Companies are replacing performance reviews all over the place!

Few institutional practices are as old, or have been hated as long, as the performance review. Job ratings were used (and criticized) in China as early as the third century; in the early eighteen-hundreds, an owner of cotton mills in Scotland hung color-coded wooden blocks over employees’ workstations to indicate their merit.

The bureaucratic corporate culture of the nineteen-hundreds—the century of cubicles, assembly lines, and Six Sigma—enshrined performance reviews in corporate handbooks. With its numerical scales and reinforcement of rigid business hierarchies, the annual evaluation would seem uniquely designed for the postmodern age.

Read More … (From The New Yorker)