Harold Fethe is the inventor of the Visual 360 Interface, a software tool to make rating employees more accurate and faster than traditional methods. Employees get to pick five colleagues who then rank the rated employees according to how they perform compared to other colleagues. Harold, an anthropologist by training, is also an accomplished jazz guitarist. “I use music analogies all the time,” he says. "Music is a phenomenon that has teamwork, underlying patterns with which you have to be competent, aesthetic decisions, and fairness.”

TRANSCRIPT:

Intro: 0:01

Inventors and their inventions. Welcome to Radio Cade a podcast from the Cade Museum for Creativity and Invention in Gainesville, Florida. The museum is named after James Robert Cade, who invented Gatorade in 1965. My name is Richard Miles. We'll introduce you to inventors and the things that motivate them, we'll learn about their personal stories, how their inventions work, and how their ideas get from the laboratory to the marketplace.

Richard Miles: 0:37

Measuring employee performance. It's hard to do, or is it? I'm your host Richard Miles and today on Radio Cade , I'll be talking to Harold Fethe who has great experience in S and P 500 companies, also a founding principle at MindSolve Technologies and the inventor of the Visual 360 Interface. Welcome to the show Harold.

Harold Fethe: 0:55

Thank you. Good to see you.

Richard Miles: 0:57

So Harold , for a long time, listeners who have listened to every single one of the episodes, some of them may say, Hey, I've heard this before. And so I should mention to our listeners that this in fact is a companion episode to my interview last August with Jeff Lyons , another founding member of MindSolve. And I'm sure your accounts won't vary by one I owe it to Harold. You're going to completely corroborate each other's stories.

Harold Fethe: 1:21

Jeff and I can argue about whether it's a nice day.

Richard Miles: 1:24

He said you could provide an alibi. He didn't, you can say what that was in reference to.

Harold Fethe: 1:28

I love Jeff, we couldn't be better buddies. And thank you for that tee up.

Richard Miles: 1:31

So I encourage our listeners to go back and listen to that episode. It was a fun conversation August of 2019, entitled "Better Employee Evaluations" with Jeff Lyons . And if you don't like this episode, you're just not a lot of fun . I can't really help you as a listener, but anyway, Harold, let's get right into it. And let's start by talking about your invention of the Visual 360 Interface. If I were a brand new employee at your company or one of your former companies, and you were trying to explain it to me, what does it do? And how does it make your life and my life easier?

Harold Fethe: 2:00

Okay. So I'm going to speak to you that way. So I'm going to say, Richard, you just got here and you're going to be working closely with people. And when it comes time to do the performance measurement, you'll pick five or so people who work closely with you to evaluate your performance and you will be chosen by some people and you will evaluate their performance. And this is how we gather a consensus view because we're a very teamwork, dependent teamwork oriented organization. If people aren't collaborating faster than the competition, we're in trouble. And so this is how we make our performance measurement harmonious