By eliminating the bottom 10 percent every year, you’re losing a tremendous investment, because these people could change places and be used in other ways. You’re also sending the message up and down the line that your company is a military hierarchy. The Welch paradigm is, after all, a military paradigm; it is a Norman Schwarzkopf paradigm. What’s the difference between them? None to speak of. Wouldn’t Welch have been able to run the Gulf War? Perfectly. Would Schwarzkopf have been able to run GE? I’m sure he could have. There’s something wrong with that; it shouldn’t be that easy to make that interchange, because the creative business world needs a lot of components—ingenuity, free thinking, leaps of faith—that the military model doesn’t value.
Author: Ricardo Semler
Source: Across the Board (ATB)
Subjects: Human Resources, Leadership, Management, Organizational Behavior
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