Feedback from employees, supervisors, and unions has led the Defense Department to adjust its preliminary National Security Personnel System design, say Pentagon officials. For one, job objectives will focus on results, clearly establishing a line of sight from individual performance to organizational goals. And yet, the changes will not lesson the importance of the method of performance. (We did not make this up.) “The payout methodology, exercised after ratings are complete, will be based on a range of shares tied to the performance rating.” Let it be known that these adjustments are meant to make NSPS more “clear and understandable.”
Retired Col. Carlyle "Smitty" Harris, known for introducing the "tap code" by which American POWs in North Vietnam could surreptitiously communicate with one another, died July 6. Harris was brutalized by the North Vietnamese over almost eight years of captivity.