Customer Reviews

Performance : Creating the Performance-Driven Organization

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

...from the CEO of yet another "Toxic Company".

I bought this book from another bookseller as a closeout clearance book (for less than five dollars), and I think I paid too much!!

Overall the book's writing stlye is disjointed, as if it was made up of a collection of other articles and websites, rather written as a book.

As for the content: I'll borrow what another reviewer had to say, it's the obvious and the wrong. If you know anything about business, you don't need this book, because most of it is common knowledge. The rest of it is just plain wrong!

You'd be better off reading Storey's Guide to Raising Pigs: Care/Facilities/Management/Breed Selection.

The only information in this book is the 'obvious' and the 'wrong'. For instance the author's insistence on his framework for performance (align, measure, reward, report, analyze):

ALIGN: Kinda, obvious isn't it. There's no point in having duplicate departments or wasted efforts. Most businesses have gotten this problem solved at the Business Plan level.

MEASURE: Dead wrong. There's no quicker way to kill morale than micromanaging employees down to the level of how long it takes them to answer the phone. Besides why are you wasting money employing people to "measure" your other employees?

REWARD: "Pay for Performance"- Perhaps the worst idea in American Business since "New COKE". Good employees won't be motivated by extra money (sure they'll like it, but they'd do a good job without it). So the only thing this does is create a whole new crop of mercenary employees.

REPORT: Because how else can you justify all that money you wasted on MEASURING. Besides nothing builds a team like telling them how they are different from their co-workers, right? WRONG!

ANALYZE: Because those mercenary employees are really only interested in the money, so you have to tell them what the report means!!

This book is bad ideas followed by worse ideas. Who edited this thing anyways??

So I ended up with this book because of work, and while I'm reading it I keep thinking 'Where have I heard about this before??'. Then it hits me: ENRON!! They used this same system of incentives, reviews, and bonuses as what is detailed in this book. The end result for Enron was it destroyed the company.

So, I definately disagree with a lot of what's in this book, but the bigger problem is what ISN'T in the book - namely the costs. Any plan has costs and benefits and in the end you have the weigh those costs and benefits to decide if you want to use the plan. But, Stiffler treats his "Action Plans" as if there are no real costs. It's typical salespitch clap-trap. What about employee turnover (a major expense for almost any business), or damage to employee morale and teamwork (difficult to quantify but very important to most businesses)?

I'd have to say that the cost of this kind of "Performance" is way too high for the very small benefits it might offer.

I work in the HR department of a company that tried this type of system, and I can tell you from personal experience that it is a lousy idea. We eventually scrapped the entire thing and went back to a traditional pay/evaluation system.

The 360 reviews were a disaster, we had to review each of the evaluations to screen out who was being honest and who wasn't (and you never really know for sure, I'm certain that we threw out perfectly accurate reviews in favor of dishonest ones that said what management wanted to believe).

Many of our best employees quit because they felt like they couldn't keep up with younger employees who were willing to work long hours in order to get the bonuses. Then when the economy slowed down and we didn't pay bonuses, those people quit, and we were left with inexperienced workers who were totally overloaded.

Finally when we scrapped the "Performance Management Culture" we had to pay big signing bonuses to get some of our old employees (who really knew what they were doing) to come back.

My boss got this book because he thought that it would have some new or different ideas in it, but it's just the same old stuff. We aren't gonna make that mistake again!!

If you care about your company, don't use this book as anything other than a doorstop. (Or if you need to prop up some wobbly furniture) Whatever you do don't read it or use any ideas from it!

Its mostly a confusing jumble of acronyms and ideas. Many contradict each other and the core premise of being able to prduce performance through motivation by tangible incentivization seems to run counter to most modern management thinking and current studies on behavioural patterns. The action plan portion of the book sounds more like a sales pitch than an unbiased analysis. And, the advice is pretty much outdated.

Someone gave me this book as a gift. I'm glad I didn't have to pay for it.

I didn't agree with every point in this book, but it certainly gave me some things to think about. We spend a lot of time in my company on our strategic plans, our budgets, and our performance appraisals, but they never seem to link up.

The figures and illustrations alone are worth the price of the book. There's an employee performance report that uses charts and graphs to show performance against objective and relative ranking. My experience is that people want to succeed but don't alway know how to, and this report shows them how.

I recently read this book and I feel it articulates a clear blue print for organizations wishing to truly align their performance management processes with overall corporate strategy. This line of thinking not only benefits the company so that it will be successful in driving revenue, but it is also effective in creating a motivating environment for employees. Employee morale is often linked to job satisfaction, and without a clear idea of how as an employee, you can contribute to the success of your organization, you will be unable to achieve your goals.

There is a lot of valuable information as well as useful charts contained within this text. Companies who have only addressed part of their performance management issues, would gain a unique perspective by reading this book.

For those managers who are looking for a clear, logical approach to improving your organization's performance this book provides a concrete way to get there.

Stiffler's well thought out approach to driving performance makes absolute sense and is clearly described with well written analogies and examples from real life.

It gave me a number of concepts I had never come across before and made me change the way I think about how to motivate an organization to work together toward common goals more successfully.

If you read this book, you will be glad you did.

The book is based on some real-life examples based on Synygy's extensive experience in managing itself as well as incentive compensation plans for many Fortune 500 companies. If companies were to implement the entire culture of performance management and not just the incentive compensation part of it, they would truly benefit in aligning corporate strategy and linking it with employee pay.

This book is full of practical easy to use information I was able to implement immediately. Stiffler's ability to explain complex issues in a clear & easy to understand manner made this read valuable to me and my organization. I'm using this book as a tool to help my management team understand how to use performance based management principles to grow our business.