Personal problem-solving and workplace performance management practices

¶ … difficult, in retrospect, to point to an instance where I was ahead of everyone else, but I have been able to solve problems. I remember I was in need of a career change. Mostly, things just did not feel right in my career. I did not really know what it was -- did I need a new company? A new boss? It turned out that my career path that I was on really was not a good career path for me. I went off the grid, so to speak, and came back after a period of a few months with a new sense of what I wanted. I don't know if that is a creative solution -- I think I just see things as solutions and let the "creative" or "uncreative" judgment fall to someone else. But I do know that it was an somewhat unorthodox approach to things -- not so unique you would say that I thought it up, but I did step outside of my programmed thinking to learn new truths about myself and re-orient myself in this direction.

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I feel that performance evaluations need to be every six months. There are a few reasons why I say this. The first is that the reviews need to be sufficiently spaced apart that the data used in the evaluation has statistical significance. Very frequent reviews can be undermined by small sample sizes. However, one of the major purposes of a performance review is to alert the employee to areas that need improvement. It is to the benefit of everyone that this is done more frequently. Give the employee a change to get meaningful feedback, but with enough frequency that there is opportunity for corrective action. To me, that period is every six months. For new employees, there might be cause to have a review every three months for the first year. But ultimately, even long-time employees will benefit from the six-month cycle because it can help to keep them on their toes, whereas annual reviews might breed a certain amount of complacency.

Live Chat Assignment #2

There are elements of this passage that are confusing, not so much for the writing style and the referencing. Referencing Heidegger is of course valuable to Sartre's audience because they will be familiar with other existentialist philosophers, but to me the reference is distracting and unhelpful. Additionally, the writing style is too stream of consciousness -- Sartre writes off the top of his head, and I wonder if these ideas could not be conveyed with a little more clarity.

The italicized words are interesting, because they are the critical concepts that Sartre wants to convey. Existentialism is defined by Sartre in the work. The idea that existence precedes essence is basically that when we are born, we exist, but we have no concept of our own existence until later in life. We are condemned to be free, in this passage, refers to the fact that ultimately we make our own choices and our life will be shaped by these choices. The condemned part I don't think fits -- we are condemned in that there are actually many constraints on human existence, that our freedom is an illusion, not that we are condemned to actually be free. We are responsible for everything we do, but that responsibility comes within the confines of interacting with other on this small planet. Sartre, of course, did not have the benefit developments on astrophysics that allow us to contemplate existence in a different way.

In some respects, we do not need contextual clues because Sartre tells us the meaning, but with things like "existence needs to precede essence" he says this a few times and we piece together what he intends to mean. I don't have a lot of knowledge about the subject, and if I did I would probably be better equipped to put this into context -- what I see as weaknesses here might not be, if I knew the whole context of the passage. And I don't know Heidegger from the hole he dug, so I'm definitely missing whatever that reference was about.

The question in Step 4 isn't any different than Step 2. In Step 2, I answered what I thought were the most likely definitions, and that has not changed.

I don't have an answer for Step 5 yet, but I think that there will be some distinctly different interpretations of this passage. As I noted above, Sartre is writing stream of consciousness, which will leave the reader focusing on some points, and a different reader on other points. This is not exactly technical writing, and I think that Sartre deliberately left elements of his arguments open for interpretation.