Hmm the problem with stack ranking to me is not that you drop the bottom couple percent of the company. It’s that you attempt to do so within smaller divisions

Hmm the problem with stack ranking to me is not that you drop the bottom couple percent of the company. It’s that you attempt to do so within smaller divisions of the company. Like, if you randomly bin everyone into groups of 5 people and drop the worst one, you will frequently end up dropping people who are not in the bottom 20% overall. You may even drop top performers. There’s probably a small percentage of folks that the system would benefit from losing but this kind of scheme can’t easily drop them; even if the metric used to rank people is accurate; which it often is not.