I would like to hear proponents of stack ranking explain how stack ranking and any "we only want A players"-style policies are NOT mutually exclusive. Because i

I would like to hear proponents of stack ranking explain how stack ranking and any "we only want A players"-style policies are NOT mutually exclusive. Because if no good case can be made for both co-existing within the same organization, then seeing both can be a good signal to detect for an organization that uses stack ranking as a compensation attenuation mechanism. There may be sound organizational behavior reasons to hide the compensation attenuation in this manner, but I'm hard-pressed to find empirically-based evidence for such reasoning.