Measuring Performance
Malcom Gladwell has a blog - you may know him as the captivating author of Blink and Tipping Point. If you want a short overview of his ideas, check out a podcast from a while back he did for IT Conversations. His most recent entry is about a new way of calculating performance in professional basketball - a lamentation of sorts for Kevin Garnett, one of the best players in professional basketball, who despite his performance is marginalized because of poor teammate performance.
It's interesting that this new way of calculating basketball has yielded some interesting results - players like Josh Childress and even the South Dakota Native Son Mike Miller, players who even less passive fans of professional basketball may be hard pressed to identify.
I wonder about the measure of performance for those of us in a "conventional" job. When I was in grade school, I missed out on an award for perfect attendance simply because we'd moved as a family and I'd gotten enrolled in school a few days late. My attendance was probably based most on boredome (less bored at school than home), but little did I know this would be a statistic used by my employers to measure my performance. The other statistic I've heard of from many people is the yearly "review" where some management person sits the employee down, chats with them for a bit and then comes up with a guestimate of how much that particular employee has contributed over the designated time period.
What if a company decided to hire an economist or two and think of some different ways to measure performance? Things we missed may start to manifest themselves: the employee who seems to be zoning out but who comes up with 6 or 7 ideas that the company ends up leveraging each year. The secretary who is always walking around fast and looking busy but whose accomplishments for the year are complaining about younger, better looking coworkers. The magpie who is actually costing the company thousands of dollars with pointless water cooler chatter and email forwards... How about the bad manager whose poor decision making and leadership end up making his underlings look bad and/or incompetent?
I know what you're thinking - those "consultants" from Office Space who were interviewing employees and asking them to rate themselves. But on a serious note, some thinking about this is probably better than none.
11:44:16 PM 
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