Get Rid of the Performance Review!: How Companies Can Stop Intimidating, Start Managing--and Focus on What Really Matters

Based upon a startling article in the Wall Street Journal that appeared in November, 2008, Dr. Sam Culbert, a professor at the prestigious UCLA Anderson School of Business and an expert on human relations in the workplace, summarized what most of us have already known for years - that annual corporate performance appraisals not only don't work, they actually cause more problems than they solve.

In this powerful book, Culbert, with his co-writer Larry Rout, a long-time editor at the Wall Street Journal, pinpoints how performance reviews destroy employee morale, are rarely helpful, vary widely from one manager to the next, and in short, actually have a negative impact on both the supervisor and his/her subordinate. Plus they give rise to emotional friction between the two individuals that often can't be repaired.

By using real-life examples of how performance reviews are botched, screwed up, and get in their own way, Culbert make a strong case as to why performance reviews should be totally revised, or thrown on the corporate scrap heap.

Culbert then provides the solution: instead of performance reviews, he strongly advocates the adoption of performancepreviews. In effect, managers and bosses should address key issues in their subordinate's performance when those problems pop up right away -- not at the end of the year. Performance previews work.

Full of common sense, along with real passion, this book confronts one of the long-standing traditions in management/employee relationship and advocates strongly for immediate change. More

Samuel A. Culbert is Professor of Management at UCLA Anderson School of Management. He is the recipient of the American Association of Publishers Best Management Book of the Year award and the Harvard Business Review McKinsey Award.

Larry Rout is an editor at the Wall Street Journal.