Get Rid of the Performance Review!

How Companies Can Stop Intimidating, Start Managing - and Focus on What Really Matters

By: Samuel A. Culbert, Lawrence Rout - contributor

Narrated by: Samuel A. Culbert

The performance review. It is one of the most insidious, most damaging, and yet most ubiquitous of corporate activities. We all hate it. And yet nobody does anything about it.

Until now...

Straight-talking Sam Culbert, management guru and UCLA professor, minces no words as he puts managers on notice that -- with the performance review as their weapon of choice -- they have built a corporate culture based on intimidation and fear. Teaming up with Wall Street Journal Senior Editor Lawrence Rout, he shows us why performance reviews are bogus and how they undermine both creativity and productivity. And he puts a good deal of the blame squarely on human resources professionals, who perpetuate the very practice that they should be trying to eliminate.

But Culbert does more than merely tear down. He also offers a substitute -- the performance preview -- that will actually accomplish the tasks that performance reviews were supposed to, but never will: holding people accountable for their actions and their results, and giving managers and their employees the kind of feedback they need for improving their skills and to give the company more of what it needs.

With passion, humor, and a rare insight into what motivates all of us to do our best, Culbert offers all of us a chance to be better managers, better employees and, indeed, better people. Culbert has long said his goal is to make the world of work fit for human consumption. Get Rid of the Performance Review!shows us how to do just that.

©2010 Samuel A. Culbert (P)2010 Hachette

It's that time again - Mid Year Performance Rev

I came across this book purely by accident or was it?
l enjoyed listening to the narrator and author read his material because for me, it added that ounce of credibility to what he wrote.

Further to that, he certainly displayed his full and utter disdain for performance reviews; and here I was thinking I was the only one who felt this is an absolute waste of time, manipulation at its finest and sincere and utter rubbish, where bullies go to hide. With approval from upper management and coercion and collusion of the HR department, the rest of us don't have a chance.

I found myself in a situation where a colleague of mine was prompted without the job vacancy being announced and asking why. Really long story short, my personnel file has been dirtied and the likelihood of a promotion let alone a salary increase is doubtful.

with that being said, I'd like to thank for this book! it has restored my faith in humanity and reassured me I'm not going mad!!!

Will now proceed to getting the hard copy for reference during my "Performance Review"

Great read, good stuff and absolutely BRILLIANT!

Enjoyable listen but I have doubts

This is a worthwhile listen. The author makes a great case for ridding the world of annual performance reviews. However, the author assumes implicitly that you are working with above average, reasonable employees. I don't think his prescription works with the garden variety slackers, who always have an excuse for being late or not getting work done.

Terrible

What would have made Get Rid of the Performance Review! better?

Just a terrible boo tha does a terrible job of the rea need for abolishing performance appraisal.

Has Get Rid of the Performance Review! turned you off from other books in this genre?

Yes

Who would you have cast as narrator instead of Samuel A. Culbert?

It's not the narrator, it's the book

If you could play editor, what scene or scenes would you have cut from Get Rid of the Performance Review!?

Complete re-write