Quotes About Evaluation

How do you tell a valuable French book?' 'First there are the pictures. Then it is a question of the quality of the pictures. Then it is the binding. If a book is good, the owner will have it bound properly. All books in English are bound, but bound badly. There is no way of judging them.

He liked the works of his friends, which is beautiful as loyalty but can be disastrous as judgment.

How many people will he feed, he thought. But are they worthy to eat him? No, of course not. There is no one worthy of eating him from the manner of his behaviour and his great dignity.

Ein Klassiker ist ein Buch, das die Leute loben, aber nicht lesen.

I misjudged you," Harvey said. "You're not a moron. You're only a case of arrested development.

Henry James said there isn't any difference between the English novel and the American novel since there are only two kinds of novels at all, the good and the bad.

So it is that much homiletical advice tends to function in reverse—that is, it works reasonably well in evaluating a sermon already formed, but provides very little help en route!

diagnosis is central to our homiletical task.

The unexamined life is not worth living, but the unlived life is not worth examining.

You have a judgmental face." "I'm a scientist. I look at everything this way.

we confused the manager's general competence and maturity with his task-relevant maturity.

ask both the manufacturing and the sales departments to prepare a forecast, so that people are responsible for performing against their own predictions.

This means that even as we try to standardize what we do, we should continue to think critically about what we do and the approaches we use.

So even if you're just an invited participant, you should ask yourself if the meeting—and your attendance—is desirable and justified.

a genuinely effective indicator will cover the output of the work unit and not simply the activity involved.

the performance rating of a manager cannot be higher than the one we would accord to his organization!

The review is usually dedicated to two things: first, the skill level of the subordinate, to determine what skills are missing and to find ways to remedy that lack; and second, to intensify the subordinate's motivation in order to get him on a higher performance curve for the same skill level (see the illustration on this page).

The long and short of it: if performance matters in your operation, performance reviews are absolutely necessary.

as you review a manager, should you be judging his performance or the performance of the group under his supervision? You should be doing both. Ultimately what you are after is the performance of the group, but the manager is there to add value in some way.

the performance rating of a manager cannot be higher than the one we would accord to his organization! It is very important to assess actual performance, not appearances; real output, not good form.

A successful MBO system needs only to answer two questions: 1.  Where do I want to go? (The answer provides the objective.) 2.  How will I pace myself to see if I am getting there? (The answer gives us milestones, or key results.)

We all have a hard time saying things that are critical, whether we're talking to a superior employee or a marginal one. We must keep in mind, however, that no matter how stellar a person's performance level is, there is always room for improvement. Don't hesitate to use the 20/20 hindsight provided by the review to show anyone, even an ace, how he might have done better.

I have seen far too many people who upon recognizing today's gap try very hard to determine what decision has to be made to close it. But today's gap represents a failure of planning sometime in the past.

To weigh something one needs a platform on which to stand to do the weighing.