Showing posts with label thing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label thing. Show all posts
Tuesday, June 13, 2017
Is Quirky a Good Thing
Is Quirky a Good Thing
Is it ever worthwhile to de-quirk a novel?Yes, sometimes it is worthwhile to revise this sort of thing.
My book has one seriously odd character: a home-schooled narrator. The consensus among replying agents, however, is that the voice is just too "quirky". Fair enough, but now what?
Is a complete re-write in order? And a re-query to follow?
Or should I trash the manuscript, hit the bottle, and move on?
Quirky can be great-- it can mean charming, funny, unique. But "too quirky"... If youre getting a lot of this feedback, I would start to wonder if what the agents really mean is weird and distancing.
The right amount of quirky reminds people of themselves, their own uniquenesses. Too much, though, and you can lose your audience, especially among kids, who can be pretty judgemental about weirdness in others.
Still there are good examples of very unusual behaviors and world views that absolutely work for the book theyre in... Because the author has taken the trouble to make them make sense for that character-- to show us why they have these quirks.
I would suggest that you ask yourself which of your characters quirks are serving the character development enough that its worth going to the trouble of showing the reader why the character has those quirks... and which quirks you maybe just added for "flavor"-- as a shorthand for character development. I have a hunch that some of those quirks just arent earning their keep in your story.
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Friday, May 26, 2017
Is Getting Rid of Performance Reviews Really a Good Thing
Is Getting Rid of Performance Reviews Really a Good Thing
The Huffington Post reports today on a new study about employee performance reviews by CEB, a consulting firm that offers talent management solutions to its clients. In recent years, some firms have chosen to do away with the traditional annual performance review. Some good reasons exist for eliminating these reviews, as the process often does not deliver desired results. CEB finds, however, that eliminating such review systems may do more harm than good. Here is an excerpt from the CEB report of their findings:
What’s more, the improvements in measures of employee performance that companies expect actually fall because managers struggle to make and communicate performance and pay decisions without ratings. In fact, less than 5% of managers are able to effectively manage employees without ratings. CEB analysis shows that eliminating ratings leads to four unintended outcomes.
- Manager conversation quality declines by 14% because managers struggle to explain to employees how they performed in the past and what steps to take to improve future performance.
- Managers have more time, but time spent on informal conversations decreases by 10 hours because managers do not shift that extra time toward ongoing, informal performance conversations.
- Top performers’ satisfaction with pay differentiation decreases by 8% because managers have trouble explaining how pay decisions are made and linked to individual contributions.
- Employee engagement drops by 6% because managers are unable to do the very things that are proven to engage employees, such as set expectations for their, hold clear performance and development conversations, and provide appropriate rewards and recognition.
In sum, the theory of removing the annual review process is that more frequent, informal feedback could be more effective than an annual "event" at which managers employ a formal ratings system to evaluate and rank employees. In reality, it appears that many managers simply do not provide sufficient feedback when formal annual review systems are eliminated. Perhaps we should not be surprised by these findings. Many managers would rather jump in the water off the Maine coast in January than deliver feedback to their subordinates!
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Sunday, May 7, 2017
Is There Such a Thing As Slow Prototyping
Is There Such a Thing As Slow Prototyping
IDEO designer Keaton Herzer has written a terrific blog post titled, "What the hell is Rapid Prototyping?" Heres an excerpt:
It implies that there is an alternative?—?slow prototyping. I’m not aware of any design team that practices slow prototyping. That would be a waste of time and money for everyone and thatis super obvious. Let’s remind ourselves what the purpose of a prototype is: to test our ideas! History and statistics tell us that our ideas are wrong MOST of the time. So most of our prototypes will get thrown out after being invalidated. If that’s the case, why would we do anything but prototype rapidly? If you’re going to build a prototype?—?build it. Then test it. Then learn how bad your ideas were. Then do it again. I guess you could do that slowly if you wanted to, but I don’t see the point. There is no such thing as “rapid prototyping.” There is only prototyping?—?and you should be doing it rapidly.
I think slow prototyping does exist though, and its not a good thing. Consider how large companies engage in what they consider to be prototyping. They build a mock-up of a potential new product. However, they take quite some time to do so. They try to make it as "beautiful" as possible, as free of imperfections and problems as they can imagine. Why? They are actually trying to validate an idea that they have. Its a demonstration to others in the organization, often used to solicit resource commitments. Its not actually prototyping. Why is it slow? They do not want to hear lots of criticism. They want positive feedback, so they take lots of time to make it as "good" as they can. To me, thats the type of slow prototyping that does exist in many organizations, and it often is counterproductive. It inhibits learning and adaptation, and thereby prevents the type of rapid improvement that Herzer describes.
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Saturday, May 6, 2017
Is There Such a Thing as Too Much Feedback
Is There Such a Thing as Too Much Feedback
The Wall Street Journal reports today on the changing culture at Kimberly-Clark, maker of products such as Huggies diapers and Kleenex tissues. In this article, Lauren Weber writes the following:
"One of the company’s goals now is managing out dead wood, aided by performance-management software that helps track and evaluate salaried workers’ progress and quickly expose laggards... Armed with personalized goals for employees and large quantities of data, Kimberly-Clark said it expects employees to keep improving—or else. People can’t duck and hide in the same way they could in the past, said Mr. Boston, who oversees talent management globally for the firm. It has been a steep climb for a company that once resisted conflict and fostered a paternalistic culture that inspired devotion from its workers."
Weber goes to write that Kimberly-Clarks performance management system reflects a trend taking place in many companies, in which firms have eliminated annual merit reviews and replaced them with more continuous feedback. She cites examples such as Accenture, Adobe, and GE, all of whom eliminated traditional annual performance reviews. These firms have adopted real-time feedback systems for a number of reasons including, according to Weber, the belief that, "Millennial workers, meanwhile, demand more feedback, more coaching and a stronger sense of their career path."
My question is simple though: Can we take this shift to continuous monitoring, evaluation, and feedback too far? I keep hearing that millennials want more feedback, but Ive spent a ton of time around young people as a college professor. Im not sure any of us love being critiqued at every turn. We work on some projects that take some time to get off the ground. Some ideas require some time to take shape. In short, I think this shift taking place in corporate America raises some critical questions: Is too much early "feedback" going to quash some creative ideas? Are managers adept enough at offering constructive critique to make this type of real-time feedback system effective at many firms? Are we evaluating what truly drives success, or are we focused on what is easy to measure? Are we encouraging short term thinking when we provide real-time feedback, or are we making sure to keep long term objectives in mind?
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