4 ms·
> The CEO ... believed that regularly letting people go was a way of eliminating bad apples and forcing people to work harder and smarter. Microsoft called it
by stephengillie 8y ago
> The CEO ... believed that regularly letting people go was a way of eliminating bad apples and forcing people to work harder and smarter.
Microsoft called it Stack Ranking.
- Phlarp 8y agoRank and Yank
- StudentStuff 8y agoIts obviously done Microsoft so much good /s
- strict9 8y agoPresumably it wasn't structured like MS's stack ranking, it was arbitrary. It's a weird feeling to come in regularly and be uncertain if you'd still be employed by the end of week, but not for anything you specifically did. Now that I think about it, it was a bizarrely nepotistic environment. An engineering manager would hire their friends, many speculated as at least partial insurance against being fired. But once that manager was gone, job security for those people was also gone. Weird how people put up with madness like that when your field is in high demand.
- sargun 8y agoYou mean cronyistic, not nepotistic.
- commandlinefan 8y ago> when your field is in high demand Well, when everywhere is pretty much the same...
- sleepybrett 8y agoStack ranking goes back to the 80s at GE under Jack Welch.
- AareyBaba 8y agoAlso known as "Management by Bestseller". Some CEO of a successful company writes a book claiming his management wisdom led to his company success and then a bunch of CEOs read the book and try to replicate the same success because they don't have any original ideas themselves. In this instance the CEO was GE's Jack Welch and his policy was 'rank and yank' Similarly, some CEO will write that you must have a mission statement and distill your management philosophy into 3 or 4 words preferably starting with the same alphabet. Next thing every CEO has their own tag lines: 'Agility, Accountabilty, Ambition' or 'Passion, Persistance, Performance' or <insert words from thesarus>. My previous company CEO spent thousands of dollars on polished metal tangram squares with her three words embossed on them given to every-single-employee at the company.
- Apocryphon 8y agoSounds like those squares were conjoined triangles.
- owyn 8y agoAh yes, the "Conjoined Triangles of Success" from Silicon Valley is a parody of this.
- diebir 8y agoAction, Urgency, Excellence, Dick Brown of EDS. Every employee got a book full of power point slides.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]