About Fucking Time

 

 

Well...it's about fucking time. Finally, someone has written a book on the societal cancer that was Jack Welch of GE and his ignorant, retrograde, management practices.. The title, "The Man Who Broke Capitalism: How Jack Welch Gutted the Heartland and Crushed the Soul of Corporate America―and How to Undo His Legacy" is one that I could have written myself. Apparently, people had to wait until the house fell on the wicked witch before they took him to task for being a (wicked) bad manager and a shitty business man..  At the Joe Big-Ass Corp, I lived through Jack's stupid and counterproductive performance rating system - the stack rank. It was all the rage with JBA Corp execs who wanted more than anything to be Just-Like-Jack, fake tough guys in business casual khakis...  The last time I wrote about Jack and his pet management process was on July 5th, 2012 in a prior incarnation of this blog: When it comes to managing employees, many large corporations kneel at the altar of Saint Jack Welch, formerly of GE.  St Jack, a street punk from Salem MA who clawed his way to the top of GE, was famous for saying he wished he could build his factories on barges and tow them to the lowest cost labor markets around the globe.  St Jack also infected American business one of the most pernicious forms of organizational cancer ever to come down the pike - the stack rank. Briefly - the stack rank says that 20% of your employees will be top performers, 70% of your employees will be adequate performers, and 10% will be subpar performers and should be replaced every year.  Every company has its own breakdown, but you get the rough idea. While many CEO's love this method of managing employees, I have long thought that it is a pox on American business and transforms the workplace and work teams into versions of Survivor or The Hunger Games (except without the cool prizes at the end). It turns colleagues into competitors. It weakens team effectiveness because people are not only worried about accomplishing whatever the most pressing team goal is, but are also about looking better at it than their teammates doing it. Team cohesion falters because - well - why should I help you if you'll end up higher in the rank than I do at the end of the year? The stack rank method might be a bit more tolerable for employees in growing organizations because of the yearly influx of new meat. In static organizations (orgs where hiring has been frozen for cost containment reasons), it is simply a corrosive and demoralizing way to reduce staff and contain payroll expense. Many proponents of the stack rank will say that it rids companies of dead wood. I will grant them that for the first one or two iterations of the process. After that - companies effectively lay off solid contributors every year because they have no more dead wood. For companies wishing to contain payroll expenses, here's the best part of the stack rank:  You get to tell these formerly solid contributors (who are now in your bottom 10%) that they are now performance problems. Once this happens - all sorts of organizational processes kick in, most of which result in termination of the employee - with a reduced severance package because - well - they were a bottom performer. A solid win all around - except for the employee and their former team. Obviously, my assessment of Jack's methods won me no friends in the executive ranks at the JBA Corp.. but I figured - fuck em - fuck em all but six.. and especially fuck Jack Welch - the ignorant bully of GE - the source of So. Much. Suffering... fuck him sideways.

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