This needs a (2015). In the 9 years since this was written I haven't seen that many attempts to do something different and these ideas are entrenched. Even newer companies that have the opportunity to do be different tend to fall back on these approaches once they hit the size that people management becomes a role.

My own experience has been that performance reviews really just end up being alignment reviews, which is it's own sort of useful. I think this is possibly the most accurate signal one can expect out of these processes.