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This is kind of why I’ve always felt “stack ranking” or regularly firing low performers, Welch style, is actually a blessing. Without it, organizations settle down after the growth phase and nobody young and smart ever gets promoted again.
One of the things that’s true in some kinds of front office finance is that the Darwinian nature of progression, not just ‘up or out’ but the fact that every recession means big layoffs and that bad MDs are fired into the mid-market or boutiques pretty quickly, means that even though the 80s to late 90s heyday of the profession is over, you can still do pretty well if you’re young, smart and ambitious.
Other professions deal with the problem in different ways. In advertising, they just openly discriminate against old people, such that by 45 you either want to be in a very senior position, own your own agency or your career is fucked. In others, like insurance, young people just never get promoted. In accounting and law, they split partner and non-partner track (whether formally or informally) such that by 30 you’re either destined for some degree of success or an endless purgatory of senior manager/associate-hood.
Yeah, that’s because for a long time many major corporations were run by people who actually didn’t understand a lot of marketing, accounting, finance, economics (especially game theory) 101 stuff. McKinsey, BCG and Bain served a genuine purpose in the 80s because huge sclerotic corporations were terrified of being RJR Nabiscoed (and by the people who had done the buyouts) and so brought in MBAs who had been taught by people who studied business failures and who quickly identified very easy and obvious ways of making them more efficient and profitable.
Today every major American corporation is staffed by HSW MBAs, so there is simply no more need for management consultants. It isn’t that McKinsey suddenly became worse, it’s that the ‘expertise’ that MBB had in the 80s has been diffused into American corporate life so wholly that it is no longer necessary. Today, the big consultants mainly exist for management to cover its ass over controversial and possibly bad major decisions by being able to blame them on someone else.
I think the main question here is whether society has, in some sense, "perfected" management. Or at least done something like figure out the problem of management up to the 95% level of perfection or whatever. Are there truly almost no new horizons over which we can actually substantially improve management performance? I think that at least Elon Musk would disagree, saying that it's been mostly a management problem that other companies haven't been able to accomplish the technological feats he's accomplished, and I wonder if Thiel would agree. I think he's saying here that there actually is a lot of room for a more ambitious "management science", but that no one's really doing it, so the result is that everything that's left is basically a scam.
I don't know that I have much of a personal opinion on which perspective is right.
They don’t need to have perfected management, just to have perfected the aspect that can be quickly implemented by standardized process.
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Wrt the advertising industry, there was an amusing but brief series with Steve Coogan on Showtime years back, called "Happiness" iirc, that depicted the downside of becoming middle-aged in advertising.
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And with it, you run out of poor performers and have to start firing good ones. There may be a constant influx of new people which makes the number of poor performers non-zero, but "non-zero" isn't "enough to satisfy the stack ranking percentage".
This only happens in two failure states. The first is that you stop hiring anyone, in which case your organization is probably in pretty serious decline, and the second is that your HR is so good that you only hire the best of the best, and you hire them perfectly such that all of them are a great fit. In this case, your organization is likely to be so successful, and its expansion so rapid, that there’s enough room to promote everyone good and to hire tons more people, at which point stack ranking will make sense again.
Isn't the other failure state some version of 'your metric of rating high performers is flawed/becomes gamed' at which point you become Enron in which anybody who isn't committing fraud upon fraud upon fraud is fucked.
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That's not necessary. If you fire the X percent lowest performers, and you hire replacements, only X percent of the replacements, on the average, will be as bad as the X percent of the original company that you just fired. But you still have to fire X percent of the whole workforce next year--not fire X percent of the replacements (a much smaller number), so you have to fire good people.
That doesn't require that HR be good at all.
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