Targets

Just a quick one.

Targets. They came over from the United States of America pretty much in the eighties, with all the bollocks about "Quality is Free", which is like businesses reading Self-Help books or going for a business opportunity in fake perfumes.

They are a means whereby a firm can get so huge that the guvnor not only doesn't know the names of 95% of his staff, but also doesn't know within 50% how many staff he has, and can still see, at a glance, on a pretty coloured pie chart whether his staff are "achieving".

They don't work. There are two reasons why not.

Firstly, the staff at the bottom are not as daft as he'd like to think they are. They are really good at making pie charts, and they have mates in the design industry and suchlike who can craftily use colours and patterns to make them look much better than they are. Then they go up a level, and are made to look even better. And so on. When the guvnor sees them, they are the numerical equivalent of "send three and fourpence, we're going to a dance", when the poor troops only wanted a bit of back up for the big push.

Secondly, they are not set at 100%. 100% is a target. The target. The only target. If you don't achieve 100% you are not doing it right.

Take the NHS. The target is everybody getting better, and going back to work/play. If you get 100 people in with a dodgy leg, and your target is 95%, and five of them snuff it in a filthy MRSA-infested operating theatre, you achieve your target and every goes "Yay!" and gets a bonus.

For fuck's sake. Get rid.