I come to praise Chris Ballard, not to bury him.

[ChoppedWood]

Originally Posted by IndyNorm

Like you I'm torn. Seems like our best chance to have success next year is to roll it back and hope Jones can stay healthy and that he and Steichen can figure out how to beat the defensive blue print Pitt put in place. But long term wise it's probably better to move on. If you're the owner of a company and under your current COO you've finished in the red for 5 straight years and 7/9 since the COO has been put in place then you'd be crazy to not replace him.

Great points in here.

In the real world, there is typically an annual appraisal performed. That appraisal is a retrospective look at the year. When you have someone responsible for a department / sector, when they are the ONE person accountable for the totality of that area, that evaluation will look at the totality of the 12 months. If the year started hot, but ended with a thud, and the person in charge is fully responsible for the full 12 months performance, there is a severe consequence for the totality of the performance. In that situation as the ultimate evaluator you don't say "hey, you did great early on, but once Brad left, well the department collapsed and we failed to meet all our objectives as a company as a result and a bunch of employees are getting cut, but since you did good early on we are going to ignore what the final outcome was, here's your bonus, have a great time in Tahiti". It doesn't work like that. For some reason we seem to want to see that approach taken with Ballard and I just don't understand why?

I sure as hell would not retain this person when over the course of 10 years I look at their performance and conclude they have seldom, if ever, met the performance expectations. Why would you WANT to keep that person in place in that circumstance?

So why retain him?