Lectures
Twelve Tuesday lectures: the mechanism behind each week's trick, the real case it comes from, and the sources.
Week 1 has slides. Week 10 has no mechanism to explain, only a record.
Welcome to calibration
What a calibration meeting is, who is in it, what the curve looks like, and why a company that knows a rating is mostly the rater still runs one.
Week 1 · 23 February 2027
Rewarding A, hoping for B
Kerr, Goodhart, Campbell, and the model underneath all three. What happens to a measure once the people it measures know it is a target, and to the work the measure cannot count.
Week 2 · 2 March 2027
Who speaks for you
The cast of a calibration meeting, the peers you nominate, and two literatures: incentive theory on subjective evaluation, and the research on impression management.
Week 3 · 9 March 2027
The self-review as fiction
The brag document, the self-review, and Amazon's 2026 requirement that every corporate employee list three to five accomplishments with impact.
Week 4 · 16 March 2027
Traces
Memory, numbers, self-review, and why memory wins. What a manager of ten can hold from a quarter, direct message against channel, and the line where a trace becomes theatre.
Week 5 · 23 March 2027
Credit
Who reads what about a project, how a promotion packet is assembled from public associations, and what the research found when a mixed team's credit was left unassigned.
Week 6 · 30 March 2027
Promotion-driven development
Promotion packets, Google's product graveyard, the multitask model with a launch in it, and how to tell a rebuild the users needed from one the packet needed.
Week 7 · 20 April 2027
Presence
Passive face time and the research behind it, the 2026 proxies that replaced the car park, and why this is a different week from week 5.
Week 8 · 27 April 2027
The reorg
What a restructure resets, the order a list is built in, dependency as the last filter, and the ceiling that strategy puts on the person using it.
Week 9 · 4 May 2027
The layoff list
The record of 2025 and 2026, dated and sourced, and how the lists were actually built. No mechanism this week, because no trick reaches it.
Week 10 · 11 May 2027
The rat race
Saturation, the rat race modelled and measured in two law firms, the simulation in which a forced distribution's gains fade, and what a room falls back on when nothing separates the names.
Week 11 · 18 May 2027
Now you're the manager
Backward design and constructive alignment moved into a review system, the rater problem, procedural justice, and naming who pays under your own design.
Week 12 · 25 May 2027