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Company I worked at had this inflicted on them by McKinsey, untold woe followed. There were suicides, many nervous breakdowns. A colleague (a great man who is

by sgt101 3y ago

Company I worked at had this inflicted on them by McKinsey, untold woe followed. There were suicides, many nervous breakdowns. A colleague (a great man who is utterly unregarded professionally but is one of the most profound thinkers I ever encountered) had a brainwave which was to calculate how much the stack ranking was costing. We discovered that every year the company was spending nearly 15% of its budget for management grade employees on the process. This estimate came from two sources, HR's official requirements and guidance and surveys of the management group. It turned out that large management consultancy found that it was doing the same at the same time we did; this information and my colleagues presentations of his teams research resulted in the system getting dropped. God damn the people at McKinsey that inflicted this so widely. "In search of excellence" must be counted as one of the artifacts and efforts that has been most harmful to democracy since 1945. I am waiting for an apology.

truculent 3y ago
The London Review of Books had a pretty damning article on McKinsey and management consultancy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33869800 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33869800 "One gets the sense that Bogdanich and Forsythe think the consultants they write about are rotten apples, but the barrel is sound. Their own material makes clear, however, that all the services often spoken of as merely helping businesses and government departments run more efficiently – management consulting, audit, software development – are in fact focused on enabling capitalists to enrich themselves further without the inconvenient interference of workers, taxpayers or regulation. Thanks to the hegemonic model McKinsey and other management consultants invented, these firms not only make and remake businesses and government in the image of their laissez-faire fantasies, but see homo economicus as the last word in modern selfhood." (HN comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33869800 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33869800)
sgt101 3y ago
I should add, on the journey to the evidence that finally killed the stack rank we did some interesting empirical work. This was in collaboration with an organisation that actually became part of the dreaded firm. Still, it was good stuff. In F1 racing you have a unique opportunity to study employee performance empirically. Why? Well - every year there's a new car. The components that get on the new car get on it because of an empirical process. If your team can lighten something, create more drag or reduce drag or increase power then your component gets on the car. This insight allowed individual performance to be tracked. The results - well it turns out that for almost the whole workforce it's luck; future performance cannot be predicted from past performance. You screw up one year, but then the next you knock it out of the park. There was an exceptional group though. Being in the highest percentiles in successive years was strongly predictive of being in the highest percentiles for future years. In the follow up work this was investigated and it was found that managers could reliably identify the individuals in their departments that would be in the group of "persistent out performers". There was no similar group of low performers.

by sgt101 3y ago

truculent 3y ago

The London Review of Books had a pretty damning article on McKinsey and management consultancy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33869800 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33869800 "One gets the sense that Bogdanich and Forsythe think the consultants they write about are rotten apples, but the barrel is sound. Their own material makes clear, however, that all the services often spoken of as merely helping businesses and government departments run more efficiently – management consulting, audit, software development – are in fact focused on enabling capitalists to enrich themselves further without the inconvenient interference of workers, taxpayers or regulation. Thanks to the hegemonic model McKinsey and other management consultants invented, these firms not only make and remake businesses and government in the image of their laissez-faire fantasies, but see homo economicus as the last word in modern selfhood." (HN comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33869800 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33869800)

sgt101 3y ago

I should add, on the journey to the evidence that finally killed the stack rank we did some interesting empirical work. This was in collaboration with an organisation that actually became part of the dreaded firm. Still, it was good stuff. In F1 racing you have a unique opportunity to study employee performance empirically. Why? Well - every year there's a new car. The components that get on the new car get on it because of an empirical process. If your team can lighten something, create more drag or reduce drag or increase power then your component gets on the car. This insight allowed individual performance to be tracked. The results - well it turns out that for almost the whole workforce it's luck; future performance cannot be predicted from past performance. You screw up one year, but then the next you knock it out of the park. There was an exceptional group though. Being in the highest percentiles in successive years was strongly predictive of being in the highest percentiles for future years. In the follow up work this was investigated and it was found that managers could reliably identify the individuals in their departments that would be in the group of "persistent out performers". There was no similar group of low performers.