Posts Tagged yahoo

1st Place New Car, 2nd Place Steak Knives, 3rd Place “You’re Fired” : Yahoo embraces employee ranking #fail

bell-curve-hiring1So on the heels of Microsoft throwing their stacking system under the bus, and running as far away and as fast as they can from Steve Ballmer’ s lackluster rein Yahoo in their infinite wisdom decides to implement a grading system and forcing everyone into the bell curve so essentially, 3rd place “you’re fired”.  Now I understand poor employee hires are the bane of the workplace but assuming the bell curve and natural distribution in your workplace….I don’t get it.  In fact, NPR, “Put Away the Bell Curve Most of Us Aren’t Average,” and follow up from The Drucker Institute , Curve Ball for the Bell Curve, put the bell curve to task in business.  You can go straight to the source  THE BEST AND THE REST: REVISITING THE NORM OF NORMALITY OF INDIVIDUAL PERFORMANCE.  But boils down to that there are a few superstars and there is everyone else.  Superstars can be a product, a service, sales to a particular a client, an individual and then everyone else, and sure special care should be taken to nurture this superstars.  Jack Welch originally wanted GE to be #1 or #2 in each market it competed but then back off saying it was taken to “nonsensical levels” by an “insidious bureaucracy.” My experience on the small scale that it is is Organizational Behavior is like playing 3D chess in the 5th Dimension, what motivates people, how you inspire people, how you create a workplace people are fired up to be at and want to work hard to achieve common and uncommon goals.  It would seem to me either Yahoo is a bit backward thinking on this one, or is setting up a framework to clean house.  my bet, they clean house and then they get rid of the ranking system.   Read about the stacking system at Vanity Fair. and their lost decade.

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