An article by Will Oremus in Slate blames the decline of Microsoft on its poisonous stack-ranking system for evaluating employees. This system involves ranking employees in each unit from best to worst, then firing those with the lowest rating. This is demoralizing and causes bitter rivalries and office politics.
Jack Welch is credited with devising this system of internal competition. It sets employees against each other, all fighting for survival.
A brilliant article last year by business writer Kurt Eichenwald in Vanity Fair predicted that stack-ranking was destroying Microsoft’s culture, causing it to lose ground to Apple, Google, and other nimbler corporations. He was right.
Unfortunately, Bill Gates imposed the same toxic methods on the nation’s public schools. He still can’t understand why stack-ranking has not produced the great results he predicted in schools nor why it has engendered a hostile response from teachers, even those who get high ratings. He can’t figure out why they prefer collaboration with their peers rather than the internal competition that is causing his company to fall behind the high-tech companies that treat their employees with respect and that build a culture of teamwork.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Software Raw In Tooth And Claw …
Let’s stack rank the deformers: Gates, Broad, Rhee, Duncan, Obama, Emanuel, Bloomberg, Kopp, Huffman, White, (too many to list) or leave them all at the bottom similar to pond scum.
See definition on urban dictionary:
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=pond%20scum
Amen and hallelujah. I’ve been thinking about the connection between stack-ranking and slash-and-burn school reform policies ever since reading Eichenwald’s article in Vanity Fair last year. Now that Ballmer is being forced out, maybe Microsoft will correct course and Gates will see the light in regards to teachers.
Microsoft could spent huge amounts of money on projects and acquisitions that failed and still milk the Windows cash cows. They would shift entire groups of people in chaotic reorganizations. Not only was stack ranking like a Roman Coliseum, but quality has been a constant challenge. And the stock price on options was king. Microsoft Bob and Zune. ‘Nuff said.
yes, this reminds me of the television shows, Survivor, and The Bachelor, etc. where there comes a fierce competition for the prize. But in education, we need to work together for the prize, which is that of helping our children to become successful on all fronts.
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Yes, the notion that competition is good for markets and therefore appropriate in education is truly outlandish and those TV shows are good examples of how, in competitions, everyone is really just out for themselves because there can be only one winner and everyone else is a loser.
Some of the TV shows with cooking competitions like Gordan Ramsay’s MasterChefs and Cutthroat Kitchen are other great examples. They purposely demonstrate cutthroat business practices there, such as by encouraging contestants to sabotage the competition, in order to get ahead, by letting them give the other chefs disgusting ingredients and taking away needed materials and supplies. None of these are behaviors that I would want my children to learn, let alone in an educational environment, but they are regularly demonstrated by leaders in education –who are not typically educators themselves.
If ‘a nation at risk’ was a reaction to the Japanese success, partly due to a superior culture of cooperation and teamwork, kind of strange to move in the opposite direction and put in place policies that destroy group cohesion.
Japan’s success was primarily due to the influence of American statistician and business management expert W. Edwards Deming, who urged companies to treat their workers as associates, not adversaries, which companies like Toyota listened to while most US corporations ignored him.
Gates is such a spoiled brat!
Uneducated spoiled brat! I know he reads and has access to everything, but in his spoiled brat kingdoms, who will be a sounding board, challenge him and disagree with him?
We have seen the pattern of never disagreeing with super stars in all walks of life. The $$$ shuts up just about all who hang out with the richest.
Gates is the richest under-educated with no true empathy and comprehension of what makes most of us human.
He will never change.
I did hear an encouraging interview with Malcolm Gladwell on BookTV about his new book: David & Goliath. He mentions that ALL Goliath characters will tumble. Hmmmmmm!
Any system of evaluation that forgets the purpose of the enterprise will degenerate this way. It begins by confusing image with reality, and ends with shadows replacing substance.
The district in which I work is beholden to Gates Foundation grant money and the inanity that comes with it. Among the recommendations for the retooling of the system’s evaluation model was the notion that an “accurate” model would have around 20% of teachers scoring a 1 or 2 (levels subject to firing or extensive PD). I wrote the then Chief of Staff and explained that they were simply adopting the premise of Microsoft’s stack-ranking. I further explained that hypothetically, even if 20% of existing teachers were “bad,” maintaining that an accurate model would have around 20% scoring 1’s and 2’s, you’d quickly get to the point you were firing people who had previously demonstrated they were good teachers. Naturally, he avoided addressing my points and simply insisted that the phase “stack-ranking” had never come up in planning.
NYT article yesterday said as far as a new CEO of MS, “All the really interesting people who were in the company over the last dozen years who might have been have left. ” Guess Gates wants to do same w/ our school systems.
The model Gates et al. promote in education involves filling the highest positions with people who have no expertise or formal training and limited, if any, experience in the field. Let’s see if he brings in a butcher, baker or candlestick maker as CEO of MicroSoft. I doubt it, since MS is HIS baby and that would be like him hiring groundskeeper Willie to run Lakeside School. –Not going to happen, too close to home.
To be fair, the stack ranking system was brought into Microsoft after Ballmer became CEO. Under Gates there was a much more reasonable system. Still, your point is valid that treating employees or students like commodities is not the way to get creativity or extra effort.
Gates might not have been the one to bring stack ranking to MS but he remains the Chairman of the Board and the individual who owns the most shares in the company, so if he had a problem with it, he could have done something to change it.
Had a conversation with someone in the tech industry who had to stack and rank the 80 employees he supervised. Each time he hated doing it because even folks he had to rank at the bottom were outstanding employees. He left that company because he could no longer stand how they treated their employees.
Clueless Bill. Steve Ballmer announces his resignation and the stock jumps. Just think what might happen in the schools if Bill announces his withdraw from futzing around with them.