Happy Thanksgiving…..Be thankful for Lean

Happy Thanksgiving from the Lean Is Good blog.  As I reflect back, there is so much to be thankful for it amazes me.  Often times in our blogospheres we rant and rave about all the negative things like lack of leadership, overburdened workloads, lack of commitment, etc.  However, take a minute to think about all [...]

Roundtable 2 – How do you measure a year in someone’s life?

The ‘posters’ of the Lean Is Good blog have grown to four in number. Each of us brings a different background and set of experiences around Deming, lean, and learning. How could we leverage this diversity of thought and voice for the benefit of our readers? We ‘planned’ and came up with an idea that [...]

How do you measure the life of a woman or a man?

Five Hundred Twenty-Five Thousand Six Hundred Minutes.  One year. Over the last couple months we have posted several times on annual performance appraisals (The Jackass Fallacy,  Dan Pink’s & W. Edward’s Deming’s take on motivation,  Bryan suggests a better way, and competition among peers.)

Competition Among Peers – Deming’s Third Deadly Disease

Last week I did a posts here and here (and Bryan offered a different paradigm here) about the external motivation (carrot and stick) assumption of many performance evaluation / merit pay systems.  We’re calling this the “jackass series”. Let’s talk about another assumption that underlies many of these systems – competition between peers increases productivity [...]

Performance Appraisals – A Better Way?

As Bruce points in a couple recent post (here and here), it is performance appraisal season.  Bruce provided many great points on how they are used for evil instead of good!  But we all aren’t as lucky as Deming and can’t just conscientiously object.  In reality most of our jobs require us to perform some [...]

The Great Jackass Fallacy – Dan Pink and W. Edwards Deming

Special thanks to reader Dan Mott who left a link to a TED video on a post from last week called Performance Evals Are Bad – The Great Jackass Fallacy criticizing the “carrots and sticks” approach to performance evaluations and merit increases.  According to career analyst Dan Pink (you can read reviews of and or [...]

Performance Evals Are Bad – The Great Jackass Fallacy

Several weeks ago we ran a series of posts on policy deployment because it was “that time of year.”  Now it is getting to be a “different” time of year, the time when we have to start thinking about performance evaluations. Some evaluation systems are based on building skills and coaching processes.  This isn’t a [...]