So…

1) treat poor performers as bad hires and ignore them in your dataset

2) treat 10x performers as needing to be promoted and also ignore them in your data

3) treat everyone else as relatively equal

…and use “Pareto distribution” and “no one has mentioned this before” to write a blog post?

Is the point of the article to get people who disagree with 10% corporate culling a pseudo intellectual economic buzzword argument to stroke their hatred of an inefficient hr practice? If so:

1) 10% culling in performance review is a mechanism to cull “bad hires”. I find it difficult to understand how the author can argue it’s a bad practice and then state that you cull bad hires from your dataset without thinking that they are the same thing or at least largely overlapping.

2) If the author is proposing to separate performance review, culling bad hires, and promotions, into 3 separate systems and assume no overlap, he should think through the structural issues more. While it’s possible to design a management structure where the organization is at a constant state of no bad hires, all 10xers promoted, that is putting a lot of responsibility on individual managers to run review, culling and promotion by themselves at a very high level. It’s brittle - a few bad managers not running the system can easily leave your organization bloated with bad hires and no fallback (fallback = performance review process).

3) The system of performance review is equally about risk management to the business as it is about rewarding your employees. IMO, the author’s framing simplifies the problem too much and pushes the complexity out for other people to deal with. It’s the kind of thinking that is damaging to organizations… I wonder if there is a process to cull this kind of thinking from your org… wait what time of year is it??