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Apparently workers do like to know whether they are performing well, and they want to know it more often then once a year, at a time of their “official” performance review.
ONE defining characteristic of the Net Generation is that it thrives on feedback. Just as they are used to checking their progress on leader boards when playing video games, so Net Geners want to keep close tabs on their performance at work, too. This can be a problem for managers who may be badgered weekly-even daily-for appraisal by eager young members of staff.
The Economist writer, who discovered this “startling” fact with a help of software company that have found the way to remedy this calamity, thinks that this desire to be managed well, is somehow a result of video games impact. The Rypple approach takes a load and responsibility of mentoring off the management shoulders and places into domain of crowdsourcing, at least so it seems from reading the article.
The desire of an individual contributors to know their contribution and impact on performance of a team is not a new phenomena. It is partially based on our need for security (as if it is known and documented that I perform well, my job is secure.) and partially on our desire for “meaning” (as what I do is more meaningful than producing a paycheck). The performance review, sponsored by the institution, is designed primarily for re-assessing compensation in relation to long term performance and career goals. In my personal experience, both as a reviewee and reviewer, these are not at all very satisfying or productive exercises which only highlight a problem with a lack of accountability of management.
On my journey I want to know the destination clearly, and want to check often whether I am deviating off my course. I am surely do not qualify as a member of “Net Gen” chronologically, but spiritually I am definitely with them.
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We are all familiar with the extreme examples of fundamentalist behavior by recollecting our emotions about people, like us, jumping from the World Trade Center towers, watching movies about the Holocaust, or reading about murderous attacks on Pro-choice clinics. We live in extremely emotionally charged times, when everybody seem to feel that they are right and everybody else is wrong.
I am referring here to any form of intolerance and immediate de-humanization of people who happen to have an opinion or belief, which does not agree with our own. Ancient Greeks used to think that the Truth is a result of a vigorous debate, i.e. free and open exchange of opinions and arguments. Democratic systems are based on a belief that honest and open debate eventually produce the best available compromise.
So how do we allow ourselves to be manipulated, by “high priests” of Hate, into the fundamentalist frame of reference on any possible subject, from presidential elections, to illegal immigration, to gay marriage, to bailouts? Is political correctness turning us into them? If having a different opinion turns me into less-than-human, than physically destroying me is no longer murder, and “social cleansing” replaces debate.
This season, whatever holiday you choose to celebrate, add more light to our short, winter days and try to put self-righteousness aside when you look at another human being, who happens to “wave a different flag”. Friendly, non-threatening discussion of the specifics of your disagreements may reveal that you are not that far apart. Just don’t throw slogans at each other - that is what fundamentalists do. How many times do we need to travel that road before we learn our lesson?
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These are a couple of very interesting, seemingly unrelated, blogs that were published last week - 10 Principles of the New Business Intelligence by Tom Davenport and The End Of Venture Capital As We Know It? by Eric Schonfeld.
They made me think that if this economic conditions stay with us for the length of time, predicted by many economists, we ought to adopt to conditions under which decision-by-template methodology is no longer acceptable in business and mindless consumption is no longer acceptable in personal life.
Try to have any corporate decision maker to single out 3 to 5 specific key decisions, which could be tangibly supported by Business Intelligence software, and see them run. There are a many good reasons why certain human activities are categorized as art as opposed to science, even though the most are a mix of both. However when it comes to business activities, the main reason of refusal to treat management decision making as the science is the fear of accountability. If you can formalize decision making process into an algorithm, you can measure it, and if you can measure it and optimized it - you no longer need me. Even worse, you can track and trend my performance and compare it with other’s scores! There will be no place to hide! It is amusing how we, humans, underestimate our truly human contribution to a process (art) and feeding our insecurities by overestimating capacity of technology (science)to replace us, and in this process bring our fears into reality of our experiences.
These fears do have a foundation in our experiences. Millions of jobs were eliminated by use of technology in the last 50 or so years, but most of these jobs were redundant and repetitive with the focus on reduction of cost per unit of production. In my opinion, single focused optimization is a misnomer and often results in false economies. We wasted a lot of quality in the name of the cost, and we could do it quite easily because the creativity (art) element in these jobs is relatively low when compared to expense.
The management decision making process is, or I would argue should be, substantially different with all data, required to support the decision, is processed and organized in an optimal way for a human to focus on the subset of the data in need of creative (art) interpretation, analysis and judgement to produce a quality decision. The important condition is that the process of gathering, processing and organizing this data is not undermining it’s integrity. That is where science excels and art corrupts!
Replacement of “creativity” of spreadsheet jockeys with objective (i.e. unbiased) data would bring a lot of, sorely missed, integrity into our financial reporting systems. However an opportunities for decision support applications are not limited to institutional environment, there are quite a few early attempts to provide support for consumer driven markets as well however these are not analysis driven yet, and focus more on sourcing and connecting at this point. The examples are many with the sites like www.epinions.com, www.cnet.com, or www.getsatisfaction.com just to name a few.
As economic environment evolves into assigning true economic value/price to consumer products, currently subsidized by the labor arbitrage and abuse of environment, consumers will have to learn to be more intelligent in their purchasing decisions.
Apparently workers do like to know whether they are performing well, and they want to know it more often then once a year, at a time of their “official” performance review. 
There are many excellent blogs and other resources on the Internet which explore methodologies and Best Practices for business process re-engineering, project management, systems implementation, software engineering, and change management. However I could not find much help with unlocking value of integrated utilization of these disciplines to facilitate Organizational Transformation. In this blog I would like to focus on this subject. I would like to stress that this is not an academic inquiry, but a practitioner's desire to discuss and share practical business knowledge and Best Practices. Let's see how it evolves - "Every brilliant idea quickly degenerates into a lot of hard work" - Peter Drucker.