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Archive for the ‘Books’ Category
Second Meeting of IFRACTAL Bookshelf This Monday
Jun 4We hope you’ve all been busy this month reading our May book for the IFRACTAL bookshelf, Get Rid of the Performance Review! by Samuel A. Culbert with Lawrence Rout, a book that offers advice on how to stop intimidating and start managing.
If not, there’s still time this weekend for you to pick it up and read it over. (It’s worth it, we promise.)
Join us this Monday, June 7, 2010 at the IFRACTAL office at 20 n. 3rd Street in Philadelphia. We’ll be there around 6:00 p.m.
The IFRACTAL Bookshelf: Switch Follow-Up
May 6We hosted our first meeting of the IFRACTAL book club on Monday at National Mechanics. Some local friends joined our hour-long discussion about Switch, a book that explains how to make and enforce change. But for those of you who weren’t able to make the trip out to Philly, here are the highlights from the discussion—as inspired by the book.
Play to people’s good character.
One of our attendees suggested right off the bat that one of the best ways to drive participation is to invoke altruism in your approach. Not a bad idea, especially when you can also share some “feel-good” vibes with your coworkers.
Change the path by changing the environment.
This is a key concept directly from Switch. Changing the environment gets people to act different. We experienced that a bit at IFRACTAL—the move from our quaint Rittenhouse office to our current locale in Old City has definitely impacted our daily office interactions.
Make small adjustments.
You don’t need to be the CEO of a company to make change that matters. We brought up a few times during our discussion. No matter what your role in a company, you have the power to make small, lasting changes in your circle. And if they’re good changes—they’ll spread, and they’ll stick.
Find respected figures to do the talking.
Sometimes it’s not what you say—it’s who says it. We talked a lot about how you need to use the right people to talk to different groups. That may mean getting a star athlete to talk to urban neighborhoods about the litter problem or getting your labor union leader to pass along key messages.
Create habits to reinforce the switch.
Getting people into the habit of doing something is a great way to enforce a behavior. Whether it’s having a routine checklist at the beginning of the day or specifying a specific way to answer the phone at work, once you create the habit, the follow-through will bring about unexpected, positive results.
Join us next month!
The next book on our list is Get Rid of the Performance Review! by Samuel A. Culbert with Lawrence Rout, a book that offers advice on how to stop intimidating and start managing. We’ll meet the first Monday in June to discuss what really matters in reviewing performance. Hope to see you there!
What’s Hot. What’s Not.
Apr 14
The cycles of style rotate so quickly and no one except the experts know what’s going to circulate to the front of the line next. Since we are HR Elite here at IFRACTAL, we’re planning to help you stay up-to-date on what’s hot and what’s not.
HOT |
NOT |
| Treasure Hunts | Team Building Retreats |
| iPad | Kindle |
| Switch | Ready-to-Use Performance Appraisals |
| Lime Cat | A Copycat |
| Keynote | PowerPoint |
| @HR_SAID_WHAT | Tweeting “Good Morning” |
Think you know something that’s hot or not? Want us to let you know if it is? Drop us a line and we’ll feature it in our next What’s Hot. What’s Not. article.
The IFRACTAL Bookshelf: Our New Book Club Starts This Month
Apr 9At IFRACTAL, we think it’s important to learn something new every day. That’s why we like reading so much. You should check out our office bookshelf—it’s full of every business, management and HR book you can think of.
And it’s still growing. For us to stay on top of our game, we like to read the newest books on the topic. We like to chat about these books internally, but now we’d like you to join us.
Every month we’ll add another book to our IFRACTAL bookshelf. Then we’ll pick a date, meet up and discuss it. You’re all invited.
April’s book is Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard.
This book is from the same authors our other favorite book, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die.
In Switch, brothers Chip and Dan Heath show how to get the change you want. It just might be our new favorite book. And we’d love to talk with you about it, too.
Join the conversation on Monday, May 3, 2010. We’ll be at National Mechanics after work.
Book Review: Get Rid of the Performance Review!
Apr 6
There are just a small number of books that every HR practitioner and manager should read. Get Rid of the Performance Review! is one of those.
Authors Samuel A. Culbert, who is a Professor of Management at UCLA Anderson School of Management, and Lawrence Rout, who is a senior editor at the Wall Street Journal, make an incredibly compelling case to defenestrate performance reviews. They write about how much damage performance reviews do to company performance. They say this:
It all comes down to two lies:
- First, pay and performance are not linked and the workplace is unfortunately a meritocracy.
- Second, the performance review is not really about the employee and is mainly about everybody else from the boss, the bigger bosses and HR.
Honestly, people in HR should read this book and weep. I agree with Culbert and Rout who argue that a lot of performance management systems are in place to make HR appear more powerful. And they write about the destructive forces that Jack Welch’s “Rank-and-Yank” system wreaked on companies — including GE.
And managers should read Get Rid of the Performance Review! because everything they think about performance assessment is wrong. I’m not going out on a limb to say that. Managers don’t know. And the HR people who taught them are wrong, too. Don’t hate me because I’m right. Go buy the book. It’ll change your mind.
How much do you hate performance reviews? Here’s a quiz to find out. Let me know what you think. Do you love performance reviews? Hate them? Feel like you are going to throw up in your mouth when you have to get or give one?
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