Managing for Quality and Performance Excellence 10th Edition by James Evans ,William Lindsay

Exercise 68

Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric, stated his passion for making people GE's core competency yet he used a system in which executives in the bottom 10 percent of a forced performance ranking were eliminated. What do you think of this approach? How does it fit with a total quality philosophy? How would you respond to someone who says, "I think all my people are pretty good. If I fire the bottom 10 percent, that would just give me a new bottom 10 percent. Where does it end?"