Schumpeter's notebook

PERFORMANCE reviews have become part of the corporate culture. So has circumlocution. Managers are forever pulling punches, thanks to political correctness, legal jeopardy and, perhaps, the general niceness that afflicts our times.

Visiting Tata Steel's archives on my visit to Jamshedpur, I came across some examples of "appraisal" from 1904 that suffered from none of these problems. The appraiser summed up the workers' performance in one or two words. Here are some choice examples: "cheated and fled", "unfit for work", "too lazy", "lazy and not honest", "not particularly valuable", "too weak", and, my own favourite, "a failure".