially harmful sounds.
D. Beyond the Ears
The effects of sound don’t stop with the ears. Nonauditory effects of noise exposure are those effects that don’t cause hearing loss but still can be measured, such as elevated blood pressure, loss of sleep, increased heart rate, cardiovascular constriction, labored breathing, and changes in brain chemistry.
The nonauditory effects of noise were noted as early as 1930 in a study published by E.L. Smith and D.L. Laird in volume 2 of the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. The results showed that exposure to noise caused stomach contractions in healthy human beings. Reports on noise’s nonauditory effects published since that pioneering study have been both contradictory and controversial in some areas.
Bronzaft and the school principal persuaded the school board to have acoustical tile installed in the classrooms adjacent to the tracks. The Transit Authority also treated the tracks near the school to make them less noisy. A follow-up study published in the September 1981 issue of the Journal of Environmental Psychology found that children’s reading scores improved after these interventions were put in place.
E. Fighting for Quiet
Anti-noise activists say that Europe and several countries in Asia are more advanced than the United States in terms of combating noise. “Population pressure has prompted Europe to move more quickly on the noise issue that the United States has,” Hume says. In the European Union, countries with cities of at least 250,000 people are creating noise maps of those cities to help leaders determine noise pollution policies. Paris has already prepared its first noise maps. The map data, which must be finished by 2007, will be fed into computer models that will help test the sound impact of street designs or new buildings before construction begins.
Activists in other countries say they too want the United States to play a more leading role on the noise issue. But as in other areas of environmental health, merely having a more powerful government agency in place that can set more regulations is not the ultimate answer, according to other experts. Bronzaft stresses that governments worldwide need to increase funding for noise research and do a better job coordinating their noise pollution efforts so they can establish health and environmental policies based on solid scientific research. “Governments have a responsibility to protect their citizens by curbing noise pollution,” she says.
