Microsoft’s Downfall: Inside the Cannibalistic Culture That Felled a Tech Giant
"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."<p>This is the most important sentence in the article. Because many companies over the years - a lot of them start ups - would point to this practice by Microsoft and try to follow their lead. Microsoft has been stack ranking almost since conception. It was always a horrible way to run a company. But it took decades for it to actually bring the company down.