Agreed that the model makes a lot more sense for a consulting company as opposed to a product company. However, in terms of how it actually worked, I was also

Agreed that the model makes a lot more sense for a consulting company as opposed to a product company. However, in terms of how it actually worked, I was also involved in meetings to allocate people to bands, and the percentages had to be respected across the client group (UBS, in that case). This means that if there were, say, 10 analysts in the UBS client account, then only a couple could get "Exceptional" (or whatever it was called), and so on... The implication of this was that your performance (and therefore pay raise, promotion, and so on) largely depended on whether: a) you had made a strong enough impression on your manager so that he/she would be motivated to do a decent job of fighting for you in the meeting; b) your manager was actually politically competent enough, and had the political capital to spend on getting you a good rating; c) you had made enough of an impression on all the other people likely to be at the meeting so that they'd know about it and accept it when your manager suggested that you should be rated Exceptional. If you hit all three of those, you might get a great rating. If you didn't bother to network with everyone who was likely to be at the meeting, or if your manager sucked or didn't like you all that much, you were pretty much fucked.