Not for himself, of course, but rather for America’s corporate executives. In New York City today, Bush spoke on Wall Street about his belief that “the salaries and bonuses of CEOs should be based on their success at improving their companies and bringing value to their shareholders.”

So often, pay for performance is a concept assumed to be applicable only to the rank and file. It’s a worthy cause to elevate it to the c-level as well and it’s great that Bush is pushing the idea.

It just makes you wonder what HIS salary would be if we applied pay for performance thinking to his $400k “guideline.” Given his approval ratings, it would be an interesting exercise indeed.

A note: if the title offends you, please excuse me. I think the content and concepts make it worthwhile. Also, it’s the title of a real book – and so that makes it okay (right?).

He’s got a new book coming out next month called “The No Asshole Rule – Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t.” Today, at our all-hands company meeting, we got a chance to hear Bob speak on the topic.

The No Asshole Rule is something we actually have, use and abide by at SuccessFactors. We have a “rules of engagement” document which is posted all around our offices and on our website (#5) that reminds us of some of the basic tenets of working at the company. This particular rule, now softened a bit to “No Jerks,” understandably gets the most attention.

Why are assholes such a big deal? According to Bob, a professor of management and engineering at Stanford, they can easily take the wind from the sails of an otherwise successful company. Assholes can lower engagement, raise turnover and cost companies a lot of money. One guy Bob spoke about cost his company an estimated $160,000 over the course of a year – factoring in the costs of time spent by management, hr and executives in dealing with him – as well as anger management and training classes, overtime spent by other employees responding to his last minute requests and so on.

But its likely you don’t need any data points beyond ones from your own experience to make you aware of the preponderance and impact of assholes in the workplace. We’ve all dealt with them at some point and been the victim of behavior that makes us feel awful. According to Bob, there are two tests that identify the presence of an A-hole:

1. – “After talking to the alleged asshole, do their “targets” feel oppressed, humiliated, deenergized or belittled by the person?” and

2. – “Does the alleged asshole aim his or her venom at people who are less powerful or people who are more powerful.”

There are a few things to be careful of with your newfound A-hole identification powers. An important one is to be mindful of rushing to a-hole judgement – once you accuse someone of being one, you may quickly find you’ve created a monster.

So what do we do about the a-hole problem? Bob counsels us to simply avoid working at places where the a-hole factor is high (if you’re an employee), and to avoid hiring them (if you’re a company). He notes that “asshole poisoning is a contagious disease. Get out and stay out of asshole infested places – they will change you, you wont change them.” And the opposite effect is true as well – hire too many and it wont be long before your whole company is acting like an ass.

Another answer is to me mindful of “moment to moment conversations.” Be aware of asshole behavior – both yours and that of others. Noting and making small adjustments in response can make all the difference in whether a colleague perpetuates the -Ass-holishness.

We were lucky enough to get a copy of Bob’s new book today and I’ll be reading it soon. I hope to be back with further reflection once I work through it, but in the meantime, you should take a look at his blog for more thinking on the topic.

A guest post by Josh Bersin – CEO, Bersin & Associates

Competencies are one of the most difficult and under-utilized part of performance management.  Bersin & Associates research shows that only 36% of organizations with performance management process rate their use of competencies “excellent” or “good.”

But we also found that effective use of competencies can have a huge impact:  organizations that rate themselves world-class in the use of competencies for performance management are 4-times as likely to have a strong performance-driven culture.

Why?  Because the process of identifying and implementing critical competencies in itself drives a clear understanding of what performance means, how to obtain it, and how to communicate it.

As you can read in our recently published research, thoughtful and strategic use of competencies can have a significant impact on financial performance.  A few of the highlights from our research with SuccessFactors on how the use of competencies affects financial performance:

* Competencies should be customized for your business and should focus on management and leadership-level skills, not just job requirements

* There are two types of job-level competencies:  “hygiene” competencies which establish the basic requirements for a job (ie. customer service), and “performance” driven competencies, which, if executed, will not only help an individual perform their job but will help them grow and excel.

These “performance” or “critical” competencies vary from company to company and industry to industry.  

Read more from our research with SuccessFactors.

A guest post by Erik Berggren – Director of Customer Results, SuccessFactors.

You probably don’t need me to tell you that successful companies are ones who provide products people want. But what sometimes gets lost is that this is true not just for B2C firms, but for B2B firms as well. To get a sense of what I mean, just consider the story of my current office printer. Made by a well known PC manufacturer – it is so universally despised by my colleagues for being constantly broken (as it is right now) that it will soon be replaced by a machine from another company. The moral of the story? If the end users, your ultimate customers, don’t like your product, its ultimately not going to do very well.

Recently, SuccessFactors conducted a study on how high-tech companies manage their talent. Specifically, we took a look at the core competencies such firms use to evaluate people in their organizations. Perhaps not surprisingly, we found that one very key competency stood out amongst companies that both grew faster and provided a greater return to their owners than their competition. That competency? Customer focus.

“So what?,” you might be thinking. Isn’t it fairly obvious that customer driven product development and engineering makes sense? Sure it is, but the research shows the importance of making this an explicit area for managing people. It’s not something that can be merely talked about, it has to be acted upon – and it’s that action that makes all the difference. By way of comparison, our research also showed that customer focus is NOT something that poor-performing high tech companies stress. That is what makes this so intriguing – we’ve proven both sides of the coin.

Want to know more? Based on the results from our broad-ranging research on competencies and how they drive financial performance, we decided to partner with Bersin and Associates to get a perspective of deep expertise from the broader HCM field. Josh Bersin has analyzed our research in depth and written a great report that puts the importance of managing competencies in perspective.

For questions about the research, feel free to leave a comment, or send an email to Erik at eberggren AT successfactors.com.

A guest post by Erik Berggren – Director of Customer Results, SuccessFactors.

You probably don’t need me to tell you that successful companies are ones who provide products people want. But what sometimes gets lost is that this is true not just for B2C firms, but for B2B firms as well. To get a sense of what I mean, just consider the story of my current office printer. Made by a well known PC manufacturer – it is so universally despised by my colleagues for being constantly broken (as it is right now) that it will soon be replaced by a machine from another company. The moral of the story? If the end users, your ultimate customers, don’t like your product, its ultimately not going to do very well.

Recently, SuccessFactors conducted a study on how high-tech companies manage their talent. Specifically, we took a look at the core competencies such firms use to evaluate people in their organizations. Perhaps not surprisingly, we found that one very key competency stood out amongst companies that both grew faster and provided a greater return to their owners than their competition. That competency? Customer focus.

“So what?,” you might be thinking. Isn’t it fairly obvious that customer driven product development and engineering makes sense? Sure it is, but the research shows the importance of making this an explicit area for managing people. It?s not something that can be merely talked about, it has to be acted upon ? and it?s that action that makes all the difference. By way of comparison, our research also showed that customer focus is NOT something that poor-performing high tech companies stress. That is what makes this so intriguing - we’ve proven both sides of the coin.

Want to know more? Based on the results from our broad-ranging research on competencies and how they drive financial performance, we decided to partner with Bersin and Associates to get a perspective of deep expertise from the broader HCM field. Josh Bersin has analyzed our research in depth and written a great report that puts the importance of managing competencies in perspective.

For questions about the research, feel free to leave a comment, or send an email to Erik at eberggren AT successfactors.com.

Fortune magazine just came out with their annual list of the 100 best companies to work for. In the interactive presentation you can sort by components of the evaluation like “best” benefits, pay, growth in the number of jobs, turnover, % minorities and % women. These are all important things to consider when choosing a job, but I’m left wondering.

I’m left wondering why questions like “is this place a meritocracy?” or “does this company pay for performance?” or “what’s my chance of being promoted here?” or “how many jerk managers work at this place?” get lost.

While perks like free basketball games (Quicken Loans) or grocery delivery (Microsoft) or on-site laundry (Google) are great – studies have shown that they aren’t the most critical components of job satisfaction. So I’m left wondering – is this really a list of the best companies to work for?

So what do you think the biggest issue for HR execs is in 2007 according to the ORC Worldwide HR Priorities survey. If you said talent management, you’d be right. Nice Job!

Find out more.

Not to keep flogging the Google horse or anything, but it appears the company is doing some innovative stuff beyond its products. The company has gained some HR-related attention before for using billboards featuring complex mathematical problems to recruit engineers. Now, they’ve turned their attention to candidate screening.

According to this NYT article, the company is exploring new methods for hiring “more well-rounded candidates, like those who have published books or started their own clubs.”  They will now be asking the 100,000 job applicants each month to fill out an “elaborate online survey that explores their attitudes, behavior, personality and biographical details going back to high school.”

The company then takes the surveys and compares them against some 25 different measures of employee performance. By doing so, they hope to expose the traits that make for successful employees so they can more readily find the gems amongst the thousands of applications they get each day.

I just think they are just right on with this. As I recently posted on Dave Lefkow’s blog:  ”When performance is the heart of the effort, you can come to a recruiting system from a new perspective. Instead of focusing only on traditional recruiting metrics like time to hire – you can start to think about and track the actual performance of each new hire over time. Then, you can identify what makes for higher performing candidates and build that knowledge into a system that helps you source and hire more like them.”

Interestingly, Dave wondered “…if the market is ready for this – right now, recruiters are measured on efficiency, not effectiveness. It’s all about getting bodies in seats, and introducing a measure of quality that recruiters are tied to would require a big mindset shift. I can hear the groans now – but I don’t make the decisions about who to hire. That’s the hiring manager. Buck passed.”

Google is no representation of the market at large. But as a pioneer in many ways, they often pick up on trends before others. Perhaps their talent approaches are equally visionary.

If you’re still debating the merits of Software as a Service there’s an article from The Economist you should read. It’s not about SuccessFactors (though it could be) it’s about Google. Why is an article about Google relevant to SuccessFactors? Well, because they provide their offerings as a service, and so do we. Thus, many of the benefits of the approach are the same:

6 lessons about SaaS using quotes from the article:

1. “Most employees already know how to use web-based software, and thus do not need training. “ Any new application takes some time to get familiar with, but when users are used to the web, they have a tremendous head start with SaaS applications.

2. “They can access the services through any web browser, regardless of what kind of computer (or telephone) they use.” Ummm. Yes. No software to install on every PC. Works with any system anywhere in the world.

3. “And in-house IT staff need do absolutely nothing, since the data and software reside on Google’s server computers.” IT’s opinion will always count, but it’s not another system they have to install, update, secure and maintain.

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