Each year Universum, a Swedish consulting firm asks American MBA students where they would most like to work. The 2007 survey showed a few surprises in its top 50 companies named: Hewlett-Packard and Cisco Systems had fell, while old reliables such as General Electric, Coca-Cola and General Mills had jumped up the list. But the most-desired industry remains consulting, despite the beating it has taken since the end of the dotcom boom, and the top firm remains McKinsey. Perhaps the reason is: in recent years McKinsey has done as much as any company to provide MBA graduates with increasingly better and more profitable positions.
The reason for this was the firm’s popularization of a concept known as "war for talent". It advocated finding the best and brightest and rewarding their innovations (创新) in proportion to "talent" instead of their performance or seniority (资格). But what is talent And how does a company measure its employees’ talent, especially when assigning them to new projects The "war for talent" recommends a careful assessment of the inner skills and characteristics ready for success but gives few clues as to what those inner skirls might be, which might make the war standardless. For a company focused on quick growth, one shortcut could be young hires who had already been rewarded for their talent by receiving MBAs from well-respected schools. Thus as the idea of finding talented employees who could quickly learn the skills took off, so did the asking price of the star MBA graduates.
Unfortunately, now the "war for talent" seems less of a brilliant idea. The economic downturn, bringing with it less competition for the available talent, also did its part to control in indulgent (宽容的) employers.
Similarly, Professor Jeffrey Pfeifer emphasized that cultivating a talent means not just hiring the most effective performers, but being able to deal quickly and firmly with the least effective C performers. But he adds that the C refers not to the person but to the individual’s performance in a given job. Some low-performing managers were A or B performers earlier in their careers—and may attain that level of performance again.
MBA programs will remain attractive recruiting areas, but the MBA model itself has come under increasing criticism. Prof. Pfeifer, in a 2007 article found little evidence that an MBA had much effect on future salary or career. Future MBA students might need to provide more evidence of their talent to impress potential employers.
According to the text, McKinsey is favored by American MBA students in that the company ______.