My yearly evaluation was yesterday

No one escapes ISO 9001, Serge once said to me when we were hunting ducks, once you implement this standard inside your company, it becomes part of you. So he called this morning, reminding me that my yearly evaluation was overdue and that he had reserved a table in a bistro on Crescent Street.

So Serge and I had lunch, and he brought the same standard form that every director uses to evaluate its soldiers. This is kind of lame, you would assume that being a CEO puts you above the bureaucratic process, but not here.

We went through the objectives that we had discussed last year, put some new realistic objectives for the upcoming year (like, increasing our bottom line by 10% without any new revenue), you know - the usual stuff. Then Serge asked me how well I was integrating the company values into my daily work, especially the "intrapreneurship" value.

Now folks, most of you think intrapreneurship within a fat corporation is some kind of "special" project under the radar that is so cool and sexy that management puts you in a separate building to work on it secretly. For a top CEO like me, intrapreneurship is really about putting non-paid hours into a project, a project so mundane and dull that we have to put extra effort to attract people on it. That's it.

Sure, the intrapreneurship buzzword is sometimes enough to attract a few people, but we need to do more than that. If you really want your employees to put unpaid time on something, you gotta do a few things. Like, tell them it's "normal" for an employee to do this, this behavior is "expected" when you're part of an organization. Psychology 101. If the employee resists and start talking BS about this personal obligations, family and whatnots, then you use the second argument. You say, if you contribute unpaid time on this project, we might maybe consider giving you possibly a slightly higher profit-sharing bonus by the end of the year, restrictions may apply and it is subject to your Business Unit approval. People are so cash-strapped that they'll do anything to get another buck from the company, and that usually closes the discussion.

So I gave Serge a long spiel on how I wanted to put micro-management to a new level, remove some decision power from our BUs, give them ludicrous sales objectives in their stale markets, and all those efforts I would do on week-ends.

He seemed happy with my attitude, and then we discussed salary and bonuses. I won't go into the specifics, but let's say I got a much bigger raise than anyone in our company combined. But keep this to yourself, it's a secret.