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GRE Issue:
In any profession—business, politics, education, government—those in power should step down after five years.
Write a response in which you discuss the extent to which you agree or disagree with the claim. In developing and supporting your position, be sure to address the most compelling reasons and/or examples that could be used to challenge your position.
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For any establishments the man in power is a crucial role to play, be it a high school, a company, a government or the Congress. It is argued that in order to prevent corruption, inaction, rent-seeking or power abuse, there should be a maximum years for the man in charge to stay in power. But is it realistic to set a universal formula for all kinds of institutions, like five years? Not necessarily. I believe five years is a relatively short time for a CEO or a high school principal to make his/her mark and deliver his/her contributions, but for a government official or a politician, five years may be long enough to test his suitability for the job, any time longer may leads to unwanted consequences.
Let’s talk about the leadership in enterprises first. Every time a new CEO is inaugurated he has a whole package of plans to pitch: the vision in five of ten years, the profitability goal, the expansion scheme, the downsize possibility and the preventions the company must take to avoid falling behind. Honestly speaking, this is not easy job. Every CEO has two masters to serve: the stockholders and the employees. The former wants profit-maximization, the latter wants stability and reasonable salary-increase. In order to do both jobs well, he needs time to test his plan, to find out the problems, to fine-tune an existed production process and to evaluate opportunities. The stock price and the financial statements will be his score card: if it looks good, why bother to change the whole leadership after certain years? If it is not, it is not the end of world, give him some time, trust his ability to make change until proved otherwise. So why we should set a stiff standard and act like a robot?
As to education, I believe stability is crucial and frequent change of management does not benefit the school. Take the high-school principal for example: A principal’s education concept set the stage for the succeeding development of the school. But in order to formulate a time-tested concept, the principal needs to do a lot of groundwork: talk to teachers to find out what is the major obstacles facing the students; talk to the students to discover which subjects they find most difficult to conquer; talk to the administrative staffs to know if there are red-tapes we can eliminate. After doing all these he knows what needs to done and a reform may be on the way. But we can force that any reform will not be smooth at the beginning: Resistance? Yes. Uncomfortable? Definitely. But a resolute principal will not give up easily. But time is the precondition that guarantees all this can happen. Hard to believe a school that change its principal every five years has high chances of standing out. After all, education concerns generations of people, it is life-time business.
But for politician and government official, I totally agree that there should be a upper limit on their incumbencies. Unlike a CEO or a school principal whose stepping-down may have a huge impact on the institutions they are serving, most government officials are replaceable, especially those in the administrative posts whose daily job is around paper work. For these guys, the longer they stay in power, the worse the influence could be: they may try to form a close knit inner circle, keep real talents from getting in, promoting rent-seeking behavior and corruption. I believe that is why the U.S. cap the tenure of the presidency to four years.
You may say generally speaking five years is long time, isn’t it enough for the leader in any profession to prove his capability and step down to let fresh blood in. After all, just like I analyzed in the government official case, the longer a leader stay in power, the worse his impact could be. But just because it could prevent negative influence does not mean every institution should follow the same. We can invent lots of preventive measures to avoid the bad side but keep the stability and continuity at the same time. In a word, there should not be a clean-cut in “how long”here.
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