I've had good and bad performance reviews. The best was with a manager who had told me the aims, and then gave me useful feed-back. The worst gave no aims and empty, meaningless, undefinable feed-back.

In general, the aim has been to set up a system of fuzzy, irrelevant criteria and a scale such that no one can reach "excellent!" and no one is told "you're outta here!". You could be doing the work of 3 or 4 and better than anyone in the division, and still never get an excellent on any of the criteria.

What the heck is a "program manager"? We had group leads, who had no decision-making power, dev group managers, 1 or 2 mid managers, general manager of all dev, VPs (the conglomerate had over 200 at one point, so by that time there was a hierarchy and functional area break-down among VPs), and then CEO co-founder "Uncle" Bill.

Oh, and you owe me a nickel. When I originated the phrase "Show me the money." it was in the context of having done some consulting work on several successful major movies and hadn't been paid a dime, though I did have dinner with Kilmer, Kidman and O'Donnell (I took revenge on the sequel for not having been paid by going along with a lot of garbage). I'd quit my day job after the 3rd try at trying to convince them that it was a bad idea to commit federal felonies. But SMTM and "materialize the coin" arose in the midst of a complex, multi-way discussion of economics, employment, and intellectual property rights. I was trying to convey the idea that each employee must produce at least as much value as it costs to employ him -- salary, benefits, taxes, over-head, insurance, etc., i.e. the coin (pronounced quan as in quantum, in part because I was living in a cave apartment with a Frenchified name, and this minimum value was a hard quantum below which they can't employ you). On the IP front, I was putting forth the proposition that all property rights originate in a mental feat of creation of value. Over the course of the 1990s, my little bits found their ways into over 35 movies.

The wild, exaggerated version used as "Rod" carried on in the kitchen and through the house came the next day, when I saw Crowe using my line as a sig to his posting. And, yes, it does feel good just to say it.

"If I've got to ride your a** like Zorro, you're going to show me the money." came a few days later. The filming of "The Mask of Zorro" was held up and I'd heard of it on CNNHN; they'd had all of their costume swords seized at the border. And, besides, I wanted to plug the whole Zorro mythos. It took me about 20 minutes after I heard the news-blurb until I'd edited the line down so that it had the right sound and rhythm and serious tone and Crowe picked that up, also, and ran with it. ("Dorothy" had been in my Anthropology class.)