"Eichenwald’s conversations reveal that a management system known as “stack ranking”—a program that forces every unit to declare a certain percentage of employees as top performers, good performers, average, and poor—effectively crippled Microsoft’s ability to innovate. “Every current and former Microsoft employee I interviewed—every one—cited stack ranking as the most destructive process inside of Microsoft, something that drove out untold numbers of employees,” Eichenwald writes. “If you were on a team of 10 people, you walked in the first day knowing that, no matter how good everyone was, 2 people were going to get a great review, 7 were going to get mediocre reviews, and 1 was going to get a terrible review,” says a former software developer. “It leads to employees focusing on competing with each other rather than competing with other companies.”
HOLY SHIT that sounds like a bad idea! Who in the world would think that's a good idea. That's crazy.
> "Who in the world would think that's a good idea."
Someone who manages a bunch of lazy good-for-nothings who, if left to their own devices, will sit around and do nothing all day every day.
These environments actually exist - but in the R&D and creative arenas, if you are in possession of such a working environment, you've already lost, and no amount of management "science" will save you.
Ballmer's a sales guy and the system is probably outstanding in a sales environment where individual effort is both more important and easier to measure.
I think "MBAs" are used as a "strawman" far too often (probably because I'm biased as someone who has an MBA and since I've been developing for over ten (10) years). Bad "business decisions" can be made by anyone.
Overall, it really doesn't matter who implemented this policy.
Not at all. By B-school professors mentioned Taylorism primarily as a matter of historical interest. None of them suggested using it to manage a software company.
Taylorist ideas still pervade relatively modern industries; offshoring software development is one such example. The knowledge work is separated from the execution. This split in management/development and the manual workforce was the main motivator behind the production line of the day. By moving the knowledge work upstairs, you could pay an unskilled workforce much less to execute the assembly.
HOLY SHIT that sounds like a bad idea! Who in the world would think that's a good idea. That's crazy.