Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

Everyone forgetting about Lisa Brummel and "stack ranking"?

That nearly ruined Microsoft...

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/microsoft-ditches-syst...

"grading on a curve" is a good idea, and if athletics wasn't run that way, nobody would watch.

that doesn't mean it's easy to implement, manage, or impossible to game, or that it plays nice wrt human factors, but to attack the core idea as essentially wrong is anti math, science, and rationality.

Microsoft always suffered from rewarding egotists and political animals over people who did actual work.

This is ridiculous. You grade people to a standard, not against each other. Stack ranking Jack Welch-style is basically operating under the assumption that if you had Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Elon Musk, Satya Nadella, and Jeff Bezos on a team, that one of them would have to get a shitty grade and be fired.

All it does is make true talent not want to work with other true talent for fear they get screwed over.