This suggests there's a major problem in the mid-level management that's communicating the message. Telling a front-line manager to put someone in a bucket to m

This suggests there's a major problem in the mid-level management that's communicating the message. Telling a front-line manager to put someone in a bucket to meet the quota results in bad feelings, poor decisions that lead to loss of talent and bad publicity. The alternative doesn't have to be abolishing stack ranking. The manager's manager should instead ask for justification and help the manager raise standards if they are too low. If not, he should repeat the same process with his manager. The +-3% variance indicates that the executive team expected this to happen. Since the feedback indicates that it's not happening in some (many) cases, hopefully this has triggered top-down conversations on the right way to implement.