Excerpt from Annual Report of Program Activities, National Institute of Mental Health, Vol. 1: Fiscal Year 1980<br><br>These paragraphs introduce the annual report of the nimh Intramural Research Program. The substance of the report is the summaries by the Laboratory and Branch Chiefs of the research of their units during the year ending September 30, 1980. The summaries follow this short piece and the comments by Dr. Robert Cohen, Deputy Director of this program.<br><br>A year ago and the year before that I devoted a good deal of this space to comments on the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 and especially to the Senior Executive Service. The ses, together with the companion Merit Pay system, are the major innovations in personnel systems in recent years that affect the senior members of our staff. They are systems that are intended to improve government efficiency and productivity by giving more money for better staff performance and some deprivations for poor performance. These pay for performance systems have had to be applied to scientists who already have a well developed reward system based on peer recognition and esteem, and which recognizes that the contributions by a scientist cannot be limited to or judged by any 12 month period, as the ses performance appraisal system purports to do.<br><br>The past year has really been the first Operational year for the ses and almost so for the Merit Pay plan. A full account of the first year of the ses might be justified, but I am writing this well after the close of Fiscal Year 80 and will give only a brief summary.<br><br>About the Publisher<br><br>Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com<br><br>This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.