ACT III: THE THEATER — Performance vs. reality
I'm not a specialist in Performance Reviews, so I won't write technically about the subject. I'll simply try to reflect on everything that surrounds it.
All workers need to know "how we're doing."
This is a statement, not a question. It doesn't matter if the worker thinks they "need" it or not, because even if the worker "doesn't need it" (from a psychological standpoint—sad, but many people think this way), the company does.
Performance reviews are an excellent opportunity to explain which steps are "correct" and which aren't, in the pursuit of achieving the company's objectives. There's no other way to get a team (of any kind) to move toward its goals than by working, evaluating, and communicating the results of that evaluation.
As such, it should be an important moment, for both the worker and the company. After all, the present and the future of the relationship between both parties will be put into words and recorded (as it should be). Isn't that very important?
Despite this—like so many other topics that involve companies—having a very strong theoretical framework, in many companies it's simply omitted entirely, or conversely, done as a bureaucratic formality (with such heavy administrative burden that it ends up undermining the impact).
When they do happen, they often lack empirical context.
From my point of view, it's essential that feedback has strong empirical content—a kind of direct correspondence with the actions carried out or being carried out at work.
That is, if my performance review says I'm doing very well and the company is happy with my work, there should be real examples, of actions, results, or whatever, related to my behaviour. The same applies—even more so if the feedback is negative or unfavourable.
If you can't give me a single example of what I do or did, why bother telling me I'm a star or a disaster? Something's not right.
The Taleb Connection
A performance review without examples is a document with nothing on the line. The manager has issued a verdict and risked nothing in issuing it. "You're doing very well." "We're not satisfied." Either statement is unfalsifiable as long as it stays generic — and the worker has no way to trace the verdict back to a real moment of work.
"Those who talk should do and only those who do should talk." — Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Skin in the Game (2018), Prologue
The performance review is the inversion. The person doing the work shows up to be evaluated by someone whose evaluation costs them nothing. The asymmetry is structural: every concrete sentence in a review carries some risk for the manager (it can be checked, contested, remembered); every generic sentence carries none.
"How much you truly 'believe' in something can be manifested only through what you are willing to risk for it." — Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Skin in the Game (2018), Prologue
So the question at the end of the article is the right one. Name one concrete thing. If you can't, your evaluation is bullshit. You're rating a persona, not a person. And persona-rating costs nothing — which is exactly why it spreads.
This article was translated from the 2012 Spanish original and revised in 2026 through human-AI collaboration—clarifying transitions and adding connections to Nassim Taleb's framework.