Rank-and-Yank

Dec 19 2016

Lean As A Regenerative Value System | Robert W. “Doc” Hall | Compression Institute

“Lean thinking needs transformation, major expansion, and a basic shift in objectives – from improving operational efficiency to something much bigger: Continuous Regeneration of ourselves, our human economy, and of the natural world. All three depend on each other. To do that we must learn to think more than technique deep.”

Sourced through the Compression Institute.

Michel Baudin‘s comments: While I agree with Doc Hall that there is more to life in society than manufacturing or even business operations and that we need to continuously rethink the conclusions we have reached on “ourselves, our human economy, and of the natural world,” I don’t see much value in putting all of these deep meditations under Lean, which I see as nothing but a convenient label to enable car companies to adopt Toyota’s system without referencing a competitor, and to allow organizations outside the car industry to borrow and adapt concepts from this system.

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May 5 2016

The Downside of Six Sigma | Don Peppers | LinkedIn Pulse

“Revered for decades as one of the world’s most innovative companies, 3M lost its innovative mojo when it began using Six Sigma to try to improve its operational efficiency. James McNerney, the CEO named in 2000, was a Jack Welch protégé from GE. He introduced the Six Sigma discipline as soon as he took the helm of the firm, streamlining work processes, eliminating 10% of the workforce, and earning praise (initially) from Wall Street, as operating margins grew from 17% in 2001 to 23% by 2005.

But when McNerney tried to apply the Six Sigma discipline to 3M’s research and development processes it led to a dramatic fall-off in the number of innovative products developed by the company during those years.”

Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.linkedin.com

Michel Baudin‘s comments:

Don Peppers describes “eliminating 10% of the work force” as part of implementing the “Six Sigma discipline,” but I don’t recall seeing anything on that subject when learning about Six Sigma.

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Microsoft's lost decade

Aug 14 2012

Metrics in Lean – Alternatives to Rank-and-Yank in Evaluating People

The July, 2012 edition of Vanity Fair had a cover story about Microsoft and the damage caused to the company by its stack ranking system, also known as rank-and-yank. This story caused a flurry of responses in the press, including an article in Forbes defending the practice. The idea is not just that employees should be evaluated individually and ranked, but that the bottom few performers should be mercilessly culled from the work force, thus bringing up the overall level, tightening the performance range, and motivating survivors for the next round. This assumes that the performance of employees can meaningfully be reduced to a single number, and that living in permanent fear of losing your livelihood is the best motivation for improvement.

According to another Forbes article, GE, the company that championed Rank-and-Yank in the 1980s, abandoned it in 2005. Another once celebrated showcase of this method is the notorious Enron, and now Microsoft is under fire because of it.  Yet, according to the same article, the practice is now widespread among large American corporations, hidden under a variety of names. But where is the evidence that it actually works in the long term?

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