In looking at the history of performance management, we can go as far back as Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. The text states that to succeed in war, one should have sufficient knowledge of one’s own strengths and weaknesses as well as those of one’s enemies.
There is probably a lot more history to cover between the fifth century B.C. and now. But we’ll skip forward to the 20thcentury when the evolution of performance management really began to take off thanks to things like computerization of big data, automation, and academic works to guide the philosophy behind the work HR departments do.
