OKAY! HERE IS MY TAKE ON AN ALTERNATIVE TO PERFORMANCE APPRAISAL!
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© April 13, 2010
REFERENCE:
Some readers felt I avoided to take a stand on performance appraisal. I hope this helps.
* * *
In 1980, I directed the largest Quality Control Circle (QCC) program in the United States at Honeywell Avionics, Inc., Clearwater, Florida. There were more than 1,000 hourly workers participating religiously in these quality circles, while 1,000 engineers and 2,000 professional support personnel participated half heartedly seeing them as being a cosmetic and inconsequential intervention, which of course they were.
That said I did something that was quite revealing to me. Each hourly quality circle had from ten to fifteen members, people working on the same project. In the course of my work with them, I asked them to name the three people in their respective groups who were most important to the success of the project, being careful to focus on the work not the popularity of the person.
The first time I did this the results came back mixed with no clear indicator of who was and wasn’t contributing. Over time, we were able – as a group – to decide what criteria indicated the most significant contributions and who were the persons most likely to be responsible for such contributions.
The top three, not often in the same order, were mentioned some seventy-five percent of the time consistently for each respective quality circle. Obviously, in a 15-member circle, some voted for themselves. Significant, all of them voted. Even more significant, three out of four of them agreed on who in their group was carrying the ball.
Professionals, paranoid to the nth degree, wouldn’t even participate in this exercise.
Then along came Tom Brokaw’s NBC Television electrifying program, “Japan Can, Why Can’t We?” (mid-1980). Quality circles exploded across the country, but now the workforce was becoming increasingly white-collar or professional versus blue-collar and unskilled workers. Quality Control Circles (QQC) were directed at the wrong workforce, and so they soared like Daedalus with the same ultimate fate.
Still, I did learn that the best evaluators of performance are the performers themselves. No ten-point scale of management, indeed, no management at all. Now in this electronic age this could be done on software that could accurately gauge input, and correctly target promotions on the basis of systematic criteria. If this is being done, I applaud it. The point is there is no need for managers in the process.
* * *
Tuesday, April 13, 2010
PERFORMANCE APPRAISAL: THE FLOODGATES ARE OPEN THE DELUGE IS HERE!
PERFORMANCE APPRAISAL: THE FLOODGATES ARE OPEN THE DELUGE IS HERE!
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© April 13, 2010
REFERENCE:
My missive yesterday was to point out how good and bad intentions have consistent unintended consequences.
Feudal lords were not all bad. They simply wanted order and for people to behave and appreciate the little they were given.
Capitalists were not all bad, but they wanted people to behave and appreciate the little they were given.
In our post capitalistic society with the same sex marriages of communism and capitalism (China), and Islam and capitalism (Indonesia), to name a couple, Christianity and capitalism considered the appropriate heterosexual marriage of good people is floundering. It has been floundering since World War Two.
* * *
There has always been a ruling class with few breakthroughs throughout history. Power is always reluctant to share even a modicum of power, and so it has been, so it will be, and so conflicts will be on periodic display.
When I was coming into the world, good men, brave men, but poorly educated and skilled men, took or the Carnegies, the Mellons, and the Rockefellers. Many lost their lives fighting for a decent wage, hygienic working conditions, a proper return on their productivity in terms of benefits, and the dignity of work.
The Robber Barons met workers’ demands with strike busters armed with guns and clubs. Don’t’ take my word. It is all in our history books. It happened in Europe as well. It happened in Russia, too, only to give birth to the Soviet Union. It is happening today in China, India, Indonesia, and South Africa and elsewhere in emerging economic powers and is being met with draconian methods.
* * *
What I have found astounding in my career is the behavior of grandsons and granddaughters of these workers who took on the Carnegies, Mellons, and Rockefellers. Eighty years ago men picketed their workplaces and bled on American streets. They had their knuckles busted as they refused to remove their hands from the fences locking them out of their work.
Today, their grandsons and granddaughters are far better educated more knowledgeable and therefore more relevant to their work than their bosses, indeed, to the whole idea of corpocracy. Yet they allow themselves to be repressed compressed and grinded into conformity with hardly a whimper of protest.
They are professionals.
Being professional has come to mean they are docile, timid, impotent, cowardly, submissive, retiring, nonconfrontational, passive-aggressive, and counter dependent on a pusillanimous system that pays them a structured salary and gives them miniscule increases. The mechanism that keeps them in place is performance appraisal. Human Resources, its architect, has become management’s union. HR has all the skills of Madison Avenue advertisers.
Those at the top earn sometimes 1,000 percent or more than those with the brainpower that is the lifeblood of the operation. Meanwhile, the well heeled are steering that selfsame operation in far too many instances into bankruptcy, reorganization, redundancy exercises, mergers, reengineering, or some other claptrap justification of the moment
While this is going on, these professionals are expected to behave and appreciate the little they are given. And they do.
* * *
It has become a cradle to grave phenomenon and the unintended consequences of grandchildren and great grandchildren becoming primarily interested in getting and not giving, in escape rather than confrontation, and in living a surreal existence rather than a real one with some electronic contraption.
Eighty years ago parents were determined their children would never suffer as they had, never have to fight as they had, never have to stand up for their beliefs and their dignity as they had. They wanted their children and grandchildren to avoid pain and risk that was a constant companion to their lives. They forgot that it was that spirit that won World War Two, a legacy they refused to pass on to their children.
Ordinary Joes and Janes – I had many in my clan – put on the military uniform and fought the Axis Powers the same way their parents had fought the Robber Barons, and they won the war, or did they, actually?
* * *
I propose they unwittingly killed the spirit that won the war. They kept the truth from their children and the painful lessons of that truth, while forgiving their children the consequences of their actions, being always there to break their fall, apologize for their missteps, or deny them the integrity that had made them what they were. .
My greatest advantage in life was to be born to poor parents with no grandparents on either side, no safety net other than my own cunning, knowing that when I fell there would be no one to pick me up. Many of my generation avoided having their spirit killed for the same reason as mine, but what did we do to our children?
I was educated with a mindset of that grandparent generation. Although mine were gone when I was born, I had it programmed into my soul. I road the easy life to a fine education, and rapid promotion in the 1960s when the heritage that had made us strong as a nation was unraveling. We were already living in nostalgia.
The survival spirit was too deep in my soul for it to happen in me. I never forgot I was a poor boy, and I have never joined those of wealth who would be patronizing to the poor. Never. I never joined the club. I am comfortable with a poor boy’s mindset into my advanced years, while not being poor, but I have the anger and fight of my grandparent’s generation that mounted the battle against the Robber Barons eighty years ago. It is why I write.
The biggest disappointment of my life has been how my children and the children of their generation have been finessed by sex and economic wealth. You only have to look at PBS on television or at the most popular books to see that these two subjects dominate. Sex is of prurient interest because we are human beings. Wealth is seen as the panacea meant to cure everything.
Have you ever noticed that only weeds grow on parched earth? We have become a society of weeds.
Casinos are the current weeds in our economic parchedness. They are everywhere even in my hometown of Clinton, Iowa. “The answer to economic woes.” Florida’s governor Crist is flirting with $1.5 billion from Seminole Indian casinos over the next ten years as an answer to a budget deep in the red.
It is that old “catch 22” – the profits come from those least able to afford to gamble, thinking by gambling they will no longer be poor when the house is designed to kill that hope.
Artificial stimulants are the rave today to a hapless sex life, while plastic surgery is a multibillion-dollar industry. We don’t want to grow old because that would mean we would have to grow up.
* * *
Our nation is dying, not because of immigrants, not because of the fears of Anglo Saxon and Christian entropy, not even because of the economic challenges, which have always been with us.
Our nation is dying because we are preoccupied with such issues when entropy is a normal fact of existence and the persistent challenge. We are failing to reinvent our nation for its role in an emerging world. We are stuck with what we were and where we were in those glory days, and have forgotten what it was like to be unstuck.
This is the macrocosm of the microcosm that I address. Focus on the wrong ball and that one rolling down the hill will eventually bury you.
So, what does this have to do with performance appraisal? I won’t attempt to answer that as I have had a plethora of responses to my missive, showing that the idea of performance appraisal resonates with many of you in alarming ways. Here is a representative sample of those responses
* * *
A READER WRITES:
Hello Jim,
You have hit the nail, plucked a note, struck a chord, rung the bell and started the chant reminding us again of the most tedious, clichéd and non-value adding process used in business today.
One of my former bosses, a VP of Human Resources, once told me the job of HR was to keep the company out of court. Hence, the performance appraisal, the sole purpose of which seemed to be justification for terminations. Unfortunately, our mostly spineless managers found it difficult to ever document on paper anything really bad about one of their employees, primarily because it would mean having a discussion about improving that performance. Nor could they say anything too good for fear that someone on top would notice and promote the employee.
Tom Coens wrote a book in 2002, "Abolishing Performance Appraisals." I had an opportunity to speak with him briefly after a presentation he gave on the subject. He seemed very sincere. In the book he provided several alternatives. Apparently, now, eight years later another one has surfaced
The problem is that HR is the keeper of the flame, holder of the records and designer/ perpetual redesigner of the process. I'll admit I fell into this trap early in my career. Part of a team established to re-design our appraisal process.
We cleverly tried to focus on competencies and the understanding that required competencies varied from function to function. Nice, but shallow attempt at forcing thought. We succumbed to the scale, one to five points. When we presented our process to the executive board the GM from England suggested we use a ten-point scale to avoid managers giving half points. They (managers) gave half points even on the ten-point scale. Talk about an inability to commit.
This was the beginning of the end for me. The naiveté of youth began to give way to the cynicism of experience. Managers and executives I held in high regard because of what they had accomplished and their presumed intelligence became increasingly disrobed.
It was about this time I discovered some of your books, which fueled the journey. A friend, who is on your mailing list today, told me about your writing. He talked about your edginess as compared to other 'sacrilegious" management/leadership/OD authors of the period.
A final step in the process, after several years of pushing, the company I was with, thanks to the leadership of a thoughtful Division President, finally did "abolish appraisals." The monitoring device was a quarterly red/yellow/green review of project status. The only qualitative evaluation was whether the employee was maintaining company values - teamwork, respect, development, and integrity. In other words, there were no bodies in the wake of an accomplishment.
I suppose there is hope. I believe it starts with wresting control of "appraisal" from the HR function and leaving it to those who use the tool to shape it. Clearly, based on past application of PAs, management does not want to rate people. Now, ranking, in the Jack Welch 10/80/10 mode, is the next disparaging tactic to address.
Thanks for the reminder. Pound the nail, bang the going, push on the flywheel, it will eventually gain its own momentum.
Michael
* * *
DR, FISHER RESPONDS:
Michael,
Thank you. I feel I’m talking to the choir. It is those that have no church, speaking metaphorically, that are the challenge.
Be always well,
Jim
* * *
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© April 13, 2010
REFERENCE:
My missive yesterday was to point out how good and bad intentions have consistent unintended consequences.
Feudal lords were not all bad. They simply wanted order and for people to behave and appreciate the little they were given.
Capitalists were not all bad, but they wanted people to behave and appreciate the little they were given.
In our post capitalistic society with the same sex marriages of communism and capitalism (China), and Islam and capitalism (Indonesia), to name a couple, Christianity and capitalism considered the appropriate heterosexual marriage of good people is floundering. It has been floundering since World War Two.
* * *
There has always been a ruling class with few breakthroughs throughout history. Power is always reluctant to share even a modicum of power, and so it has been, so it will be, and so conflicts will be on periodic display.
When I was coming into the world, good men, brave men, but poorly educated and skilled men, took or the Carnegies, the Mellons, and the Rockefellers. Many lost their lives fighting for a decent wage, hygienic working conditions, a proper return on their productivity in terms of benefits, and the dignity of work.
The Robber Barons met workers’ demands with strike busters armed with guns and clubs. Don’t’ take my word. It is all in our history books. It happened in Europe as well. It happened in Russia, too, only to give birth to the Soviet Union. It is happening today in China, India, Indonesia, and South Africa and elsewhere in emerging economic powers and is being met with draconian methods.
* * *
What I have found astounding in my career is the behavior of grandsons and granddaughters of these workers who took on the Carnegies, Mellons, and Rockefellers. Eighty years ago men picketed their workplaces and bled on American streets. They had their knuckles busted as they refused to remove their hands from the fences locking them out of their work.
Today, their grandsons and granddaughters are far better educated more knowledgeable and therefore more relevant to their work than their bosses, indeed, to the whole idea of corpocracy. Yet they allow themselves to be repressed compressed and grinded into conformity with hardly a whimper of protest.
They are professionals.
Being professional has come to mean they are docile, timid, impotent, cowardly, submissive, retiring, nonconfrontational, passive-aggressive, and counter dependent on a pusillanimous system that pays them a structured salary and gives them miniscule increases. The mechanism that keeps them in place is performance appraisal. Human Resources, its architect, has become management’s union. HR has all the skills of Madison Avenue advertisers.
Those at the top earn sometimes 1,000 percent or more than those with the brainpower that is the lifeblood of the operation. Meanwhile, the well heeled are steering that selfsame operation in far too many instances into bankruptcy, reorganization, redundancy exercises, mergers, reengineering, or some other claptrap justification of the moment
While this is going on, these professionals are expected to behave and appreciate the little they are given. And they do.
* * *
It has become a cradle to grave phenomenon and the unintended consequences of grandchildren and great grandchildren becoming primarily interested in getting and not giving, in escape rather than confrontation, and in living a surreal existence rather than a real one with some electronic contraption.
Eighty years ago parents were determined their children would never suffer as they had, never have to fight as they had, never have to stand up for their beliefs and their dignity as they had. They wanted their children and grandchildren to avoid pain and risk that was a constant companion to their lives. They forgot that it was that spirit that won World War Two, a legacy they refused to pass on to their children.
Ordinary Joes and Janes – I had many in my clan – put on the military uniform and fought the Axis Powers the same way their parents had fought the Robber Barons, and they won the war, or did they, actually?
* * *
I propose they unwittingly killed the spirit that won the war. They kept the truth from their children and the painful lessons of that truth, while forgiving their children the consequences of their actions, being always there to break their fall, apologize for their missteps, or deny them the integrity that had made them what they were. .
My greatest advantage in life was to be born to poor parents with no grandparents on either side, no safety net other than my own cunning, knowing that when I fell there would be no one to pick me up. Many of my generation avoided having their spirit killed for the same reason as mine, but what did we do to our children?
I was educated with a mindset of that grandparent generation. Although mine were gone when I was born, I had it programmed into my soul. I road the easy life to a fine education, and rapid promotion in the 1960s when the heritage that had made us strong as a nation was unraveling. We were already living in nostalgia.
The survival spirit was too deep in my soul for it to happen in me. I never forgot I was a poor boy, and I have never joined those of wealth who would be patronizing to the poor. Never. I never joined the club. I am comfortable with a poor boy’s mindset into my advanced years, while not being poor, but I have the anger and fight of my grandparent’s generation that mounted the battle against the Robber Barons eighty years ago. It is why I write.
The biggest disappointment of my life has been how my children and the children of their generation have been finessed by sex and economic wealth. You only have to look at PBS on television or at the most popular books to see that these two subjects dominate. Sex is of prurient interest because we are human beings. Wealth is seen as the panacea meant to cure everything.
Have you ever noticed that only weeds grow on parched earth? We have become a society of weeds.
Casinos are the current weeds in our economic parchedness. They are everywhere even in my hometown of Clinton, Iowa. “The answer to economic woes.” Florida’s governor Crist is flirting with $1.5 billion from Seminole Indian casinos over the next ten years as an answer to a budget deep in the red.
It is that old “catch 22” – the profits come from those least able to afford to gamble, thinking by gambling they will no longer be poor when the house is designed to kill that hope.
Artificial stimulants are the rave today to a hapless sex life, while plastic surgery is a multibillion-dollar industry. We don’t want to grow old because that would mean we would have to grow up.
* * *
Our nation is dying, not because of immigrants, not because of the fears of Anglo Saxon and Christian entropy, not even because of the economic challenges, which have always been with us.
Our nation is dying because we are preoccupied with such issues when entropy is a normal fact of existence and the persistent challenge. We are failing to reinvent our nation for its role in an emerging world. We are stuck with what we were and where we were in those glory days, and have forgotten what it was like to be unstuck.
This is the macrocosm of the microcosm that I address. Focus on the wrong ball and that one rolling down the hill will eventually bury you.
So, what does this have to do with performance appraisal? I won’t attempt to answer that as I have had a plethora of responses to my missive, showing that the idea of performance appraisal resonates with many of you in alarming ways. Here is a representative sample of those responses
* * *
A READER WRITES:
Hello Jim,
You have hit the nail, plucked a note, struck a chord, rung the bell and started the chant reminding us again of the most tedious, clichéd and non-value adding process used in business today.
One of my former bosses, a VP of Human Resources, once told me the job of HR was to keep the company out of court. Hence, the performance appraisal, the sole purpose of which seemed to be justification for terminations. Unfortunately, our mostly spineless managers found it difficult to ever document on paper anything really bad about one of their employees, primarily because it would mean having a discussion about improving that performance. Nor could they say anything too good for fear that someone on top would notice and promote the employee.
Tom Coens wrote a book in 2002, "Abolishing Performance Appraisals." I had an opportunity to speak with him briefly after a presentation he gave on the subject. He seemed very sincere. In the book he provided several alternatives. Apparently, now, eight years later another one has surfaced
The problem is that HR is the keeper of the flame, holder of the records and designer/ perpetual redesigner of the process. I'll admit I fell into this trap early in my career. Part of a team established to re-design our appraisal process.
We cleverly tried to focus on competencies and the understanding that required competencies varied from function to function. Nice, but shallow attempt at forcing thought. We succumbed to the scale, one to five points. When we presented our process to the executive board the GM from England suggested we use a ten-point scale to avoid managers giving half points. They (managers) gave half points even on the ten-point scale. Talk about an inability to commit.
This was the beginning of the end for me. The naiveté of youth began to give way to the cynicism of experience. Managers and executives I held in high regard because of what they had accomplished and their presumed intelligence became increasingly disrobed.
It was about this time I discovered some of your books, which fueled the journey. A friend, who is on your mailing list today, told me about your writing. He talked about your edginess as compared to other 'sacrilegious" management/leadership/OD authors of the period.
A final step in the process, after several years of pushing, the company I was with, thanks to the leadership of a thoughtful Division President, finally did "abolish appraisals." The monitoring device was a quarterly red/yellow/green review of project status. The only qualitative evaluation was whether the employee was maintaining company values - teamwork, respect, development, and integrity. In other words, there were no bodies in the wake of an accomplishment.
I suppose there is hope. I believe it starts with wresting control of "appraisal" from the HR function and leaving it to those who use the tool to shape it. Clearly, based on past application of PAs, management does not want to rate people. Now, ranking, in the Jack Welch 10/80/10 mode, is the next disparaging tactic to address.
Thanks for the reminder. Pound the nail, bang the going, push on the flywheel, it will eventually gain its own momentum.
Michael
* * *
DR, FISHER RESPONDS:
Michael,
Thank you. I feel I’m talking to the choir. It is those that have no church, speaking metaphorically, that are the challenge.
Be always well,
Jim
* * *
Sunday, April 11, 2010
WHEN YOU POUND AT AN IDEA EVENTUALLY THE NAIL GETS THROUGH -- PERFORMANCE APPRAISAL EXPOSED!
WHEN YOU POUND AT AN IDEA EVENTUALLY THE NAIL GETS THROUGH – PERFORMANCE APPRAISAL EXPOSED!
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© April 11, 2010
In early 1986, I was invited all expenses paid to speak at the International Conference of Human Resource Managers in New Orleans. One of the ideas that I was working on at the time was that of “work without managers,” which would become a book in four more years.
The idea mystified the group of more than 400 that attended my seminar, and some walked out. More walked out when I said that performance appraisal was a bad idea that had turned into a counterproductive joke, taking workers away from their work and giving managers, who had no real function, something to demonstrate their power over workers the way academics exercised their power over students with the grade. More people walked out.
BB and I were quite new at the time and she wondered seriously what kind of a person this Dr. Fisher was that she had hooked up with, and well that she might, as my purpose in life since I reentered industry in 1980 after a two-year sabbatical of doing nothing but reading books and playing tennis had become that of alerting whomever would listen to the changing nature of the workforce from blue-collar to write-collar and from management to professionals.
My last assignment in corpocracy was in Honeywell Europe where what I had observed in the United States was more oppressively obvious there. Management and performance appraisal had risen to the level of a religion, and was practiced with the ecclesiastical authority to demonstrate all that was wrong with the corporation.
In 1990, I retired from the corporation for the second time, and looked for a publisher across both sides of the Atlantic and found none, and so formed The Delta Group Florida and published WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS: A VIEW FROM THE TRENCHES (1991).
This self-published book represented my entering an industry of which I knew nothing, and had even less interest in knowing, grabbed the book as a kind of breath of free air, while calling it “angry” or “provocative” while naming it one of the ten best business books of the year (Industry Week) or one of the four best business books of the year (Business Book Review Journal), along with NPR’s “All Things Considered” reviewing it for radio in a positive light. It turned out to be too much too many too soon because it attacked the very premise of capitalism as it had festered into a chronic malignancy. Less than two decades later it would read like prophecy as the world flirted with a Great Depression.
Nothing changed. It was an anomaly. The business community remained transfixed with “In Search of Excellence” (1982), a book that took the country by storm believing imitation was the root to the Holy Grail, a view that I opposed, and for it was by some seen to be jealous for its success. Not true. It was the wrong message at the wrong time to the wrong audience and set American enterprise on its head to spin like a top until it finally keeled over in 2008 bleeding $trillions of dollars all over the red carpet.
You toot your own horn from the hinterland with no pedigree or credentials or connections to booster your premise and you are likely to be seen as I have been seen as angry and not perspicacious. It is the sadness and consequences of not listening to Chicken Little.
WWMs was followed by THE WORKER, ALONE! GOING AGAINST THE GRAIN (1995), a call to battle of professionals to take charge of their power and restructure work to be more amendable to their purposes. Again, I attacked performance appraisal but to no avail.
TWA! was followed by SIX SILENT KILLERS: MANAGEMENT'S GREATEST CHALLENGE (1998), which expanded on the ideas of WWMs with greater specificity in an attempt to bring corpocracy out from under the sheets, where it was hiding. The Wall Street Journal, to its credit, reviewed it and said every executive in America should read it. Few did. One CEO told me he read only the "good parts" that were not offensive to him, which was to say he read very little of the book.
SSKs was followed by CORPORATE SIN: LEADERLESS LEADERSHIP AND DISSONANT WORKERS (2000) in which I attempted to show in a balanced view that the rope-a-dope of hope without courage would change nothing as the offense was on both sides of the spectrum, as workers were as guilty as managers for the mess.
The meritocracy of miniscule raises as the outcome of performance appraisals only drove the stake deeper in the heart of hope expunging courage. It was not a pretty sight.
Meanwhile, corporate pay at the highest levels was soaring as these characters that manned these positions of privilege operated with the infallibility of a pope, and were treated as such. It was madness, madness on both the part of workers and managers and was not a good omen for the future. The little CORPORATE SIN was reviewed -- an academic loved it and published a powerful review on Amazon -- he was the wrong audience.
Not to be undaunted, I returned to the battle with a retrospective, hoping in the process for those in charge to see how we were like the Pied Pipers serenading us off the cliff in A LOOK BACKWARD TO SEE AHEAD (2007). I could see, although not an economist, that our behavior and culture were in the process of signaling our doom. We were stuck, missing the changes, staying the same, leaving the future up for grabs, and said as much.
This doomsday scenario was manifested a little more than a year later in the subprime fiasco and the Wall Street meltdown. Greed and false aspirations can carry a dream only so far. And yes, I have punished my readers with my perspective on the performance appraisal review in this book as I had in the other books previously mentioned here.
This is all preamble to the fact Samuel A. Culbert with Lawrence Rout has published a book that resonates with my long-term view, GET RID OF THE PERFORMANCE APPRAISAL REVIEW: HOW COMPANIES CAN STOP INTIMIDATING , START MANAGING – AND FOCUS ON WHAT REALLY MATTERS (2010).
There is a lot of crème puff in this effort but it is the first real attempt to get out of the morass that I call “anachronistic management.”
I hope it generates a dialogue and gets beyond a lot of the damage Peter Drucker did with his MANAGEMENT BY OBJECTIVES (MBO’s) that never worked, and his PERFORMANC APPRAISAL that worked even less well.
Drucker was one of those sacred cows that spoke and everybody listened whenever he spoke. I stopped listening to him a long time ago when he said, and apparently meant it, that workplace culture had little to do with performance, when it has everything to do with it.
I’ve retired from writing books on the psychology of management. I’ve said everything that I have had to say, some have stolen my ideas as theirs, which is okay as long as they use them wisely, others have made me the object of their focus rather than what I have had to say, and as a consequence pushed the stone back into place, after I had used all my energy to dislodge it, and then there are still others who have no idea what I am writing about here.
* * *
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© April 11, 2010
In early 1986, I was invited all expenses paid to speak at the International Conference of Human Resource Managers in New Orleans. One of the ideas that I was working on at the time was that of “work without managers,” which would become a book in four more years.
The idea mystified the group of more than 400 that attended my seminar, and some walked out. More walked out when I said that performance appraisal was a bad idea that had turned into a counterproductive joke, taking workers away from their work and giving managers, who had no real function, something to demonstrate their power over workers the way academics exercised their power over students with the grade. More people walked out.
BB and I were quite new at the time and she wondered seriously what kind of a person this Dr. Fisher was that she had hooked up with, and well that she might, as my purpose in life since I reentered industry in 1980 after a two-year sabbatical of doing nothing but reading books and playing tennis had become that of alerting whomever would listen to the changing nature of the workforce from blue-collar to write-collar and from management to professionals.
My last assignment in corpocracy was in Honeywell Europe where what I had observed in the United States was more oppressively obvious there. Management and performance appraisal had risen to the level of a religion, and was practiced with the ecclesiastical authority to demonstrate all that was wrong with the corporation.
In 1990, I retired from the corporation for the second time, and looked for a publisher across both sides of the Atlantic and found none, and so formed The Delta Group Florida and published WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS: A VIEW FROM THE TRENCHES (1991).
This self-published book represented my entering an industry of which I knew nothing, and had even less interest in knowing, grabbed the book as a kind of breath of free air, while calling it “angry” or “provocative” while naming it one of the ten best business books of the year (Industry Week) or one of the four best business books of the year (Business Book Review Journal), along with NPR’s “All Things Considered” reviewing it for radio in a positive light. It turned out to be too much too many too soon because it attacked the very premise of capitalism as it had festered into a chronic malignancy. Less than two decades later it would read like prophecy as the world flirted with a Great Depression.
Nothing changed. It was an anomaly. The business community remained transfixed with “In Search of Excellence” (1982), a book that took the country by storm believing imitation was the root to the Holy Grail, a view that I opposed, and for it was by some seen to be jealous for its success. Not true. It was the wrong message at the wrong time to the wrong audience and set American enterprise on its head to spin like a top until it finally keeled over in 2008 bleeding $trillions of dollars all over the red carpet.
You toot your own horn from the hinterland with no pedigree or credentials or connections to booster your premise and you are likely to be seen as I have been seen as angry and not perspicacious. It is the sadness and consequences of not listening to Chicken Little.
WWMs was followed by THE WORKER, ALONE! GOING AGAINST THE GRAIN (1995), a call to battle of professionals to take charge of their power and restructure work to be more amendable to their purposes. Again, I attacked performance appraisal but to no avail.
TWA! was followed by SIX SILENT KILLERS: MANAGEMENT'S GREATEST CHALLENGE (1998), which expanded on the ideas of WWMs with greater specificity in an attempt to bring corpocracy out from under the sheets, where it was hiding. The Wall Street Journal, to its credit, reviewed it and said every executive in America should read it. Few did. One CEO told me he read only the "good parts" that were not offensive to him, which was to say he read very little of the book.
SSKs was followed by CORPORATE SIN: LEADERLESS LEADERSHIP AND DISSONANT WORKERS (2000) in which I attempted to show in a balanced view that the rope-a-dope of hope without courage would change nothing as the offense was on both sides of the spectrum, as workers were as guilty as managers for the mess.
The meritocracy of miniscule raises as the outcome of performance appraisals only drove the stake deeper in the heart of hope expunging courage. It was not a pretty sight.
Meanwhile, corporate pay at the highest levels was soaring as these characters that manned these positions of privilege operated with the infallibility of a pope, and were treated as such. It was madness, madness on both the part of workers and managers and was not a good omen for the future. The little CORPORATE SIN was reviewed -- an academic loved it and published a powerful review on Amazon -- he was the wrong audience.
Not to be undaunted, I returned to the battle with a retrospective, hoping in the process for those in charge to see how we were like the Pied Pipers serenading us off the cliff in A LOOK BACKWARD TO SEE AHEAD (2007). I could see, although not an economist, that our behavior and culture were in the process of signaling our doom. We were stuck, missing the changes, staying the same, leaving the future up for grabs, and said as much.
This doomsday scenario was manifested a little more than a year later in the subprime fiasco and the Wall Street meltdown. Greed and false aspirations can carry a dream only so far. And yes, I have punished my readers with my perspective on the performance appraisal review in this book as I had in the other books previously mentioned here.
This is all preamble to the fact Samuel A. Culbert with Lawrence Rout has published a book that resonates with my long-term view, GET RID OF THE PERFORMANCE APPRAISAL REVIEW: HOW COMPANIES CAN STOP INTIMIDATING , START MANAGING – AND FOCUS ON WHAT REALLY MATTERS (2010).
There is a lot of crème puff in this effort but it is the first real attempt to get out of the morass that I call “anachronistic management.”
I hope it generates a dialogue and gets beyond a lot of the damage Peter Drucker did with his MANAGEMENT BY OBJECTIVES (MBO’s) that never worked, and his PERFORMANC APPRAISAL that worked even less well.
Drucker was one of those sacred cows that spoke and everybody listened whenever he spoke. I stopped listening to him a long time ago when he said, and apparently meant it, that workplace culture had little to do with performance, when it has everything to do with it.
I’ve retired from writing books on the psychology of management. I’ve said everything that I have had to say, some have stolen my ideas as theirs, which is okay as long as they use them wisely, others have made me the object of their focus rather than what I have had to say, and as a consequence pushed the stone back into place, after I had used all my energy to dislodge it, and then there are still others who have no idea what I am writing about here.
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Saturday, April 10, 2010
AN ESSAY ON LOVE!
AN ESSAY ON LOVE
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© March 10, 2010
In society’s attempt to marry the mind to reason, the heart has run astray. The heart is the engine of society. The heart a kilter leads to emptiness, which is the province of fear. Fear leads to terror, and terror leads to hate where there is no longer room for the heart.
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© March 10, 2010
In society’s attempt to marry the mind to reason, the heart has run astray. The heart is the engine of society. The heart a kilter leads to emptiness, which is the province of fear. Fear leads to terror, and terror leads to hate where there is no longer room for the heart.
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