No wonder, then, that so many performance reviews are worthless, in the opinion of UCLA management professor Samuel Culbert, coauthor of Get Rid of the Performance Review! A recent worldwide survey of 1,300 workers also revealed that 7 in 10 people believed that their managers did not remain calm and constructive when discussing performance. This is why 20% of the respondents dreaded having difficult conversations with their boss. Management expert W. Edwards Deming (see Chapter 2) felt that such reviews were actually harmful because people remember only the negative parts. “The best kind of performance review is no performance review,” says psychologist Aubrey Daniels, who coined the term “performance management.” It thus is no surprise that some firms (about 1%) have scrapped the practice altogether. Nevertheless, let us take a look at performance appraisals since they are still used frequently.