Has anyone else read this?

[David Cressey]

Would that your adversaries were always as stupid as they are evil.


It ain't so.

[Aussie]

Selecting for the best workers presupposes that those doing the selecting know their elbows from their ventral orifices.

Selecting for the best managers presupposes that the directors know their sh*t.

So, presumbaly, the selection process should start with a four hour interview of the Managing Director to see whether (s)he's A, B, or C grad material.

Fair dinkum, that book sounds like a Trotskyist committee meeting.  "WE MUST PURGE, AND PURGE AGAIN !!"

[Aussie]

This would never get implemented.  Not if managers were forced to take the same test.


www.abc.net.au/news/newsi...414695.htm

[codger]

that I cannot understand is that some very large, very profitable companies openly endorse this book. (Book jacket flap and website)

They must not understand that the subjectivity of this metheod makes it impossible for a company to cull out the losers. They also are implying that their company, prior to Topgrading has been operating with a very high percentage of its staff comprised of incompetents.

The author of Topgrading has made an industry of this, I think, flawed approach to staff improvement. This is far more destructive than most of the management "toys dujour" that I've seen in the past, in that it encourages canning of people for all sorts of wrong-headed, possibly illegal reasons.

There must be a preponderance of naive, intellectually and ethically challenged people in management and HR. Or worse yet, that no matter how bad of a clusterfuque their hiring practices are, the performance of the organization is unaffected. Staffing decisions are irrelevant???

[Jeremy Singer]

Deming would say this is nuts.

I took the tour at the Ocean Spray cranberry processing plant.
They sort berries with a machine that bounces them off a hard surface.
Those that don't bounce high enough don't land in the acceptable belt, and are discarded.

If you topgraded by creating a test that got rid of 1/3rd of what was left, you would be reducing the quantity of excellent product by 1/3rd!  They would never do that because it is bad business.

You can apply this many ways.  If you had a broker who told you to do this to all of your holdings every year, you should fire the broker.  He's just churning for the commissions.

Making up fake metrics in order to find a way to cut 1/3rd is a cure in search of a disease.  Unfortuately, it is the disease itself.

[pm4hire]

Big 4 firms understand this and concentrate on
hiring "B's" with good social and verbal skills.

Another factor is age.  Folks under 40 are most
likely to move on, while folks over 40 are the least
likely to seek another job.

Also, "A's" want to be paid well so they are the
1st to be terminated and the last to be hired.

[Randy Given]

Like you suspect, I don't think it works. A couple firms around here actually do that (drop "bottom" 10% or so). They end up losing good people, only to have to replace them with inferior people who either get dropped in a couple years or end up leaving on their own.

Also tends to keep "tenured" people around, even if they never were very good (not necessarily because they got old!).

[Randy Given]

Right you are. Reminds me of the annual outrage -- "we MUST do something about XYZ because 50% are below average".

[Rastus P Shagnasty]

See today's (7/25/2005)  Dilbert.  Spot on.