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.

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