Performance Management

Rating:
Summary: A waste of money and time.
Review: Barring better judgement, I purchased this book. Most of the titles in this series are god and informative, but this one is so far off center, I cannot recommend it.

His solutions are absurd and have no practical application in the "real world" and are educational theory at best.

Don't purchase this book, don't recommend it - I want my money back!

Rating:
Summary: A waste of money and time.
Review: Barring better judgement, I purchased this book. Most of the titles in this series are god and informative, but this one is so far off center, I cannot recommend it.

His solutions are absurd and have no practical application in the "real world" and are educational theory at best.

Don't purchase this book, don't recommend it - I want my money back!

Rating:
Summary: The book increase my knownledge of performance management.
Review: I have learned greatly from this book. It increase my knownledge greatly. Upon many researches on the internet and articles, nothing could compare to Performance Management by Robert Bacal.

Rating:
Summary: One of the better ones
Review: There are probably a dozen or so books on this subject that are equally good, and I'm not sure that any book is significantly better than the others in that grouping.

I happen to like this book, and use it in my HR work and in my company. Its length and to-the-point style make it ideal for busy managers, and it is indeed about as practical as it can get.

Its strength though, is that it breaks out of some of the conventional thinking about performance management and appraisal. For example, it points out that performance problems can indeed be attributed to weakness in an employee, but may also be caused by problems in the actual system of work. In this respect it draws from systems thinking and takes into account some of the criticisms of Deming, Scholtes and others.

My favorite part has to be the idea of "no blame", and that the purpose of performance management and appraisal is not to punish or even to reward, but to identify barriers to performance, and work together with the employee to remove them, no matter where they come from. Since the goal is better individual performance which contributes to organizational performance, I think this is practical indeed.

There's a positiveness to this book. If you think performance management and appraisal are excuses to kick [behind] and blame people for failure, then don't get this book, get a whip and chair.