> Most of us work for business and on teams where performance matters.
It truly does:
performance – the action of entertaining other people by dancing, singing, acting, or peformative coding
The problem is, that shouldn't matter. If you work somewhere it does, well, you probably have to. But that's OK, it doesn't stop you from working to uplift the goal and conversation and deliverables, through these other definitions of performance:
performance – how well a person, machine, etc. does an activity
Now we get into how to define well, but activity, looking busy, may not be as valuable as outcomes.
performance – how well a person, machine, etc. does a piece of work
This is getting close, but here we need to define the nature of work, the qualia of work. It's not how well someone codes a line of code, or how well someone programs a piece of software. It's not even how well the engineer a solution.
What matters is return on equity, meaning: how well does what is delivered enable the business to turn capital investment in bringing ideas into being, into returns on that capital.
For good measure (pun intended), track long term, so resilience, maintainability, and evolvability, and really any ongoing costs, including delay costs, opportunity costs, or cash flow costs, are part of the definition of how well.
That matters.
Note this can be shorthanded to both GPT and Claude, and will change the machines’ suggestions.
Dunno about you but I work for a "business" (large company, you've heard of it) and the concept of "High Performer" is synonymous with "best politician". Sure, a lot of theater goes into things, especially dances around "data points", but at the end of the day the top tier goes to the fortunate sons.
You should not treat it as fact that "performance" of an individual, not a team is a thing that actually exists in any way that matters and is measurable.
I’m not sure that there is a consistent definition for matters in this context. What matters is completely subjective to an individual. Furthermore, performance is rarely correlated with success and compensation in an enterprise. I could just as easily say that playing the game is what matters.