"Stack ranking" — the management technique that ruined Microsoft.

Stack ranking "forces every unit to declare a certain percentage of employees as top performers, good performers, average, and poor."

"Every current and former Microsoft employee I interviewed—every one—cited stack ranking as the most destructive process inside of Microsoft, something that drove out untold numbers of employees,” Eichenwald writes. “If you were on a team of 10 people, you walked in the first day knowing that, no matter how good everyone was, 2 people were going to get a great review, 7 were going to get mediocre reviews, and 1 was going to get a terrible review,” says a former software developer. “It leads to employees focusing on competing with each other rather than competing with other companies.”

ADDED: Stack ranking seems designed to overcome the standard problem in group projects, that people take advantage of each other. If we're all going to get the same credit, what do you do? Work really hard or let others do the work? What can you do to prevent that dysfunction? Apparently, the answer is to create a different dysfunction.