Peter Cappelli [Archive.org URL]

General Electric used to force out the bottom 10% because they believed it was the A-player, B-player, C-player model. If your company’s doing that, you might want to actually look to see whether it’s true that your bottom 10% this year are the same as your bottom 10% next year. The problem is, if you keep firing your bottom 10%, you’re never going to know because you’ll never know what those guys would have done. But you could at least look at the appraisal scores for everybody else and see whether they remain constant over time. If they’re bouncing around a lot, it is insane to fire the bottom 10% because there’s no reason to think those guys are going to be bad next year.

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