[WalterBright]

In every organization I've worked in, it was obvious who the high performers were and who the low performers were. It was obvious to everyone. The only blind spots were people usually seriously misjudged their own performance.

The problem, however, is that management is always being pushed to make objective measurements. For example, to fire someone, you have to first put him on an improvement plan with objective measurements. Otherwise, you're wide open to a lawsuit over discrimination, etc. You have to prove to a judge someone isn't performing, or that you gave raises based on performance.

Management also gets pushed into these attempts at objective measurements by attempts to optimize the numbers like what works great for a manufacturing process.