https://www.reddit.com/r/behindthebastards/comments/13hwz6d/i_got_to_experience_a_company_infected_with_the/
This last week's episodes on Jack Welch were just wonderful for so many reasons. For me there was a personal connection. I may have been lucky enough in my career to have never been fired because of Jack Welch; but I got to experience first hand what it was like to work in a company infected by his poisonous mindset.
Years back I was a manager at a growing tech firm. The culture at the place was great: There was excitement for the future, love for the challenge of the tech startup mindset, and a comradery in which folks supported one another. This was especially the case for managers, who often felt the pressure of trying to figure out how to be good managers who cared for their people while also delivering on results.
Then at some point, during a meeting of all of the managers led by one of our executives, this executive informed us about this great book by this brilliant businessman: Winning, by Jack Welch. We were told it was how we were going to accelerate company results by really filtering for the best people in the company. And he expected us, as the managers in the business, to drive this mindset.
This guy got so excited about this book that he even gave out free copies of the book (what a gift) and started a book club: Managers were welcome to join. (Really: Expected.) What followed in the two or three meetings of this book club (the shit didn't last long) was a bunch of BS "business" talk, spoken in vague anecdotes and platitudes about the business only succeeding if everyone was bringing their "A game." It was in these meetings that we were told that A's should hire A's because B's hire C's. (If you can't figure that shit out: Mediocre performers will hire people who are worse at their work than them to make themselves look better.)
The impact went far beyond a book club, though: Soon after we found ourselves in performance review seasons in which it wasn't as hardcore as forcing people to fire the bottom 10%; but there was absolutely a stacked ranking. I remember sitting in a "calibration" meeting in which all of the managers were expected to justify the scores they gave for their people. After speaking highly of someone on my team another manager interrupted me to explain that he actually wasn't that good -- despite the fact she had never worked with him. This political gaming of trying to make others' teams look bad so you could avoid giving crappy scores to your people continued for years after and was a massive drain on the culture.
Jack Welch is not the originator of this methodology nor the only one who pushed it; but he sure fucking popularized it amongst executives who wanted to look smart and aggressive. Robert's POV this past week was excellent; but he didn't quite bring the POV of someone who was close to the decision-makers who fell in love with this garbage. Welch's influence was toxic at so many levels and the echos of his insensitive and outright wrong approach to business will still be reverberating in the collective mindset of company executives years after worms eat their way through his small intestine.