The Failed Microsoft Corporate Origins of “Value-Added” Teacher Rankings
Readers of the Vanity Fair piece highlighting Microsoft’s decade of failure to innovate and resulting loss of market share can’t help but notice the close parallels between that company’s decline and their corporate practice of “stack ranking.”
“Stack ranking,” as described in “Microsoft’s Downfall: Inside the Executive E-mails and Cannibalistic Culture That Felled a Software Giant,” is the practice of imposing an artificial hierarchy on a working group and creating winners and losers in the bunch. Emails of key Microsoft executives exhumed from the period 1991 to 2001 show an inflexible and vaguely “data-driven” evaluation system with a veneer of scientistic authority and more than a whiff of technocratic fetishism:
“Stack ranking,” as described in “Microsoft’s Downfall: Inside the Executive E-mails and Cannibalistic Culture That Felled a Software Giant,” is the practice of imposing an artificial hierarchy on a working group and creating winners and losers in the bunch. Emails of key Microsoft executives exhumed from the period 1991 to 2001 show an inflexible and vaguely “data-driven” evaluation system with a veneer of scientistic authority and more than a whiff of technocratic fetishism:
… “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. “Every current and former Microsoft employee I interviewed—every one—cited stack ranking as the most destructive process inside of Microsoft, something that drove out untold numbers of employees,” Eichenwald writes. “If you were on a team of 10 people, you walked in the