Cisco doesn’t fire people; they allow “involuntary attrition”

This is a bad policy from Company point of view. Either firing any employee at once, company should first try to take corrective actions, and if those does not work then fire him/her. For new employee in place of old one also, it will get some days to start and deliver. Moreover it will also loose morale and enthusiasm of current team members.

If you are a good worker, and you ever hear that this kind of thing is being done, start an urgent search immediately for something else. This is a company that will fail. It will soon be the refuge of the mediocre. Anyone who is any good, who has any backbone, who has any integrity will move on ASAP. Such a 10% firing plan is such an example of gross negligence by management that if stockholders really knew, they should start a lawsuit for failure of fiduciary responsibility and also move to replace the board and CEO.

Ever notice that the ranking and "attrition" ideas get blessed by the same executives that don't have any performance metrics? They can reorg a company into the ground and sleep well knowing that they will get their golden handshake and get hired by another member of "club gold" at the next soon-to-be-doomed company. I would love to see a stockholder revolt that forces executives to perform WELL for the money that they get - instead of firing every tenth employee...

I had something similar happen to me when I worked at Motorola about 15 years ago. They had a similar scheme as you describe Paul, and I was always in the middle to bottom third of the design group. I was reassigned to a different design manager one year and later that year my ranking went from bottom third to top 10%. Why? The new manager I was reporting to was good at taking care of his people. The previous manager wouldn't look after his group. Needless to say I didn't stay at Moto much longer. I know one thing: you can't go from dunce to genius within 5 months. Their entire system was mostly politics.

Management fads come and go. The current fad seems to be to emulate Jack Welch, one of whose "theories" was that 20% of your employees are stars-reward them, 70% are just there, and 10% of your employees are duds-encourage them to go elsewhere. The real question is: does the company consider the employees an asset or a liability? All other HR and management behavior stems from the answer to that question.

The fact is bad and/or lazy managers with a complicit and /or inept HR department will ruin careers and cost their companies hundreds of thousands of dollars. A former manager from a former company I worked for forced out several of our brightest minds because he was a control freak and a micromanager. He bragged how he saved the company a lot of money by getting rid of these high end employees. He didn't appreciate their knowledge and experience in the field. He was toxic but he had buddies. He was eventually moved out but the damage was done.

I forgot to say another thing wrong about this: It assumes people are static. The Peter Principle may be right, that people are promoted to their level of incompetence, but you hope that the person learns and after a year or two can do the job. The sad thing is there is no "5% get fired" rule for the vice-presidents-- (or board of directors) one would think that what is good for the peons is good for the masters, but that is not the way it works.

One should not work for such a company but if you are not performing than you should find another job.

This is cruel and pointless abuse perpetrated by greedy management on an olympian ego trip. Not bad enough that they plunder millions now they get to watch the minions dance.

Reprehensible. HR orgs should be fired. Who needs them? they add no value and come up with lame ideas like this.

There will always be 'bosses' that favor an employee, whom will manage to stay either in the 'average' or 'golden' group, regardless of their contribution (or lack, there-of).

In our case the general concept of forced distribution was at one point explained as necessary since manager's were often "too nice". The right way to do it would be to allow the front-line manager to do their job and address individual managers if there was a specific issue.

If our management team were to have to fire %10 of the people in our organization they would be in huge trouble. Our team are all highly capable and all needed. If management was forced into firing someone it would be very easy to replace them with someone far less capable. This system is flawed beyond belief. If you have good employees reward them. If you have bad employees correct their actions. If they cant do their job or won't then after that then get rid of them at that point on a one by one basis. Don't use fear (just like in politics and the US government) to control the good ones.