Quotes About Performance

Most of us probably entertain either of these attitudes on different days. On a good day (as we perceive it), we tend toward self-righteous Pharisaism. On a not-so-good day, we allow ourselves to wallow in a sense of failure and guilt. Either way we've moved away from the gospel of God's grace, trying to relate to God directly on the basis of our performance rather than through Christ.

Our motive for obedience is just as important, probably more so, to God than the level of our performance. A person who struggles with some persistent sin but does so out of love for God is more pleasing to Him than the person who has no such struggle but is proud of his or her self-control. Of course, the person who obeys from a motive of love will be concerned about his or her performance. There will be a sincere desire and an earnest effort to please God in every area of life.

I'm just thankful to have a tour and work something I can focus on.

Jesus Alou is in the on-deck circus.

Over the course of a season, a miscue will cost you more than a good play.

Ozzie Smith just made a play that I have never seen before. And he's done it more times than anyone else.

I think that technology has both introduced new sounds but also allowed an increasingly painterly approach to recording music as you can now paint over what you've done and more and more refine an existing performance.

We've finally told the world that this is sports entertainment, and I think one of the best forms of entertainment is anything that's fun or funny, something that you really enjoy watching or listening to.

If you're an old pro, you know how well you're doing when you're doing it, and your inner government spanks you if you're not doing well.

I've had great success being a total idiot.

For a time Jerry toyed with appearing in another improvisational play called Story Theater, in which he and Carbone considered and rehearsed singing Frankie Avalon's hit Venus, but changing the key lyric to "penis.

'Untitled' is a time machine that can transport you to 1992, an edgy moment when the art world was crumbling, money was scarce, and artists like Tiravanija were in the nascent stages of combining Happenings, performance art, John Cage, Joseph Beuys, and the do-it-yourself ethos of punk. Meanwhile, a new art world was coming into being.

When you don't have standards, it's easier to exceed them.

The hardest part about being a clown, it seems to me, would be that you're constantly referred to as a clown. "Who was that clown?" "I'm not working with that clown. Did you hire that clown?" "The guy's a clown!"

When I jumped off a roof in Cannes in a bee costume, I looked ridiculous. But this is my business I have to humiliate myself.

During the Great Depression, when people laughed their worries disappeared. Audiences loved these funny men. I decided to become one.

just as Soviet managers responded by producing shoddy goods that met the numerical targets set by their overlords, so do schools, police forces, and businesses find ways of fulfilling quotas with shoddy goods of their own:

Accountability ought to mean being held responsible for one's actions. But by a sort of linguistic sleight of hand, accountability has come to mean demonstrating success through standardized measurement, as if only that which can be counted really counts.

Metric fixation leads to a diversion of resources away from frontline producers toward managers, administrators, and those who gather and manipulate data.

If what is actually measured is a reasonable proxy for what is intended to be measured, and if it is combined with judgment, then measurement can help practitioners to assess their own performance, both for individuals and for organizations. But problems arise when such measures become the criteria used to reward and punish—when metrics become the basis of pay-for-performance or ratings.

Thus, there is a gap between the measureable contribution and the actual, total contribution of the agent. As a result, measured performance (such as an increase in the division's profits or a rise in the company's stock price) may actually lead to the organization getting less of what it really needs from its employees. Moreover, there was an inevitable distortion of incentives created by the quest for simple, quantifiable standards by which to measure and reward performance

serious crimes such as robbery were downgraded to "theft snatch," and rapes were often underreported so as to hit performance targets. As a retired detective chief superintendent put it, "When targets are set by offices such as the Mayor's Office for Policing and Crime, what they think they are asking for are 20% fewer victims. That translates into 'record 20% fewer crimes' as far as … senior officers are concerned.

The cases of Mylan and Wells Fargo are recent examples of an older and common pattern, by which policies of payment for measured performance lead employees to engage in actions that create long-run damage to a firm's reputation.

Promoting short-termism. Measured performance encourages what Robert K. Merton called "the imperious immediacy of interests … where the actor's paramount concern with the foreseen immediate consequences excludes consideration of further or other consequences."3 In short, advancing short-term goals at the expense of long-range considerations.