The novel mentions the term «performance management» — one of the popular Western business concepts that began making its way into Russian business circles in the early 1990s, alongside the first foreign consultants and businessmen.
Performance management is a comprehensive management approach comprising a set of processes and analytical tools meant to align an organization’s activity and results with its goals. The concept was first formulated in the West in the 1970s, but only became known in Russia after the fall of the Iron Curtain.
In 1993 the term sounded to Russian ears like a baffling foreign curiosity, and was used mainly by people with experience working at Western companies or who’d done internships abroad. For most Russians of the time, it remained a mysterious concept from another world.
The core components of performance management include:
- Setting clear, measurable goals for the organization and its employees.
- Regularly assessing work results.
- A system of feedback and coaching.
- Rewarding employees for hitting their targets.
- Planning career growth and staff development.
Notably, early-1990s Russia saw an interesting blending of Soviet management vocabulary with new Western terminology. Many managers of the time, Zhorik among them, were eager to show off their progressiveness and knowledge of current business trends, often using foreign terms their subordinates didn’t understand.
In its modern sense, performance management is a holistic system aimed at continuously improving an organization by managing the effectiveness of individual employees, teams, and business processes. It covers not just performance evaluation, but planning, coaching, feedback, and staff development.
By 2017, the research firm Gartner had reclassified the concept, splitting it into «financial planning and analysis» and «financial close,» reflecting growing attention to planning and the emergence of new tools for managing the financial close process.
Interestingly, many principles of performance management already existed in Soviet labor management — work-rate norms, socialist competitions, honor boards — just dressed up in different ideological language. The Western system essentially just added a market component and more formalized evaluation tools.