Rather than nurture its best and brightest, Ford “selectively prunes” them!
Why would a company do this?
Two dark motivations:
- Jealousy from within the ranks.
- Cost/benefit calculations from above.
A toxic mix of professional jealousy and threatened egos means high achievers might be seen as “competition” to be eliminated rather than assets to be rewarded.
In effect, the deck is stacked – if you are a high performer but threaten someone’s ego or expose inconvenient truths, HR has people who understand how to “remove blockers” all right – except the “blocker” dealt with was you, the merit employee.
This cumulative picture is a deeply dysfunctional organization that would rather “break the legs of the fastest runners than fix the race”. By enforcing mediocrity through fear and purging, they remove voices that could call out wrongdoing – or achieve enough independence to expose it externally. It is a tragedy for the company’s innovation, but a deliberate strategy for short-term self-preservation by its power structure.