'After reading in the papers that Goldman Sachs regularly culls its bottom 10% performers, and remembering from Jack Welch's 'Straight from the Gut' that this was also the practice at GE, I decide this would be a useful discipline to bring to the company', writes Ed in his diary.
'The best place to start is the sales guys', writes Ed, 'they never seem to respond to my suggestions for improvements, they don't always reply to emails, and they don't seem to have much respect for management.'
Ed sets about determining the most hard-working salesmen based on the number of customer visits they go on.
'I take this one to the board as it will involve a change in terms and conditions', writes Ed, 'I explain my idea, show them my list of worst-performing sales people, and open the thing for discussion.'
'The vice president for marketing and sales pipes up: "Several of the guys on this list are our most valuable sales people", he said, "they go into customers' labs and show them how to design our chip into their boards, and they show customers how to use our software to differentiate their products. It takes time. Sometimes days. That's why some of our most valuable customers are brought on board by sales guys who carry out the least number of customer visits."'
'There's a bit of a silence.'
'"Still want to go ahead with the cull, Ed?" asked the COO.'
'A bit of a non-starter,' confides Ed to his diary, 'still, there's only 256 days to go to the IPO and then I'll be stuffed to the gills with cash and out of here.'
This Ed's saga is always amusing. Keep it up :)
Thank you Rohit. Fortunately Ed has kept extensive diaries.